Rise to Fame
Coming up through Chicago's Piven Theatre Workshop, she trained alongside John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Jeremy Piven, and Aidan Quinn before anyone knew any of their names. While her classmates went mainstream, she made a different call. Dogfight (1991) opposite River Phoenix earned her an alt-Oscar endorsement from critic Danny Peary. By 1996, she'd won three international festival prizes for I Shot Andy Warhol, playing Valerie Solanas with a coiled-spring intensity that had no real equivalent in mainstream cinema.
In the Spotlight
Thirty-plus years in and the calls are getting louder, not quieter. Outer Range gave her 14 episodes as Cecilia Abbott alongside Josh Brolin, the kind of complicated wife that networks usually cast wrong. She played Mary Todd Lincoln in Manhunt (2024) and landed the role of Mags in the upcoming Hunger Games prequel. The franchise work is new territory. An actress who built her name doing I Shot Andy Warhol is now fielding offers from major studio properties, which says more about her staying power than any award.
Side Notes
She wrote a book about birds. Not a celebrity vanity project, but Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing (2025), essays that came out of her work on the boards of the National Audubon Society, the American Birding Association, and the NYC Bird Alliance. That class also produced Lara Flynn Boyle, which rounds out a roster that either says something about Chicago in the '80s or about that particular drama school.