Nipped in the Bud

Back in 1990, Movieline Magazine ran an article about 8 actresses whose acting careers had been cut short.  It was their version of What the Hell Happened.  Here’s a look at the actresses Movieline Magazine said were “nipped in the bud” in 1990.

It’s the oldest story in Hollywood, the tale of an unfulfilled promise. “I coulda been a contender,” wails Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront–and so, it seems, the following eight actresses coulda been stars but had to settle for a spot far further outside the winner’s circle than was initially predicted. By no means down for the count, all nevertheless share the experience of missing the moment that might have made all the difference. We asked four writers to tell us how they did it.


de mornay - feds
REBECCA DEMORNAY
It’s harder for women, nowadays. In their hit Risky Business, Rebecca DeMornay and Tom Cruise demonstrated enough sexual chemistry to leapfrog over the competition and become overnight stars. They also became an item. With all of Hollywood courting them, both picked very badly, choosing to demonstrate their range, lest anyone mistake them for sex objects: Cruise played a sprightly forest-dweller in Ridley Scott’s lamebrained Legend, and DeMornay portrayed a rock-singing newlywed in the Hal Ashby/Neil Simon rock ‘n’ roll dramedy, The Slugger’s Wife.


Facing his-and-her mega-flops, the couple broke up around this time. In an era dominated by projects with starring roles for males, Cruise got another shot at carrying a big studio picture, but DeMornay did not. Had they stayed together and remained the paparazzi’s darlings, his continued heat might easily have helped her at this crucial career juncture. Without Cruise, she became just another beautiful blonde actress in a town filled with them, and at a time when there are ever fewer roles for women, even the slightest slip gives the all-important edge to the competition. Kim Basinger and Michelle Pfeiffer grabbed the spotlight and DeMornay found that it’s tough to get back on top. Even her about-face as a demure ingenue in The Trip to Bountiful failed to get the excitement going again. One project that might have helped was Roger Vadim’s remake of his own And God Created Woman–he had, after all, made sex stars out of Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda–but the resulting bomb, instead of raising eyebrows and/or temperatures, showcased DeMornay’s far-from-memorable rock ‘n’ roll singing.Lately she’s made films you’re likely to find on video shelves, such as Dealers and Feds.

Kevin Hennessey

elizabeth mcgovern - 1990
ELIZABETH McGOVERN
At age 18, she had the irresistible face of a wise, gorgeous baby and when the world got a look at her in 1980’s Ordinary People, Robert Redford’s wrenching saga of suicide in the rich suburbs, she had her pick of choice parts for a few years there. It wasn’t just her looks, either. She serenely held her own opposite Tim Hutton’s turmoil in Ordinary People and went on to win a supporting actress Oscar nomination for her role as the loose and lovely Evelyn Nesbit in Milos Forman’s Ragtime. So what if the 1983 Lovesick bombed? It wasn’t her fault her lines weren’t funny or that there was something inherently sleazy about the story of a crazed psychiatrist (Dudley Moore) courting a pretty patient less than half his age (writer/director Marshall Brickman glossed over the malpractice aspects of the story by making it clear she didn’t really need a shrink).


McGovern’s terrific likability could have survived all that, but not what followed: Sean Penn. In 1984 she made Racing With the Moon, a lyrical, period love story that got a lot of added press when McGovern and co-star Penn fell madly in love in a too-public affair. The movie’s failure (thanks partly to Richard Benjamin’s instinct-free direction), was compounded by a painfully public disengagement from Penn (who quickly took up with Madonna), and the just-blossoming actress went into an eclipse from which she’s never fully emerged. Though she got some good reviews in theater, it was 1987 before she made another major film–The Bedroom Window, an indifferent thriller in which she played Steve Guttenberg’s girlfriend while Isabelle Huppert stole the show. Then John Hughes cut her role in She’s Having a Baby to shreds–she was having the baby, but Kevin Bacon was having the movie. When she played Mickey Rourke’s good girlfriend last year in Johnny Handsome she was lit so ruthlessly it was impossible not to meditate mid-film on the cruelty of time. But in the little seen bizarro-socio-sci-fi The Handmaid’s Tale, McGovern showed a tough brassiness that just might herald a new direction. The dew’s definitely off the rose, but she’s good, and hell, her career’s not much worse off than Seans’s. Maybe there’s justice.

