Famke Janssen's Excellent Summer
Dateline: 08/25/00
I
first became aware of Famke Janssen in Woody Allen's film Celebrity.
She was stunning, she was intelligent, and midway through the film, Kenneth
Branaugh leaves her for Winona Ryder. I couldn't believe it. How can you fathom
such atrocious taste? Such bad judgment? One thing I knew: I wanted to see more
of this actress.
Not a problem. You can't miss Famke Janssen this summer. She's pulled off quite a coup, currently starring in the both the best Hollywood action film and the one of the best independent pictures of the season: Bryan Singer's The X-Men, and Valerie Breiman's Love & Sex.
In the X-Men, Famke plays Dr. Jean Grey--cool as ice, telekinetic, impressive and always professional under fire. But in Love & Sex, Janssen makes the transformation to an ordinary, single young woman, Kate Welles--moody, brash, and sometimes a spectacular klutz. She swoons over kittens, and cracks you up with the story of how she lost her virginity. It's a career making performance, one she will be remembered for.
This is good news, because it turns out, unlike me, most people didn't know Famke Janssen from Celebrity. (Not that many people saw Celebrity, which is shame, just for the chance to watch Leonardo DiCaprio do a spoof of Leonardo DiCaprio). Janssen, to my surprise, started out as a Bond girl. The 34 year old, one time supermodel from the Netherlands was notorious for her performance as as Xenia Onatop, a lusty villainess who squeezes men to death with her thighs in the James Bond movie Goldeneye. She was typecast as the science fiction fantasy babe, with roles in House on Haunted Hill, Deep Rising and Lord of Illusions, plus an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation'' opposite X-men co-star Patrick Stewart.
Throughout her career in Hollywood, Janssen has always looked for strong roles in independent film. She has always worked in indies, with parts in small budge films including Rounders, The Gingerbread Man, and Celebrity.
Valerie Breiman, director of Love & Sex is all admiration for her film's star. "Famke has been unfairly typecast in other kinds of movies,'' Breiman said in an interview with the Associated Press. "But every scene in Love & Sex, the proof is there. ... It's just a matter of people being smart enough to put her in these kinds of movies. I think she's Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock and more.''
In the film, Kate (Janssen) reveals her humorous and often unhappy sexual history through a series of flashbacks. The story centers around her on again, off again relationship with Adam (Jon Favreau, Swingers).
"I loved how unapologetic this woman was about her sex life, love life, messy life in general," Janssen said. "It was very refreshing. She had a great sense of humor. She's a goofball. She's a lot of things that I really am in life. But it's not the way people have seen me before.''
What can you expect next? A lot of people want to see more of Janssen, and the demand is certainly only going to intensify with the August 25 release of Love & Sex. No surprise, there's an X-Men sequel already in the works. Before that, however, there's the next independent film on the horizon. Janssen stars in Made, the directorial debut of co-star Jon Favreau.
picture courtesy of Lions Gate Films
