Jami Gertz

Jami Gertz was born on October 28, 1965, in Chicago, Illinois, and spent the better part of the 1980s becoming one of the more recognizable faces in American film and television. She trained at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts before landing small television roles that gradually built into something more substantial. What's striking is how she managed to occupy two very different registers simultaneously — the mainstream teen comedy crowd and the darker, genre-leaning work — without either side canceling the other out.

Her defining moment came in 1987 with Joel Schumacher's vampire film The Lost Boys, where she played Star, a young woman caught between two worlds (the romantic-lead framing was almost a red herring, given how much moral weight the character actually carried). That same year she appeared in Less Than Zero alongside Robert Downey Jr. and Andrew McCarthy, and the pairing of those two films within a single calendar year gave her a kind of cultural gravity that a lot of actors spend entire decades chasing. She wasn't just the girl in the horror film or the girl in the literary adaptation — she was doing both at once, and doing them seriously. The 1980s teen-film circuit could've swallowed her whole, but it didn't.

Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Gertz kept working across genres without settling into any single lane. She appeared in the ensemble comedy Twister in 1989 — not the disaster film, the smaller family farce — and took on television work that showed a real comfort with comedic timing. Her run on the sitcom Still Standing, which ran from 2002 to 2006 on CBS, became one of the more underrated examples of working-class domestic comedy in that era of television; she played Judy Miller opposite Mark Addy for four seasons and didn't let the show's broad premise flatten the character. That's the kind of sustained, unglamorous commitment to a project that doesn't always get written about, but it matters.

Her film work in the early 2000s included Seven Girlfriends (2000), a romantic comedy in which she appeared among an ensemble cast navigating a man's relationship history in a way that the film treated as both comic and genuinely melancholy — which is harder to pull off than it sounds. Seven Girlfriends isn't a film that gets discussed much anymore, but it sits in that specific early-2000s mode of low-stakes romantic comedy that has its own quiet pleasures if you're willing to meet it on its own terms. Hard to say if it represented a deliberate pivot toward ensemble work, or simply a project that fit the moment.

Gertz has remained active in both entertainment and other spheres, though her public profile shifted considerably after the mid-2000s. Her ownership stake in the Atlanta Hawks NBA franchise — held jointly with her husband Tony Ressler — brought her into a different kind of public visibility, one that had nothing to do with screen performance. The thing nobody mentions is how rarely actors who step back from the constant churn of film and television get credit for the deliberate nature of that choice. Not absence. Selectivity. Her filmography doesn't read like a career that stalled; it reads like one that got edited. The early work — The Lost Boys, Less Than Zero, the CBS years — holds up as a coherent body of range-building, and Seven Girlfriends sits in the middle of it as a marker of the quieter, character-driven work she was willing to take on when the material called for it.