Why didn’t this actress get another shot after an Oscar nom? (2024)

Almost 30 years since Leaving Las Vegas was released, I finally got around to seeing the film. I was nine years old when the movie came out, but I can still remember the hoo-ha at the time over Nicolas Cage’s Oscar-winning turn as Ben, an alcoholic who heads to Vegas to drink himself to death. What I don’t recall hearing much about is Elisabeth Shue’s performance as Sera, a hooker and Ben’s unlikely love interest in the movie.

Cage is terrific in the film, displaying all the emotional volatility and physical tics you’d expect from someone whose soul and liver are curdling in unison. But Shue is equally formidable as Sera. Without her vulnerable, compassionate presence, there would be no sympathy for Cage’s character, and she beautifully conveys a tortured soul of her own.

Abused by her pimp, shunned by her neighbours and brutally assaulted in one harrowing scene, she’s as desperately lonely as Ben, and in each other they recognise a kindred spirit. Shue was rightly Oscar-nominated for her performance, but while Cage went on to become a box-office superstar, Shue’s career would never reach the same heights. It’s one of Hollywood’s most baffling trajectories.

A decade earlier, Shue had starring roles in The Karate Kid (1984) with Ralph Macchio, Adventures in Babysitting (1987) and co*cktail (1988), that last one opposite Tom Cruise as the bartending lothario who knocks up her character, Jordan. Three hit movies in five years should have been enough to drive anyone to the top of Hollywood, but Shue had been typecast as the ingenue girlfriend, a demure sidekick to the male lead. Babysitting, Christopher Columbus’ directing debut and a cult classic, is one of the few films in which Shue played the main character. After co*cktail she starred in another ’80s blockbuster, Back to the Future II (1989), and its follow-up, once again playing a girlfriend (to Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly).

Even after she shattered her girl-next-door image in Leaving Las Vegas, meaty roles were not in her future. Shue’s filmography in the three decades since has been festooned with misfires and flops – Piranha 3D; Behaving Badly, playing a cougar – with a few exceptions. The Saint, with Val Kilmer, was a moderate hit; she was memorable as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s mother in the excellent Mysterious Skin; she had the dubious honour of starring in a Woody Allen movie, Deconstructing Harry; and she was in a couple of episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Still, marvelling at her performance in Leaving Las Vegas, I felt a pang of injustice on Shue’s part. As a keen athlete (check out those soccer skills in The Karate Kid), there’s no doubt she would have made a fine action star (we saw flashes of this in Hollow Man, with Kevin Bacon), and who knows what else she might have been capable of – maybe a truly profound transformation, a la Charlize Theron in Monster or Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry? There’s a whiff of sexism around her career trajectory; she was 32 when Leaving Las Vegas came out – perhaps too old by Hollywood standards to land many more leading roles after that.

Recently, Shue reprised her Karate Kid role of Ali in Cobra Kai, the film’s TV spin-off. Ralph Macchio apologised offscreen to Shue for her character being uncharitably written out of the franchise in under a minute of dialogue in the second movie (she crashed his character’s car and started dating a footballer!) and fans embraced Ali’s return.

Maybe Shue doesn’t share my sympathy – after all, she’s worked steadily for 40 years, including with some of the best actors in Hollywood (many of whom also starred in those turkeys).

Perhaps her feelings are more akin to those of her character in the underrated, Steve Coogan-starring 2008 film Hamlet 2, in which she plays a version of herself who ditched Hollywood to become a nurse in Tucson, Arizona. “I just, you know, got kinda sick of the business,” she tells a tongue-tied Coogan. “Anyway, there’s a real shortage of nurses out there, and I like taking care of people.”

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Shue, who abandoned her studies at Harvard after The Karate Kid and returned to the university to collect a political science degree in 2000, has said her string of mainly supporting roles in the past 25 years allowed her to focus on her husband, director Davis Guggenheim, and their children.

“At the end of my life, I’m going to have videos that are stacked up on a shelf or I’m going to have three children that will be by my bed when I die,” she said. “I have the balance I need for my own life.”

If she’s happy, I’m happy for her, too. But I also can’t help but wonder what might have been. At least we’ll always have Vegas.

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