Juliette Lewis, the rocker

The actress

After playing small roles, typical teenage-daughter sort of things in film and TV, she exploded with an Oscar nomination in the really icky remake of Cape Fear (which got savage brutality just right, and, in retrospect, hardly anything else.) Over the next 2 years, she played the younger love interest to Woody Allen, and in a nice turn for his films, essentially outgrew him emotionally (which I guess could be argued for Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan as well, although her baby-doll voice made it difficult to imagine she had out-matured him. She basically just ran away.)

Lewis was the female lead in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, and got to play the part she really wanted in real life, a Patti Smith/PJ Harvey type rocker in Strange Days.

And then, apparently, conventional Hollywood wisdom caught up with her. While certainly not unattractive, she’s not many people’s idea of a Hollywood pin-up starlet. You might see posters of her in hipster indie video and record stores (yes kids, in the middle 90s there actually were video stores other than Blockbuster,) but you weren’t going to find her plastered up on the walls of the Sigma Chi house; Walmart wasn’t going to be featuring the Juliette Lewis Collection as a loss leader.

So she works less frequently, and often is limited to very marginal background characters, like in Starsky and Hutch and Old School. She’ll get a nice indie role occasionally; the recent Aurora Borealis was a nice turn. But she seems to be focused more on becoming the sort of singer she portrayed in Strange Days. Her band, Juliette and the Licks, get pretty good press; they get to play a lot of festivals, and she’s had a few marginal hits in Europe. And dang if the clips on Youtube don’t look like they might have been fun before I got closer to the Depends crowd than to the dormitory gang.

Ten best roles

10) Renegade 9) Aurora Borealis 8) Hysterical Blindness 7) Some Girl 6) Strange Days 5) Natural Born Killers 4) Kalifornia 3) What’s Eating Gilbert Grape 2) That Night 1) Husbands and Wives

PS, it’s not a mistake that I’ve left off Cape Fear. I saw it again recently, and outside of sort of grudgingly accepting that DeNiro’s level of savagery was truly masterful in a “why don’t you fledgeling actors really dig into what he’s doing here…..with your teeth”, it’s not NEAR the top of Scorsese’s work.

Percentile score

84.27