Mia Kirshner

Kirshner had another career breakthrough the following year playing a young stripper with a surprising past identity in Atom Egoyan's widely acclaimed Exotica. The actress' work in the celebrated film attracted the notice of American casting agents, who promptly cast her in supporting roles in Murder in the First (1995) and the Southern gothic coming-of-age tale The Grass Harp (also 1995). Although she subsequently won lead roles in The Crow: City of Angels (1996) -- in which she played up her dark Goth looks as the tattoo artist who befriends Vincent Perez -- and Mad City (1997), which cast her as journalist Dustin Hoffman's intern, Kirshner has had difficulty making a name for herself in Hollywood. She continues to appear in both lead and supporting roles in such independent and/or small features as Saturn (1999), a drama that cast her as the hedonistic girlfriend of a young man (Scott Caan) caring for his Alzheimer's-stricken father. Keeping busy well into the new millennium, Kirshner would later appear in the real-time television series 24, as well as Not Another Teen Movie (both 2001), a parody of the recent wave of high school themed films. A featured role in the popular Showtime series The L Word found Kirshner continuing to court success on the small screen, and in 2006 she would head back to the big screen as the ill-fated actress who sparks a legendary Hollywood investigation in director Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx