Heather Langenkamp is Nancy Thompson, the teenager who decides to fight Freddy Krueger rather than run from him, and she plays her plainly enough that dreaming looks like a real problem. It is one role, but it is a good one.
Fi1m perspective
What Langenkamp does in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) is stay awake. Wes Craven's idea is that Fred Krueger can reach Nancy in her dreams, so the ordinary need for sleep becomes the thing to be frightened of, and Langenkamp is the reason that works. She plays Nancy as someone with a problem to solve rather than someone waiting for the next attack, and her resistance is where the film keeps its point. We found ourselves dreading sleep on her behalf, which is an odd thing to feel in a cinema seat, and it was her doing: Craven supplies the invention, Langenkamp supplies the person it is happening to.
She came to it sideways. She had done extras work in Tulsa in 1983 on Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, and was a student at Stanford when Craven cast her. By her own account nobody thought a horror film was a good idea for a young actor at the time; she took it anyway because, as she put it, "I loved the script, and I wanted to get paid, and I thought, 'Oh, no one will ever see it.'" People saw it. She played Nancy twice more, in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) and in Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), where she plays a version of Heather Langenkamp being pursued by the part she is best known for. In between there was steady television, including three years as Marie Lubbock in the family sitcom Just the Ten of Us (1988–1990).
What she is good at is the practical heroine: a young woman who thinks her way through a threat, stays loyal to the people around her and does not wait to be rescued. She does not look or sound like a Hollywood lead, and in a horror film that is an asset, because the fear has somewhere ordinary to land. What she is not is a star with a long shelf of parts to choose from. The career after Elm Street is genre work and television, and it never opened out the way a debut that strong might have promised. Some of that was the stigma that attached to horror leads in the 1980s, which she has spoken about; some of it is simply how the trade treats actors who arrive fully formed in one role.
She has since made her peace with it, and more than that, she has taken charge of it, as executive producer and narrator of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010) and the subject of I Am Nancy (2011). Most actors spend decades trying to get out from under the part that made them. Langenkamp, by her own account, spent about twenty years minding and then stopped. Start with the 1984 film; it is the one we can vouch for, and she is the reason it still frightens.
Biography
Heather Langenkamp is an American actress. Born on 17 July 1964 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she studied at Stanford University. She began her career with small parts in films shot locally, including deleted scenes in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders (1983) and Rumble Fish (1983).
Langenkamp rose to prominence as Nancy Thompson in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). She reprised the role in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) and portrayed a version of herself in Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994). She played Marie Lubbock in the television series Just the Ten of Us (1988–1990). She has served as executive producer and narrator on the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010) and co-owns a special effects studio.
