Linda Fiorentino

Linda Fiorentino — latest news, discussion & facts — IJR

Early career and breakthrough

Fiorentino landed her first professional role after her first professional audition in 1985 when she was cast in Vision Quest (1985) as Carla, the romantic partner of the lead character, a high school wrestler played by Matthew Modine. Fiorentino beat out Rebecca de Mornay, Rosanna Arquette and Demi Moore for the role. The film was a moderate success in theaters but has gone on to become a cult classic. Film critic Roger Ebert said of the newcomer, "Without having met the actress, it's impossible for me to speculate on how much of Carla is original work and how much is Fiorentino's personality. What comes across, though, is a woman who is enigmatic without being egotistical, detached without being cold, self-reliant without being suspicious. She has a way of talking – kind of deliberately objective – that makes you listen to everything she says."

Due to her "cinematic combination of spunk and sexiness", "a considerable amount of heat" was generated in Fiorentino's early career. Subsequently, she was approached by both Tom Cruise and director Tony Scott for the role of Charlotte "Charlie" Blackwood (Cruise's character's love interest) in Top Gun. Despite getting along with Cruise and recognising the film's commercial potential, Fiorentino declined, objecting to the film's "pro-military stance". The role was then given to Kelly McGillis.

In 1985, she starred in the espionage comedy film Gotcha!, which was filmed in Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin. Her co-star, Anthony Edwards, later directed her in Charlie's Ghost Story. Giving the film two stars out of four, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the European sequences as "a well-directed cat-and-mouse game" that lost its way in the final act after returning to the United States, with the film's main flaw being a focus on Edwards' character when Fiorentino was far more intriguing: "I'll bet the men who made this movie just assumed it had to be told from his point of view, and never considered hers. Too bad. I think they missed their best chance." Fiorentino spoke negatively of the film saying, "It's not my kind of film," and, "These kinds of movies are like drinking beer all the time."

For the rest of the mid-to-late 1980s, she appeared as a downtown artist in Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985) and as the wife of an art collector in 1920's Paris in Alan Rudolph's The Moderns (1988). After Hours was critically acclaimed for its black humor, and is considered to be an underrated Scorsese film. Roger Ebert gave After Hours a rating of four out of four stars and added the film to his "Great Movies" list. In its review of The Moderns, Variety wrote: "Fiorentino is ideal as the gorgeous American of a prosaic background over whom men may lose their hearts, mind and lives."

After her initial career successes, Fiorentino's acting career stagnated, although she continued to appear in erotic films such as Wildfire (1988) and Chain of Desire (1992), where she often portrayed "dominating, manipulative characters". In the early-1990s, director Paul Verhoeven invited Fiorentino to have a supporting role in Basic Instinct (eventually played by Jeanne Tripplehorn). However, Fiorentino wanted the lead role of Catherine Tramell (later played by Sharon Stone), although she was rebuffed due to having "breasts that were too small."

The Last Seduction and critical acclaim

Fiorentino experienced a resurgence after she received accolades for her performance in director John Dahl's 1994 neo-noir film The Last Seduction, playing the murderous Bridget. Dahl told The New York Times that when he began trying to cast the role of Bridget, most of the actresses thought the character was too despicable to be appealing. "But Linda saw the potential in the part and recognized it as something that she could have a lot of fun with," he said.

The New York Times described Fiorentino as "a sleek seductress who, like the femmes fatale of [Barbara] Stanwyck's day, will stop at nothing to get her way." After coldheartedly double-crossing her husband (Bill Pullman) in a drug deal, Bridget heads to an upstate New York town where she goes by "Wendy" and involves Mike (Peter Berg), a gullible local, in a murderous scheme. Fiorentino improvised a scene in which her character and Berg's character have sex against a chain-link fence behind the bar they just met in. "I was just trying to keep up with her at that point," Berg said in an interview.

The Last Seduction has gained a cult following, and the character Bridget Gregory has been recognized as one of the most iconic femmes fatale in film history. Fiorentino said of accepting the role, "After I read that script, I was in Arizona and I got in a car and drove six hours to get to the meeting because I had never read anything so unique in terms of a female character. And I walked in the meeting with John Dahl, the director, and I said, 'John, you are not allowed to hire anyone but me for this film.' And I wasn't kidding."

In its review of the film, The New York Times called Fiorentino's performance "flawlessly hard-boiled." After seeing Fiorentino in the part, Christopher Tookey, the film critic at The London Daily Mail, wrote: "The role could easily have been a misogynistic fantasy-woman. But Fiorentino makes you believe in her. I doubt if there will be a more stunning female performance this year."

Roger Ebert, in his four-star review of the film, wrote that Fiorentino "has a quality about her ... In VisionQuest (1985), a silly wrestling movie, there was nothing silly about her scenes. In Martin Scorsese's After Hours, she was the black widow waiting in the net that the hapless hero stumbled into. What's crucial is that she plays these roles with relish: She seems to enjoy the freedom a script like The Last Seduction gives her, and the result is a movie that is not only ingenious and entertaining, but liberating, because we can sense the story isn't going to be twisted into conformity with some stupid formula."

Her performance won Fiorentino the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead, and the London Film Critics' Circle Award for Actress of the Year, and was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Despite the critical acclaim, because the film was shown on television prior to its cinematic release, Fiorentino was ineligible for an Oscar nomination.

Hollywood

In a 1994 appearance on Late Show with David Letterman, Fiorentino said she chose to stop acting for a period of time after Warner Bros. executive Mark Canton told her during the filming of Vision Quest, "you have a great ass, but I think your jeans need to be tighter." She said she returned to acting later to pay off mounting credit card debt.

