Page "Jennifer Jason Leigh" Paragraph 13

She co-starred with Kathy Bates as a tormented, pill-popping woman hiding a history of childhood sexual abuse in the adaptation of Stephen King's novel Dolores Claiborne ( 1995 ).

Working again with Altman, a family friend, she played a streetwise kidnapper alongside Miranda Richardson in Altman's Jazz Era drama Kansas City ( 1996 ).

Taking another radical change of pace, she starred in Agnieszka Holland's version of the Henry James novel Washington Square ( 1997 ), as a mousy 19th-century heiress courted by a gold-digger.

In David Cronenberg's eXistenZ ( 1999 ), she played a virtual reality game designer who becomes lost in her own creation.

She had a brief role as a doomed gangster's wife in Sam Mendes's Road to Perdition ( 2002 ), and co-starred as Meg Ryan's brutally murdered sister in Jane Campion's erotic thriller In the Cut ( 2003 ).

After a long period of avoiding prostitute roles, she played alongside Christian Bale as his prostitute girlfriend in the thriller The Machinist ( 2004 ).

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle commented that " As the downtrodden, sexy, trusting and quietly funny prostitute, Leigh is, of course, in her element ".

Her performance as a manipulative stage mother in Don McKellar's film Childstar won her a Genie Award in 2005.