Phyllis Fierro has been married to Ralph Macchio since April 1987, and she works as a nurse practitioner in palliative and end of life care. She is 66. In 39 years as Ralph Macchio’s wife, she has said almost nothing in public.
The two met as teenagers at a cousin’s sweet 16 in his grandmother’s basement on Long Island. She went off to college, the relationship lapsed, and they got back together in 1983, the year he was cast in The Karate Kid.
Table of Contents
The basics
| Detail | What is known |
|---|---|
| Name | Phyllis Fierro, also known as Phyllis Macchio |
| Age | 66 |
| Home | Long Island, New York |
| Work | Nurse practitioner, in palliative and end of life care |
| Married | Ralph Macchio, April 1987 |
| Children | Julia, born May 1992, and Daniel, born October 1995 |
| Parents | Nicholas and Loretta Fierro |
How Phyllis Fierro met Ralph Macchio
The party was in about 1977. Macchio was 15, Fierro was a year older, and she knew the cousin whose birthday it was. There were Cheez Doodles, 7Up and some dancing, he told People in 2021. On The Drew Barrymore Show in January 2021, he said he was taken with her right away.
Not long after, he brought her into Manhattan to see Bob Fosse’s Dancin’, which had opened on Broadway in 1978, and dinner at Mama Leone’s. He described that evening on Live with Kelly and Ryan in 2019. Then she left for college and the two of them stopped seeing each other.
The sneak preview at the Baronet
By 1983 they were together again. In his 2022 memoir, Waxing On, Macchio writes that the relationship picked up right as he began work on the film that made him famous.
On May 19, 1984, a month before The Karate Kid opened, Columbia ran sneak previews of it around the country. Macchio went to the screening at the Baronet on Third Avenue in Manhattan without having seen the finished picture. Fierro sat beside him in the last row, along with director John Avildsen, screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen and producer Jerry Weintraub, while a full house cheered for a character he had finished playing the previous fall.
They married in April 1987
The wedding came almost three years after the first film opened and about ten months after the sequel. The third film arrived in 1989 and did far less business. Neither of them has ever discussed the wedding day publicly, and no venue or exact date appears in any reliable account.
The decade the work dried up
Macchio has written about a stretch when he had “both feet out” of acting. A development deal took him to Los Angeles, the family talked about moving west, and he says his wife gave her blessing for the move. The deal collapsed and they stayed in New York.
By the mid 1990s Fierro was a nurse practitioner. Writing about the period when Julia was a toddler and he was mostly out of work, Macchio describes his wife as an NP who was expecting their second child. The boy arrived in October 1995 and was named Daniel, after her cousin and closest childhood friend. He writes that the name carried a second meaning from the part he had played.
What Phyllis Fierro does for a living
Her work is in palliative and end of life care, which means dealing with the families of patients as much as with the patients.
Julia described the job on Instagram in March 2020, calling her mother a true hero and saying her work is to make patients and the people who love them as comfortable as possible during some of the worst days of their lives.
Her husband put it in similar terms on The Drew Barrymore Show in January 2021. She helps families through very difficult decisions, he said, and he called it “hero work.”
Phyllis Fierro’s children, Julia and Daniel
Julia, 34, is an actress. She played Daniel LaRusso’s cousin Vanessa in the fourth season of Cobra Kai, toured nationally in Flashdance in the Jennifer Beals role, and in March appeared in Sweet Tart, a one act play directed by Jesse Eisenberg, at a New York festival.
Daniel, 30, works in business intelligence and analytics for the New York Islanders.
What is not public
Fierro has no role in the Karate Kid films or in Cobra Kai, and there is no record of her sitting for an interview. Her birth date, her schooling and the hospital she works for have never been confirmed by the family.
Where things stand now
In March 2023 the couple turned up for the opening night of the Broadway revival of Dancin’, more than four decades after he first took her to see it.
Macchio received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in November 2024, with Fierro and both children standing beside him, and he ended his speech by thanking her for choosing him.
Cobra Kai finished in February 2025 after six seasons, and Karate Kid: Legends reached theaters that May. The four of them went to the New York premiere together.
On January 29 this year the Library of Congress added The Karate Kid to the National Film Registry. In May the couple attended the Dutton Ranch premiere in Manhattan. In June, Macchio played four performances of Celebrity Autobiography at the Shubert, his first Broadway run since 1986, when Fierro came to the opening night party for Cuba and His Teddy Bear, the play he did with Robert De Niro. The show closed on June 21, weeks ahead of schedule.
The line of hers that circulates comes from a People article in 2009. What she noticed first about him, she said, was his “big, dark brown eyes.”
Commonly reported, and wrong
- Her wedding date. April 1987 is what the record supports, though some outlets print August 1987.
- Her birth date. The year 1960 holds up, and People reported her as 60 in January 2021. The exact date circulating online has no sourcing behind it.
- Her son’s birth year. Several sites say 1996. People’s reporting on the children gives October 1995.
