Rebecca De Mornay’s unflinching gaze can make a stock role feel less predictable. We value her ability to suggest a woman’s private concerns, especially when the script is busy worrying about the man beside her.
Fi1m perspective
In Risky Business (1983), Rebecca De Mornay lets Tom Cruise’s Joel do the worrying. Her Lana has a composure that complicates the teenage sex comedy, suggesting concerns beyond the young man who has hired her. We felt uneasy watching that transaction, because Cruise makes paying for sex look like another task the boy hopes to get right. De Mornay keeps Lana from becoming merely a reward for his curiosity. The attraction works, but it does not make the money cease to matter.
Paul Brickman gets a good performance from her without giving Lana an equal share of his attention. The film follows Joel’s anxieties far more closely, and its eagerness to keep us sympathetic to him limits what we learn about her. De Mornay’s self-possession makes us believe that Lana has a life beyond these encounters. She makes that narrowness forgivable, but she cannot make the script equally curious about both of them.
After that breakthrough came roles in Runaway Train (1985) and Backdraft (1991), then the central villain in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992). Her poise and unflinching gaze lend themselves readily to calculating women. In The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the menace is persuasive because she gives the villain psychological detail without resorting to camp. The risk is that a film asks for the composure and gives her too little else to play.
Later roles include the scheming Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers (1993) and Dorothy Walker in the television series Marvel's Jessica Jones (2015). The part need not be sympathetic for De Mornay’s poise to be useful, but the interest lies in what she suggests beneath it. Start with Risky Business, and allow a little patience for the prosperous young man who gets rather more of the film’s sympathy than he deserves.
Biography
Rebecca De Mornay is an American actress. Born Rebecca Jane Pearch on 29 August 1959 in Santa Rosa, California, she trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles after returning to the United States in 1980.
She made her film debut in a small role in One from the Heart (1981). Her breakthrough came in 1983 as Lana in Risky Business. Other film roles include appearances in Runaway Train (1985), Backdraft (1991) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992). She has also worked in television, with credits including Lucifer (2016) and Marvel's Jessica Jones (2015).
