Clorinda "Linda" Fiorentino (born March 9, 1958) is a retired American actress. Fiorentino made her screen debut with a leading role in the 1985 coming-of-age drama film Vision Quest, followed that same year with another lead role in the action film Gotcha! and an appearance in the Martin Scorsese film After Hours.<!--site live; birth date appears in archive only--> Noted for her "raven hair, intense gaze and low voice", Fiorentino was placed No. 66 on the 1995 edition of Empire<nowiki/>'s list of the 100 Sexiest Stars in Film History by a reader's poll. Fiorentino's parents—a steel contractor and a housewife—raised her in South Philadelphia, Fiorentino was a "bright student" at school but was also rebellious and would "argue with the nuns about the Bible and they seemed to love it." She began performing in plays at Rosemont College in suburban Philadelphia after falling in with a crowd of "rich Puerto Ricans and Cubans" and found herself in plays because "everyone in the theater there was really weird." After graduation, Fiorentino planned to continue her education at law school, but one of her professors convinced her to pursue a career in acting. Film critic Roger Ebert said of the newcomer, "Without having met the actress, it's impossible for me to speculate on how much of Carla is original work and how much is Fiorentino's personality. What comes across, though, is a woman who is enigmatic without being egotistical, detached without being cold, self-reliant without being suspicious. She has a way of talking – kind of deliberately objective – that makes you listen to everything she says."
Due to her "cinematic combination of spunk and sexiness", "a considerable amount of heat" was generated in Fiorentino's early career. Her co-star, Anthony Edwards, later directed her in Charlie's Ghost Story. Giving the film two stars out of four, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the European sequences as "a well-directed cat-and-mouse game" that lost its way in the final act after returning to the United States, with the film's main flaw being a focus on Edwards' character when Fiorentino was far more intriguing: "I'll bet the men who made this movie just assumed it had to be told from his point of view, and never considered hers. Too bad. I think they missed their best chance." Fiorentino spoke negatively of the film saying, "It's not my kind of film," and, "These kinds of movies are like drinking beer all the time." Roger Ebert gave After Hours a rating of four out of four stars and added the film to his "Great Movies" list. In its review of The Moderns, Variety wrote: "Fiorentino is ideal as the gorgeous American of a prosaic background over whom men may lose their hearts, mind and lives."
After her initial career successes, Fiorentino's acting career stagnated, although she continued to appear in erotic films such as Wildfire (1988) and Chain of Desire (1992), where she often portrayed "dominating, manipulative characters". Fiorentino said of accepting the role, "After I read that script, I was in Arizona and I got in a car and drove six hours to get to the meeting because I had never read anything so unique in terms of a female character. And I walked in the meeting with John Dahl, the director, and I said, 'John, you are not allowed to hire anyone but me for this film.' And I wasn't kidding."
In its review of the film, The New York Times called Fiorentino's performance "flawlessly hard-boiled." After seeing Fiorentino in the part, Christopher Tookey, the film critic at The London Daily Mail, wrote: "The role could easily have been a misogynistic fantasy-woman. But Fiorentino makes you believe in her. I doubt if there will be a more stunning female performance this year."
Hollywood
In a 1994 appearance on Late Show with David Letterman, Fiorentino said she chose to stop acting for a period of time after Warner Bros. executive Mark Canton told her during the filming of Vision Quest, "you have a great ass, but I think your jeans need to be tighter." She said she returned to acting later to pay off mounting credit card debt.
The same year when asked about her newfound fame, and what she would do if she could never act again, Fiorentino told The New York Times: "You mean I don't have to wake up at 5 in the morning and put makeup on? I would be totally fine; I would do something else." She added she did not have a "driving passion to stay on top. [...] I'd rather be a little more subdued and aloof in my life." In a 1985 interview, she also said, "Acting is something you do when you can't make up your mind what to do. It really just kind of snuck up on me."
Co-star Michael Biehn was not fond of the film: "Well, on Jade, I had no idea what I was doing. I don't think anybody had any idea what they were doing. It was a Joe Eszterhas script. To me, none of it ever really made any sense. I didn't realize until the read-through that I was the bad guy in it. It was like a jumbled mess. And the movie came out a mess, too. It had great people on it, though. It had William Friedkin directing, it had Chazz Palmenteri, who was nominated that year for an Academy Award, it had Linda Fiorentino, who had just come out with that famous movie she did The Last Seduction, and it had David Caruso, who's a brilliant actor when given the right material, and a very smart guy. So a great cast, great director... everything but a script."
In the book Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You To Hate, author Anna Bogutskaya mentions Fiorentino's character as meeting criteria for multiple archetypes of negatively portrayed women in popular media. Bogutskaya suggests that the characterization of Katrina / Jade contributed to her perception as hard to work with, referencing her personality conflict with Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, and ultimately culminating in her gradual exit from acting.
