Juliette Lewis is an American actress and singer. She gained fame for her role in the 1991 thriller Cape Fear for which she was nominated for both an Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. This followed with major roles in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Natural Born Killers, The Evening Star, and From Dusk Till Dawn.
Background
Juliette Lewis was born in Los Angeles, California. She is the child of the supporting actor Geoffrey Lewis and Glenis Duggan Batley, a graphic designer. Her parents divorced and Lewis was apparently allowed to live on her own while still in her early teens. She has four siblings – brothers, Lightfield and Peter, and sisters, Deirdre and Brandy.
Education
Dropping out of high school, she got into trouble with the law for driving illegally at age 15, then was arrested for illegally patronizing a nightclub when she was 16. While in her 20s she went into rehabilitation for drug addiction.
Career
For she has worked steadily, and almost willfully on the borders of derangement and abandon: at twelve, it is said, in a TV movie. Home Fires; a bit in My Stepmother Is an Alien (88, Richard Benjamin); National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (89, Jeremiah S. Chechik); A Family for Joe (90, Jef f rey Melman); outstanding as the fifteen-year-old who ends up on Death Row in Too Young to Die? (90. Robert Markowitz); Crooked Hearts (91, Michael Bort- man); getting a supporting actress nomination and being the eomplicit dancer to some of De Niro’s most Satanic weavings in Cape Fear (91, Martin Scorsese); That Night (92, Craig Bolotin); excellent in Husbands and Wives (92, Woody Allen); close to human tenderness in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (93, Lasse Hallstrom); a wanton psychopath, with Brad Pitt, her companion in life then, in Kalifornia (93, Dominic Sena); eyebait for slaughter in Romeo Is Bleeding (94, Peter Medak); one of the Natural Bom Killers (94, Oliver Stone); Mixed Nuts (94, Nora Ephron); as poisoned purity in Strange Days (95, Kathryn Bigelow); From Dusk Till Dawn (96, Robert Rodriguez).
She was away for a while, in recoverv and rehabilitation, and she returned for Some Girl (98, Rory Kelly); The Other Sister (99, Garry Marshall): The 4th Floor (99, John Klausner); strenuously pregnant in The Way of the Gun (00, Christopher McQuarrie); Room to Rent (00, Khalid Al-Haggar); Gaudi Afternoon (00, Susan Seidelman); My Louisiana Sky (01, Adam Arkin) for TV; Picture Claire (01, Bruce McDonald); Enough (02, Michael Apted).
Personality
Juliette Lewis’s is an actual, if extreme career. She is a fidgety, pouting, perfect example of what appeals to voyeurism. She is an image ani-mated by the wicked thrill of being seen, looked at, and her own thrill is generated by some intuitive measuring of our guilty pleasure. She is of age now, but she was established first as a kind of Lolita, with a knowingness that was not permissible, and as a breed of illicit spectacle.