Elisabeth Shue: Shue Shines Again - Movieline (April 2000)

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/08/31/elisabeth-shue-shue-shines-again/

After Leaving Las Vegas earned Elisabeth Shue an Oscar nomination, it seemed like her career was heating up. Five years and several misfires later, Shue was starring in the sci-fi-thriller, Hollow Man. A big summer movie with an A-list director might have been just the thing Shue needed to resuscitate her career, but Hollow Man proved to be middling.

As she promoted her last grasp at moviestardom, Shue graced the cover of the August 2000 issue of Movieline magazine.

Elisabeth Shue’s career can be divided into two phases–before Leaving Las Vegas and after Leaving Las Vegas. Growing up in South Orange, New Jersey, with divorced parents–her lawyer father and bank executive mother split when she was nine–and three brothers, Elisabeth had clean-scrubbed good looks that got her the part of a perky salesperson in a series of Burger King commercials, after which she played sweet suburban kids in The Karate Kid and Adventures in Babysitting. When she entered adult-role territory, she still played the sensible good girl (in Cocktail and in Back to the Future II and III). She went slightly edgier to play a driven actress in Soapdish, but she returned to goody-two-shoes parts in The Marrying Man and Heart and Souls. So it was a surprise to everyone when she nailed the dark and extremely challenging role of an emotionally destroyed prostitute in 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas. When she didn’t win the Oscar for that remarkable performance (Susan Sarandon won that year for Dead Man Walking), there was still every reason to believe that she would now step into the best roles Hollywood had to offer. Instead, she proceeded to star in a series of mediocre misfires (The Trigger Effect, Palmetto, Cousin Bette, Molly), a so-so Woody Allen comedy (Deconstructing Harry) and Phillip Noyce’s big-budget, big-screen version of TV’s The Saint, which was at best a moderate success. With the big-budget Hollow Man, a special-effects-fueled update of the premise of The Invisible Man that stars Kevin Bacon and is directed by Paul Verhoeven, who has the hits Total Recall and Basic Instinct on his resume, Shue has the chance for a huge audience-pleaser that could accomplish what The Saint should have.

Improbably enough, Shue is studying for her finals at Harvard University when I meet her. She’s gone back to finish one last semester so she can get the dual degree in political science and government that she started working towards 19 years ago, first at Wellesly College, then at Harvard. When I meet her in the lobby of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she looks like any other harried senior. Unlike most students, though, she’s 36, has a potential summer blockbuster to promote, and has a family–her two-and-a-half-year-old son, Miles, and Davis Guggenheim, her director-husband (Gossip)–waiting for her at home. And unlike any student, she has nearly two decades of Hollywood experience on her resume.