Actors - Jennifer Jason Leigh

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	Actors - Jennifer Jason Leigh

Jennifer Jason Leigh (born February 5, 1962 in Los Angeles, California) is an American actress who has appeared in over 50 films.

Though not a major "household name", her work has drawn high critical acclaim and a cult following. Salon magazine praised her as “one of America’s best actors”, Paul Verhoeven, who directed her in Flesh & Blood
, similarly claimed “There is no greater actress working in America”, and in 1994 Vogue magazine claimed “Leigh sets a standard that all future film actresses must attempt to match… (She has) an extraordinary range and power. The proof is in her diverse, courageous and mesmerizing body of work”. Unusually for an actress of her age, she has already received three separate career tributes – at the Telluride Film Festival in 1993, a special award for her contribution to independent cinema from the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2002, and a week-long retrospective showing of her film work held by the American Cinematheque at Los Angeles’ Egyptian Theatre in June 2001. In addition to these achievements, Leigh was selected as one of "America's 10 Most Beautiful Women" by Harper's Bazaar magazine in 1989.

Born Jennifer Lee Morrow, she is the daughter of Blackboard Jungle
actor Vic Morrow and Pollock
screenwriter Barbara Turner, both of whom were Jewish, although Leigh was raised mostly without religion. Leigh changed her middle and last name, taking the middle name "Jason" in honor of family friend, the late actor, Jason Robards, Jr.

At the age of 14 she attended summer acting workshops given by Lee Strasberg and received her Screen Actors Guild membership in an episode of the TV show Baretta when she was 16. An episode of The Waltons and several TV movies followed, including an unusually powerful portrayal of an anorexic teenager in The Best Little Girl in the World, for which Leigh wasted away to a skeletal 86lbs under medical supervision. She made her screen debut as a blind, deaf and mute rape victim in the 1980 slasher flick Eyes of a Stranger, which she later remembered as “a horrible, horrible film”. In 1982 she played a virgin who gets pregnant in Amy Heckerling’s popular high-school comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, which served as a launching pad for several then-unknown future stars besides Leigh, including Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz and Phoebe Cates.

As an adult, Leigh gravitated towards portraying fragile, damaged or neurotic characters. Her waify baby-doll looks soon got her cast in victim roles – she was a virginal princess kidnapped and raped by mercenaries in Verhoeven’s medieval adventure Flesh & Blood
(1985), an innocent waitress dismembered by a lorry in The Hitcher
(1986), and a young woman sinking into mental breakdown in a seedy nightclub inherited from her uncle in Heart of Midnight (1989). It wasn’t until 1990 that Leigh made a significant career breakthrough when she was voted the year’s Best Supporting Actress by both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Boston Society of Film Critics for her portrayals of two very different prostitutes: first as the tough, emotionally numb, self-destructive streetwalker Tralala – who instigates a gang-rape by drunkenly giving herself to all the men in a bar – in Last Exit to Brooklyn
, and then as the sweet, braindead waif whose dreams of suburban bliss are shattered by psychopathic ex-con Alec Baldwin in Miami Blues. She followed up with another harrowing performance as an undercover narcotics cop who becomes a junkie in the line of duty in Rush
(1991), and the role most filmgoers associate her with: Hedy, the psychopathic “roommate from hell” in the smash-hit thriller Single White Female
(1992). Leigh was perfectly cast as the needy, frumpy emotional vampire intent on stealing Bridget Fonda’s identity, in the process creating one of the screen’s creepiest female psychopaths. She had a rare opportunity to showcase her dazzling comic timing as a fast-talking, hard-as-nails bitch reporter who has her heart melted by Tim Robbins in the Coen Brothers’ surreal comic fantasy The Hudsucker Proxy
(1994), and won a slew of awards for her eccentrically mannered portrayal of the depressed, alcoholic writer and poet Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph’s Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
(1994). Some criticized Leigh’s decision to deliver dialogue in a slurring, lockjawed mumble, but her speech was an uncannily accurate impersonation of the real Dorothy Parker; she received a Golden Globe nomination and Best Actress awards from the National Society of Film Critics, Chicago Film Critics Association and Fort Lauderdale Film Critics.

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