The same year when asked about her newfound fame, and what she would do if she could never act again, Fiorentino told The New York Times: "You mean I don't have to wake up at 5 in the morning and put makeup on? I would be totally fine; I would do something else." She added she did not have a "driving passion to stay on top. [...] I'd rather be a little more subdued and aloof in my life." In a 1985 interview, she also said, "Acting is something you do when you can't make up your mind what to do. It really just kind of snuck up on me."

After The Last Seduction Fiorentino next appeared as another femme fatale (Anna Katrina Maxwell-Gavin) in the 1995 erotic thriller Jade. Fiorentino originally turned the role down because she did not want to play a prostitute, but changed her mind once her character was changed through rewrites. The film was a critical and box-office failure. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: "Though the combination of Linda Fiorentino, Chazz Palminteri and David Caruso promised Jade some fire, it winds up with no more spark than a doused campfire."

Co-star Michael Biehn was not fond of the film: "Well, on Jade, I had no idea what I was doing. I don't think anybody had any idea what they were doing. It was a Joe Eszterhas script. To me, none of it ever really made any sense. I didn't realize until the read-through that I was the bad guy in it. It was like a jumbled mess. And the movie came out a mess, too. It had great people on it, though. It had William Friedkin directing, it had Chazz Palmenteri, who was nominated that year for an Academy Award, it had Linda Fiorentino, who had just come out with that famous movie she did The Last Seduction, and it had David Caruso, who's a brilliant actor when given the right material, and a very smart guy. So a great cast, great director... everything but a script."

In the book Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You To Hate, author Anna Bogutskaya mentions Fiorentino's character as meeting criteria for multiple archetypes of negatively portrayed women in popular media. Bogutskaya suggests that the characterization of Katrina / Jade contributed to her perception as hard to work with, referencing her personality conflict with Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, and ultimately culminating in her gradual exit from acting.

She later worked again with Dahl on his film Unforgettable (1996). Dahl's follow up to The Last Seduction, Unforgettable was another critical and box-office failure for Fiorentino, only earning less than $3 million in the United States. Reviewer Bryant Frazer gave the film a C− and wrote, "Liotta and Fiorentino look kind of sleepy throughout the whole proceeding ... but still, it has its moments, including the very ending, that really work—as if somewhere, buried inside this mess, there's a good movie trying to get out."

Men in Black, Dogma and later career

Fiorentino played the female lead, Dr. Laurel Weaver, in the 1997 film Men in Black, for which she was nominated for a Blockbuster Entertainment's Award for Favorite Supporting Actress in Science Fiction. She appeared alongside Ving Rhames, John Leguizamo and David Caruso in the 1998 direct-to-video film Body Count, which Variety called "an after-the-heist road movie that sizzles here and there but ends up going no place special." In 1999, she starred in Dogma as abortion clinic employee Bethany Sloane who is tasked with saving the world.

In years following, it was rumored Fiorentino did not get along with Dogma director Kevin Smith, which generated negative press for her. In an interview with TV Guide in 2000, Smith stated, "Linda created crisis and trauma and anguish. She created drama while we were making a comedy. She was ticked off that there were other people in the movie who were more famous than she was." He also accused Fiorentino of avoiding promotional duties after "going nuts" at the film's poster, which had spliced her head onto another woman's body and amplified her cleavage. "She never did a photo shoot," Smith said. "It's not like we were hinging on all that Fiorentino press – I fought to cast the woman in the movie."

However, in 2018, Smith stated that rumors of a falling out between the two had been misconstrued and overstated, and that while the two had not spoken in years, they amicably reconnected following his near-fatal heart attack. Blaming himself, Smith attributed the rumors to a remark he had made on the film's commentary track, which had later been sensationalized: I remember on a commentary track on the DVD — Janeane Garofalo was in the movie and at one point I said it would have been better if she played the lead, which was a really shitty and stupid thing to say. Thoughtless, considering that Linda was the lead and Linda did a great job. So, it had been years since I had spoken with Linda and I got an email from her. And of course, I was thankful to hear from her and it also gave me a chance to say I'm so sorry that I ever said that thing years ago. It gives you a chance to make amends. So that was my favorite one. I heard from so many people, but that one really stood out for me because, if somebody had said, 'Oh, the movie would have been better if [co-star] Ben Affleck directed it,' that would have hurt my feelings. I know it hurt her feelings and really unnecessarily because I always loved her performance in the movie.After a co-starring role with Paul Newman in the 2000 heist film Where the Money Is, and a lead role in the 2002 film Liberty Stands Still, Fiorentino's career slowed to a halt. She was in talks to star in a series being prepared by Tom Fontana, but did not take the project. Fiorentino was attached to a Georgia O'Keeffe biographical drama called Till the End of Time, but the project stalled when Fiorentino had a falling out with German producer Karel Dirka regarding provocative sex scenes. "You have rights, as an artist and as a woman," she said. "It's not as if I didn't agree to do some nudity. But they crossed the line. It was a question of integrity."

Fiorentino's character was written out of Men in Black II (2002) to accommodate the return of Tommy Lee Jones as the co-lead of the film and partner to Will Smith's character. According to producer Laurie MacDonald, "It turned out not to be a big enough role. We would have loved to have her, but when we began to develop the story, we couldn't find a [major] place for her. We always knew that the movie would be about bringing Tommy Lee Jones back." Kristin Lopez, writing an expose for RogerEbert.com titled "Hollywood's Difficult Women," brought up rumors that Jones' return was, in fact, contingent upon Fiorentino's absence and that the studio responded to this stipulation accordingly.

In 2007, Fiorentino optioned the rights to a screenplay about Russian poet Anna Akhmatova with plans to produce and to possibly star in and direct, but the project was dropped. During this period, she was reported to be developing two documentaries, neither of which moved forward. Fiorentino's most recent screen role was a supporting character in Once More with Feeling, released direct-to-video in 2009.