Actor / Director Profile

It came as no surprise to film aficionados when, in 1999, Entertainment Weekly named Jill Clayburgh to its list of Hollywood's 25 Greatest Actresses. For nearly 30 years, she has delivered stellar performances in a wide variety of roles. Born into wealth in 1944 in New York City, Jill Clayburgh was educated at the finest schools including the Brearley School and Sarah Lawrence College. It was while at Sarah Lawrence that she decided on a career in acting and joined the famous Charles Street Repetory Theater in Boston. She moved to New York in the late 1960s and had featured roles in a number of Broadway productions including "The Rothschilds" and "Pippin". She began her career in films in 1970 and got her first major role in Portnoy's Complaint (1972) in 1972. In 1978, she rose to screen prominence with her performance in An Unmarried Woman (1978) for which she received an Oscar nomination. She was again nominated for the Academy Award in 1979 for her role in Starting Over (1979) But after giving a riveting portrayal as a Valium addict in I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can (1982), her career went into a rapid decline, mainly because of her poor choices of scripts. She seemed destined for a comeback after appearing in Where Are the Children? (1986) with multi-talented child actress Elisabeth Harnois, but her excellent performance was largely ignored by the critics who opted to give the credit for the thriller's success to the performance of the precocious, six year old Harnois. Since the late 1980s, Jill has worked mainly in television and low budget films. But, in early 1999, it was announced that she was being considered for the title role in a big budget film based on the life of Nora Barnacle, the near illiterate wife of world renowned novelist James Joyce -- a role that could easily restore her to the prominence and acclaim that she enjoyed in the 1970s.