Graduated from Lake Erie College in 1980 with a bachelor of arts degree in modern foreign languages French and Italian literature and history She has spent her career in the arts first as an actress in film and television then as a story editor at Miramax Films Chosen as a recipient of the Sesquicentennial Fellow award at Lake Erie College in Painesville Ohio The combination of the birth of her first daughter and the 1988 writers strike put an enormous damper on Goodrichs career In 1991 first husband Pliny Porter got a job in France so the family went along and she took a job as a reader at StudioCanal giving input on Englishlanguage scripts When the family returned to the USA in 1993 Goodrich was offered a job in script development at Miramax which she did for the rest of the decade