Illeana Douglas plays women who say the thing everyone else at the table has decided not to say, and she plays them straight, without a wink. Her best work is in other people's films, a few scenes at a time, and it is usually the part you remember.
Fi1m perspective
The art teacher in Ghost World (2001) believes every word she says. That is the joke, and Douglas never lets us see that she knows it. Roberta Allsworth takes teenage art more seriously than the teenagers do, and Douglas plays her with no flicker of irony, so the laugh comes from us and not from her. It is a small part in a film about two girls and a lonely record collector, and it is the one most people bring up first.
She began in New York doing stand-up and sketch comedy, and the timing shows. Martin Scorsese gave her a screaming part in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and then kept her on: New York Stories (1989), GoodFellas (1990) and Cape Fear (1991), where as Lori Davis opposite Robert De Niro she produced a scream people still talk about. The independents of the 1990s used her better. Gus Van Sant cast her in To Die For (1995) as Janice Maretto, the ice-skating sister with the acid tongue, and Allison Anders gave her a lead as the singer-songwriter Denise Waverly in Grace of My Heart (1996). Since then she has written and directed her own shorts and a web series, Easy to Assemble, and hosted television specials on women filmmakers.
What she does is one particular thing, done well. She plays the one person at the table who has no idea she is the funny one: blunt, over-earnest, slightly too much. Most comic actors signal to the audience; Douglas withholds, and the character stays a person rather than a turn. Watching Ghost World again, we found Roberta funnier and sadder than we remembered, because Douglas will not let her be a fool, and Terry Zwigoff's film, which is hard on nearly everyone in it, is a little kinder for having her there.
The limit was set by the industry rather than by her. The studio films after 2000 gave her a scene or two and moved on, and a scene or two is not enough for the trick to work; the earnestness needs time to build before it turns funny. Her one sustained lead, in Grace of My Heart, is the film to look for if you want to see what she does when given the whole running time. She has said, "I'm a big fan of Albert Brooks, Nichols and May. I'd like to follow in their footsteps and do comedy films." On the evidence she has been in them all along, playing the one character who did not know it was a comedy.
Biography
Illeana Douglas is an American actress and filmmaker. She trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and began her career with small roles, including work for Martin Scorsese.
She is known for supporting parts in GoodFellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), To Die For (1995), Grace of My Heart (1996) and Ghost World (2001), in which she played Roberta Allsworth. On television she has appeared in Seinfeld, Six Feet Under (for which she received a Primetime Emmy nomination), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Modern Family.
Douglas has also directed short films, created and starred in the web series Easy to Assemble, and hosted programmes on Turner Classic Movies. She is a granddaughter of actor Melvyn Douglas.
