Rosanna Arquette

Rosanna Arquette, born in New York City in 1959, had one of the great eighties runs. An Emmy nomination for the television film The Executioner's Song in 1982, then Baby It's You, then Desperately Seeking Susan in 1985, which won her the BAFTA for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, and After Hours the same year, and Silverado, and The Big Blue in 1988. Very few American actors get five films that good in a stretch that short.

What she played, over and over, was restlessness. Her characters are women bored by the lives they have arranged for themselves and willing to walk straight into somebody else's, which is the actual plot of Desperately Seeking Susan and the fuse that lights After Hours, where her invitation strands the hero downtown for one very long night. She was funny and slightly unstable in a way that mainstream leading-lady casting had no category for, which is probably why the eighties suited her and the decades after suited her less.

The nineties made her a character actor. Jody in Pulp Fiction is a small role attached to one of the most infamous scenes in nineties cinema. Crash gave her the strangest role of her career, Buffalo '66 the meanest joke, The Whole Nine Yards the broadest comedy. She also moved behind the camera, directing the documentary Searching for Debra Winger in 2002.

Since then she has worked constantly in supporting television, with Ray Donovan, Eastwick, Ratched, Florida Man and Presumed Innocent, alongside a long tail of independent films. The parts got smaller as the eighties receded. The work did not get worse.