RSS Feed (xml)
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Juliette Lewis was born June 21, 1973, in Los Angeles, CA, Lewis was the daughter of film and television player Geoffrey Lewis and mother Glenis, a graphic artist, who had seven marriages and 11 children between them. Lewis wanted to be an actor from the time she was six, and when she was a teen she landed her first "daughter" roles in the Showtime miniseries.
Anxious to get on with a full-time acting career, she dropped out of high school at age 14, passed her equivalency test, and became an emancipated minor at age 15, which allowed her the same workplace freedom as adult actors. While the young actress had already found her experience on sitcoms like.
But her feature film debut as the third actress to play the daughter of bumbling suburban dad Clark W. Griswold (Chevy Chase) in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" (1989) confined her to emotional territory very much in keeping with the sitcoms she loathed. Her turn as a series regular on "A Family For Joe" (NBC, 1990), starring Robert Mitchum no less, was thankfully her last in a sitcom.
She resurfaced with a vengeance in "Whip It" (2009), Drew Barrymore's directorial debut in which Lewis co-starred as the coach of a female roller-derby teen and the terrifying archrival of a newcomer on the circuit (Ellen Page). With its all-star cast of favorite indie film actresses, the film positioned Lewis to regain her big screen visibility and remind viewers of her fiery onscreen appeal.
Juliette Lewis has been cast in the role of Tammy in the legal drama “The Firm.” The NBC mid-season replacement will also star Josh Lucas as Mitch McDeere and Callum Keith Rennie as Ray. Tammy is “Mitch’s feisty, sexy receptionist, whose work life is made all the more tumultuous by her on-again, off-again relationship with Mitch’s brother, Ray,” said NBC of the role, reported by the Orlando Sentinel.
The television series is the latest incarnation of John Grisham’s bestselling book of the same title, published in 1991. A film version starred Tom Cruise as McDeere, David Strathairn as Ray and Holly Hunter as Tammy in 1993. Hunter was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Tammy.
