Amy Irving

Irving's screen career started with a jolt. Her feature film debut came in Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), the Stephen King adaptation that remains a landmark of American horror — she played Sue Snell, the girl whose guilt-driven act of kindness goes catastrophically wrong in that final scene. De Palma brought her back the following year for The Fury (1978), another supernatural thriller, cementing an early association with psychologically charged genre work. Honeysuckle Rose (1980) and The Competition (1980) followed, broadening her range into drama and romance. The career-defining turn came with Yentl (1983). Cast as Hadass opposite Barbra Streisand's cross-dressing Yentl, Irving brought a kind of luminous, almost heartbreaking sincerity to a character who's essentially deceived by everyone she loves — and her Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress was well-earned. She didn't win, but the nomination landed her in a different tier of recognition. Crossing Delancey (1988) gave her a Golden Globe nomination for comedy, a genre that doesn't always get its due in awards conversations, and that same year she won an Obie Award for her Off-Broadway work in The Road to Mecca. The stage kept pulling her back: Amadeus on Broadway in 1980, Broken Glass in 1994 (nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards), Three Sisters revival in 1997, and the long run of The Coast of Utopia from 2006 to 2007. Her later film work is leaner but well-chosen. Woody Allen's ensemble Deconstructing Harry (1997), then a brief reprise of her Carrie role in The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999) — a cameo that felt like a wink more than a comeback. Traffic (2000) put her in serious company alongside Michael Douglas in Soderbergh's multi-threaded crime drama, and the independent films Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001) and Adam (2009) showed she wasn't chasing scale. Unsane (2018), Soderbergh's iPhone-shot psychological thriller, brought them back together again. Hard to say if that reunion was planned or just circumstance, but it worked.