Barbara Ann Mitchell

russell - winter people
KELLY McGILLIS
This actress alone constitutes an argument for director Peter Weir’s absolute genius with actors. Forget all those inexperienced kids in Dead Poets Society from whom Weir drew shining performances. It’s McGillis who’s the proverbial silk purse of Weir’s career. Just conjure up any of McGillis’s performances of the last six years and try to understand how Hollywood hype once tagged her as the next Grace Kelly/Ingrid Bergman. It was Weir’s Witness that did it. As the Amish widow who falls for cop Harrison Ford she had one of the best parts an actress ever got and she was luminous and funny and profound in it. Since nobody had to act in Top Gun, her next picture, it wasn’t apparent that McGillis wasn’t, and the big box office in Tom Cruise’s wake benefitted her tremendously.


But next came a series of films that began to build a substantial counter-argument to the notion that McGillis was the next anything. The witless Hitchcock imitation The House on Carroll Street had enough problems without taking into consideration McGillis’s performance, but suffice it to say she came off, at best, as a witless Grace Kelly. Then, as the predestined love of Tim Hutton in Alan Rudolph’s charming, if flawed, little fantasy, Made in Heaven, McGillis, obviously cast for her Witness-like radiance, came off as dully ethereal. The killer, though, was Winter People, an Ozark soap opera housing a host of worst-of-career performances. It was in this picture that her overall tendency toward facial chubbiness was disastrously married to the tendency of her face to swell up when she weeps, which she does throughout the story. Nobody saw Winter People, so it can’t be said to have hurt McGillis’s career all that much. What has hurt her is her failure to follow up Witness with even one performance that hints of the early promise. Most recently, in The Accused, McGillis was little more than a springboard for Jodie Foster’s Oscar triumph. All this is not to say that Kelly McGillis absolutely cannot act. She’s just one of those actresses that needs a really good director to avoid embarrassing herself, and a genius director to shine.

B.A.M.


M8DLOAT EC011
KATE CAPSHAW
Though she bears a physical resemblance to Candice Bergen and Julie Christie, both leading ladies of the ’60s and ’70s, Kate Capshaw has yet to exhibit their level of style or staying-power, despite the dream-hype surrounding her breakthrough film, 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Capshaw had three small films to her credit (including A Little Sex and Dreamscape) when BOOM! Spielberg picked her, Indy loved her, and she got the cover of Life magazine. But hype is just what Webster’s says it is: “artificial stimulation,” and Indiana Jones proved both a beginning and an end for Capshaw. In her one and only hit film, she made a grand entrance over the opening credits as a blowzy blonde American cabaret singer in Shanghai doing a knockout number with sophisticated, Carole Lombard-esque comic grace.


Unfortunately, for the rest of the film, her shrieks set one’s teeth on edge, and Spielberg, no actor’s director, did little to reign her in. But in any case, this broad comic potential was not capitalized on in Space Camp, or Sidney Lumet’s gloomy Power (in which she was ill-advised to play second fiddle to Julie Christie). After laying low for a couple of years, Capshaw returned to the screen last year in Black Rain, playing yet another blowzy American nightclub girl stuck in the Orient. But unlike Indiana Jones, the hero of this film (Michael Douglas) left her behind when he went on his adventures.

Having recently given birth to her child with Spielberg, Capshaw is reportedly raring to come back to the big screen, but word also has it that she doesn’t want to have to audition for parts–a privilege usually reserved for really big stars. Truth is, she hasn’t had a major film role since 1986. And after all, being the mother of Steven Spielberg’s child doesn’t guarantee carte blanche on Hollywood’s screens (see following on Amy Irving).

Jemmy Stone

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AMY IRVING
Amy Irving was just another pretty, dewey-eyed actress with a few TV credits to her name when Brian De Palma cast her in Carrie in 1976, and then The Fury in 1978. But De Palma did more than that for her: he set her up on a blind date with Steven Spielberg. She and Spielberg were together for a couple of years, but split up around the time she was making Voices, the first of several nothing movies that included The Competition and Honeysuckle Rose. And then, two pivotal events occurred: she was cast by Barbra Streisand in Yentl, the role for which she won an Oscar nomination, and she got back together with Spielberg. It was at this point that she could have parlayed her position into a solid career. Plenty of actresses who marry powerful filmmakers have no qualms at all about soliciting their mates’ help, and Irving was the live-in lover of the most powerful player in Hollywood, the mother of his son, and soon to become his wife. A juicy role in any prestigious movie might have given Irving the necessary quantum boost.


