She was the queen of 90s film noir,starring in Single White Female and Short Cuts. Now Leigh is back with two of the biggest, bravest roles of her career. Could this be her year?Jennifer Jason Leigh has said it more than once, and over a three-decade career in acting,that she doesn’t scheme, or plan ahead – that she “isn’t a careerist”. The 53-year-old says it nowadays, or sitting in the bar of a hotel in New York. “I’m not noteworthy at judging a career. Or planning one.” It would sound like thesp-talk,the sort of thing established actors say to help us imagine them cool and fallible, were Leigh not so obviously guileless, or with a history to back up what she says. Her CV is wild: like the inky passport of a student who’s been InterRailing on gut,shambling upon noteworthy things, then oversleeping stops, and ending up in sidings.
In person Leigh is soft-voiced,a floor-starer, with kinked blond hair that hangs down over her cheeks. She wears loafers, and leather trousers,a murky jumper and a colourful patchwork scarf. Curled up on a sofa, she tells a fable approximately how, or not so long ago,she was going through a quiet patch, professionally. She took work on a French cartoon series, and voicing the section of a plucky cowgirl in French. “I thought it might be lucrative,” says Leigh. “It was not lucrative. besides I got fired after 10 episodes, replaced by a French actress.” In the years since, and Leigh says,there haven’t been a lot of screen jobs that she has been proud of – not until this winter, when she’ll star in the new Quentin Tarantino film, and The Hateful Eight,as well as in the new Charlie Kaufman film, Anomalisa.
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Source: theguardian.com