She later worked again with Dahl on his film Unforgettable (1996). Dahl's follow up to The Last Seduction, Unforgettable was another critical and box-office failure for Fiorentino, only earning less than $3 million in the United States. Reviewer Bryant Frazer gave the film a C− and wrote, "Liotta and Fiorentino look kind of sleepy throughout the whole proceeding ... but still, it has its moments, including the very ending, that really work—as if somewhere, buried inside this mess, there's a good movie trying to get out."
Men in Black, Dogma and later career
Fiorentino played the female lead, Dr. Laurel Weaver, in the 1997 film Men in Black, for which she was nominated for a Blockbuster Entertainment's Award for Favorite Supporting Actress in Science Fiction. She appeared alongside Ving Rhames, John Leguizamo and David Caruso in the 1998 direct-to-video film Body Count, which Variety called "an after-the-heist road movie that sizzles here and there but ends up going no place special."' In 1999, she starred in Dogma as abortion clinic employee Bethany Sloane who is tasked with saving the world.
In years following, it was rumored Fiorentino did not get along with Dogma director Kevin Smith, which generated negative press for her. In an interview with TV Guide in 2000, Smith stated, "Linda created crisis and trauma and anguish. She created drama while we were making a comedy. She was ticked off that there were other people in the movie who were more famous than she was." He also accused Fiorentino of avoiding promotional duties after "going nuts" at the film's poster, which had spliced her head onto another woman's body and amplified her cleavage. "She never did a photo shoot," Smith said. "It's not like we were hinging on all that Fiorentino press – I fought to cast the woman in the movie."
However, in 2018, Smith stated that rumors of a falling out between the two had been misconstrued and overstated, and that while the two had not spoken in years, they amicably reconnected following his near-fatal heart attack. Blaming himself, Smith attributed the rumors to a remark he had made on the film's commentary track, which had later been sensationalized: <blockquote>I remember on a commentary track on the DVD — Janeane Garofalo was in the movie and at one point I said it would have been better if she played the lead, which was a really shitty and stupid thing to say. Thoughtless, considering that Linda was the lead and Linda did a great job. So, it had been years since I had spoken with Linda and I got an email from her. And of course, I was thankful to hear from her and it also gave me a chance to say I'm so sorry that I ever said that thing years ago. It gives you a chance to make amends. So that was my favorite one. I heard from so many people, but that one really stood out for me because, if somebody had said, 'Oh, the movie would have been better if [co-star] Ben Affleck directed it,' that would have hurt my feelings. I know it hurt her feelings and really unnecessarily because I always loved her performance in the movie.</blockquote>After a co-starring role with Paul Newman in the 2000 heist film Where the Money Is, and a lead role in the 2002 film Liberty Stands Still, Fiorentino's career slowed to a halt. She was in talks to star in a series being prepared by Tom Fontana, but did not take the project. Fiorentino was attached to a Georgia O'Keeffe biographical drama called Till the End of Time, but the project stalled when Fiorentino had a falling out with German producer Karel Dirka regarding provocative sex scenes. "You have rights, as an artist and as a woman," she said. "It's not as if I didn't agree to do some nudity. But they crossed the line. It was a question of integrity."
Fiorentino's character was written out of Men in Black II (2002) to accommodate the return of Tommy Lee Jones as the co-lead of the film and partner to Will Smith's character. According to producer Laurie MacDonald, "It turned out not to be a big enough role. We would have loved to have her, but when we began to develop the story, we couldn't find a [major] place for her. We always knew that the movie would be about bringing Tommy Lee Jones back." Kristin Lopez, writing an expose for RogerEbert.com titled "Hollywood's Difficult Women," brought up rumors that Jones' return was, in fact, contingent upon Fiorentino's absence and that the studio responded to this stipulation accordingly.
In 2007, Fiorentino optioned the rights to a screenplay about Russian poet Anna Akhmatova with plans to produce and to possibly star in and direct, but the project was dropped. During this period, she was reported to be developing two documentaries, neither of which moved forward. Fiorentino's most recent screen role was a supporting character in Once More with Feeling, released direct-to-video in 2009.
Personal life
Fiorentino married film director and writer John Byrum, whom she had previously worked with on the unfinished movie The War at Home, on June 23, 1992. The couple divorced in 1993, after a year of marriage. In an interview with film critic Roger Ebert shortly after The Last Seduction came out, Fiorentino admitted that the men she met in real life expected her to be like her devious characters, and said that when it came to the parts that she was offered, "Maybe others see in me what I don't necessarily see in myself. And a lot of it in Hollywood has to do with what you look like. I'm dark and my eyes are dark and my voice is deep, and how the hell could I play a Meg Ryan role, the way I look?" According to prosecutors, Fiorentino told Rossini that she was researching a screenplay based on Pellicano's case. Rossini conducted searches of government computers for information related to the case and passed the results to Fiorentino, who then handed the files over to Pellicano's lawyers in a failed effort to help Pellicano avoid a 15-year prison sentence.