But, perhaps to her credit, she was determined to make her career on her own terms, and she refused even to talk about the Hollywood wunderkind in interviews. So she began doing TV movies like “Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna” and pictures like the Cannon fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin. She was praised for her portrayal of a sophisticated Jewish girl who falls for a pickle maker in Crossing Delancey, but few saw this small Joan Micklin Silver picture. And then she and Spielberg split up. Well, perhaps like her mother, actress Priscilla (“Dallas”) Pointer, she’ll have a perfectly satisfying career in the theater, doing TV and the occasional movie. During the shooting of Irving’s most recent picture, the bomb A Show of Force, she became lovers with the director, Bruno Barreto, and has since had his child. What does this teach us?

Maggie Amberson

brooke shield - brenda starr
BROOKE SHIELDS
The odds that she’d make the transition from beautiful baby to teen star to adult actress were never great, but Brooke’s early fame, as America’s premier sexualized infant–in toney trash like Pretty Baby, drive-in trash like The Blue Lagoon, and in lip-smackingly trashy TV commercials for Calvin Klein jeans–gave her a fifty-fifty chance of growing up to become a beloved pin-up, sort of a brunette Farrah Fawcett, instead of just a joke. Shields is a case study that proves the old studio system, which really did work pretty well, is no more: compare her career with two earlier child stars also appreciated for their beauty, not their acting ability–Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood. Movie moguls of yore knew that the chances of having an aging teen contract player successfully make the jump to leading lady were not likely, so when the time came they really protected their investment with heavy duty acting classes, solid material, and a top director: thus, Taylor passed the test of A Place in the Sun with flying colors, and Wood came out of Splendor in the Grass with a grown-up’s career.


But Shields, in the free-for-all modern movie world where one’s mother decides on the next career move, stumbled badly with her bid for adult stardom, Endless Love. With a bad screenplay and terrible direction by Franco Zeffirelli, this was a star vehicle that exposed the inabilities of its star. A near career-ender for all concerned, it was Shields’s last major studio movie to date. She’s since been making Cannon fodder like Sahara, unreleasable tripe like Brenda Starr, and too many appearances on Bob Hope TV specials. The irony cannot be lost on Shields that when her young life inspired a TV movie called “Paper Dolls,” playing a character transparently based on Shields launched the career of another young beauty who today has the very career Shields seemed destined for: Daryl Hannah.

K.H.

lea thompson - back to the future 3
LEA THOMPSON
Although she didn’t start acting until she was 20, Lea Thompson, now 28, has never been prominent on screen as anything but a teen. And her ever-shrinking role in the Back to the Future series suggests a Margot Kidder/Superman replay. The situation wasn’t always so dire. Thompson won raves as the tough-but-virginal steel town girl in 1983’s All the Right Moves, giving it up to Tom Cruise. But then her love scene was cut from 1984’s Red Dawn because she was “too young” (at 22). The next year, she became a name, playing dual roles as Michael J. Fox’s mom now-and-then. She was on the fast track, all right–straight to Mary Pickford-ville (remember Pickford? America’s sweetheart, still playing 12-year-olds at 27, because that’s what the public demanded?). She got her shot at carrying a film, but–alas–the film was Howard the Duck. Soon she was playing just another high school sweetheart in John Hughes’s Some Kind of Wonderful.This kind of type-casting will pressure a “maturing”actress into taking some chances: In 1988’s abysmal Casual Sex?, she played a promiscuous young woman,and in The Wizard of Loneliness she played a woman with a kid–and a bearded lover. Last year on TV in “Tales From the Crypt”, she played a prostitute who succumbs to a mysterious malady that ages her onscreen. But when the heavy makeup came off, she was as fresh-faced as ever. It must have been maddening to watch another fresh-faced cutie pie, Meg Ryan, come along and steal the show in mature comic roles in When Harry Met Sally… and Joe vs. the Volcano.


Today Thompson languishes in TV movies, while Meg’s got the career that might have been Thompson’s (as well as Dennis Quaid–Thompson’s former fiance). Thompson has gone out of her way to remind the press that Lauren Bacall played mature roles opposite Bogie while still a teen. But she simply doesn’t possess the same sultry, slow-burn charisma, or the throaty voice. You just can’t imagine anyone calling her, as James Agee did Bacall, “the toughest girl… Hollywood has dreamed of in a long, long while.” Maybe she should take up smoking.

