Rise to Fame
She started on a soap opera at 18 without any formal training, receiving scripts same-day on Santa Barbara. The real breakthrough was The Princess Bride in 1987, where she was cast a week before cameras rolled. Forrest Gump came next in 1994, where she played Jenny Curran rather than the straightforwardly sympathetic love interest the role could've been played as. Both films ended up in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. For someone who stumbled into acting from a modeling career, the batting average was absurd.
In the Spotlight
House of Cards made her a TV star, but what made her name was the fight to get paid for it. Netflix reportedly told her they couldn't match Kevin Spacey's $500K/episode, so she collected her money across three paychecks: actress, director, and executive producer. She threatened to go public before they agreed. She directed 10 episodes and was the first actress to win a Golden Globe for a streaming series, in 2014. Since then she's moved into full control. Damsel pulled nearly 144 million views on Netflix through the first half of 2024. The Girlfriend (2025) she produced, directed, and starred in. She's not just taking roles anymore.
Side Notes
She spent most of the early 1990s stepping back from acting while Sean Penn's career took priority. "He was making more money than I was at the time, so it was a simple decision," she's said, though she also turned down roles during pregnancies. A gunpoint robbery in Santa Monica pushed them out of LA entirely, to rural northern California. The marriage didn't last. After divorce in 2010, a brief engagement to Ben Foster, and another marriage in 2018 to a French fashion executive that ended in 2022, she's now based in England. She also owns two oil wells in Texas, which feels like a detail from a different story entirely.