Chloe Webb
Chloe Webb is an actor, born 1956.
Her first film role was Nancy Spungen, which is roughly like starting a boxing career at the title fight. In Sid and Nancy she builds the girlfriend of the Sex Pistols bassist out of a voice first: a nasal, needling, relentless whine that most actors would deploy for ten minutes and that she sustains across a whole film without ever letting the character curdle into a joke. Born in Greenwich Village in 1956, Webb came to that part out of New York theatre.
Since then she has specialised in women who take up more air than the room allows. Peter Greenaway cast her as Louisa Kracklite in The Belly of an Architect; she was Linda Mason in Twins, Laurette Barber in China Beach, which brought a Primetime Emmy nomination, and Mona Ramsey in the 1993 Tales of the City.
Then Shameless handed her the role that reintroduced her to a generation that had never heard of Sid Vicious. Monica Gallagher recurs rather than stars, and Webb plays her with none of the softening a returning guest usually gets: warm and funny right up until she is neither, and the show is never more alive or more anxious than when she walks back in. It is the same instrument she used in 1986, older and considerably more frightening.
Movies (11)
TV (3)
Where to start with Chloe Webb
Two obvious doors, twenty-five years apart. Sid and Nancy is the performance to see first if you want to understand why people rate her, and be warned that it is loud, unglamorous, technically astonishing and hard to sit through in exactly the way the film intends. Shameless is the gentler entrance. Monica recurs across the run, and the series sharpens whenever she does.
After that, The Belly of an Architect is the one nobody expects, a formal Greenaway picture that gives her rooms full of silence to push against, while Twins shows she could play straightforward warmth when a studio comedy needed it. China Beach earned the Emmy nomination and holds up better than its reputation.
Practical Magic, She's So Lovely and A Dangerous Woman are smaller, and Repo Chick is for completists only.