J.S.

bo derek - 1990
BO DEREK
Bo Derek came out of absolutely nowhere (being chomped in two by Orca the killer whale) to play the title role in 10, in which Dudley Moore tries to assuage his middle-aged malaise with a fantasy about a magnificent young woman–the perfect “10.” Who was this quintessential California golden girl? It turned out she had been plucked off the beach at 16 by older actor/director/Svengali John Derek, who made her lose 30 pounds, and then made her his third wife. (He had previously been married to Ursula Andress and Linda Evans, both of whom could have passed for Bo’s mother.) Derek made it clear that he was going to carefully plot Bo’s career path, turning her into the star she was obviously meant to be. Of course, he hadn’t exactly put the careers of Andress or Evans in orbit (Evans got her “Dynasty” gig long after she’d divorced Derek), but he was determined that the third time would be the charm.


With the exception of a hot-tub appearance in the little-seen movie A Change of Seasons, Bo was held off the market for two years so that she could make a bigger splash with a vehicle Derek fashioned just for her: Jane, the “first jungle feminist,” in their laughably terrible Tarzan the Ape Man. Bo and John laid low until their next project in 1984, Bolero, another Derek-directed film in which Bo improbably plays a virgin who (and this is the plot) can’t get deflowered. Ugly rumors emanated from the set, boding poorly for the chemistry between Bo and co-star Andrea Occhipinti (it was said she wouldn’t kiss him because he had cold-sores on his mouth). The Dereks produced another camp classic, and–why break up a winning team?–try to go three-for-three with their new film, Ghosts Can’t Do It. The title says it all.

M.A.

August 1990

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Nipped in the Bud

Back in 1990, Movieline Magazine ran an article about 8 actresses whose acting careers had been cut short.  It was their version of What the Hell Happened.  Here's a look at the actresses Movieline Magazine said were "nipped in the bud" in 1990.It's the oldest story in Hollywood, the tale ...
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Dar
Dar
10 years ago

Thank you for posting this.
I’m not sure if most of these actresses could have been stars even with good luck/material/direction. many were not particularly tanelted in the first place.

jeffthewildman
10 years ago

Re: Brooke Shields. Some friends and I were discussing on another movie site, the fact that next weekend is remake release weekend. You have Robocop, About Last Night and Endless Love all up for release. Of those pictures Robocop is easily recognizable and About Last Night is a remake of a cult followed film based on a David Mamet play. But Endless Love Love has been pretty much forgotten by most of the general public. The song by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross has had way more staying power.

Terrence Clay (@TMC1982)
Reply to  jeffthewildman

Why Hollywood won’t cast Brooke Shields anymore
http://www.nickiswift.com/61215/hollywood-wont-cast-brooke-shields-anymore/
Brooke Shields was one of the most famous faces on the planet in the 1990s. After forging a successful career as a child star with roles in coming-of-age drama Blue Lagoon, Shields was happily married to world-famous tennis player Andre Agassi, and had landed two Emmy nominations for her role in NBC sitcom Suddenly Susan.
However, her fame began to decline dramatically, and Shields disappeared from our TV and cinema screens. We take a look at the reasons why the actress is no longer America’s sweetheart.

Lani
Lani
7 years ago

John Derek’s first wife Pati Behrs, mother of his children, had a completely different look than the later wives. Older than him too. It was actually his only marriage to get significant press at the time. Much later when Bo became a star, photographs of Pati were conveniently absent from a lot of editorials who were trying to present this absurd idea that all his wives were look-a-likes. http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/married-american-actors-john-derek-and-pati-behrs-read-a-book-with-picture-id3226196 No resemblance to the other wives whatsoever. Linda and Bo were the only two who shared a resemblance in my opinion. To say Urs looked like either of them is really… Read more »

Gluserty
2 years ago

I came across this article when I was looking up Demi Moore & “Striptease” a month 1/2 or so. I kept it in mind, and since I’ve been listening to Robert Palmer’s “Hyperactive” again (LOVE that song!!!), that automatically tracks me back to Elizabeth McGovern & “The Bedroom Window”. I have to respectfully disagree with Barbara Ann Mitchell in terms of McGovern in that spot and being upstaged By Isabelle Huppert. Oh, I think Huppert is great; her character sets in motion the entire film, and I love the scene at the aquarium between The Gutt & her (“I didn’t… Read more »

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