Earlier this month, Jennifer Jason Leigh turned fifty-four. That’s middle-aged by any standards, not just at-thirty-she’s-over-the-hill Hollywood’s. Yet she’s knee-deep in a renaissance that may transform into a bona-fide career high, if it hasn’t already. On the heels of her much-touted voice work in “Anomalisa,” Charlie Kaufman’s animated feature, she’s received her first-ever Oscar nod for playing fugitive Daisy in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.” What’s even more noteworthy: It’s her first major role since 2007’s “Margot at the Wedding.”
“I feel like the door was closed, and I had made my peace with it,” the actress told The Guardian last month, crediting Tarantino for her return to the limelight. Though that comment is gracious – and though the writer/director does have a knack for resuscitating actors’ careers (see: John Travolta and Pam Grier) – Leigh’s current success may have more to do with a tenacity that’s enabled her to survive in the film industry since she was a tween. It’s a tenacity that often takes the form of a ragged self-possession, and it’s arguably the only good thing about “Eight,” in which her black-eyed gang leader Daisy reads as a silent film actress amid a babbling brook of men. (She’s the only female lead in the film.) Watchful, wrathful, and impossibly comic, Daisy’s like a grown-up Katzenjammer Kid – if those cartoon characters were out for genuine blood. Continue Reading →
