Whatever Happened To Rebecca De Mornay

In the pantheon of actors who came of age during the 1980s, few seemed as destined for superstardom of Rebecca De Mornay. Then again, few '80s actors could lay claim the same blend of wit, humanity, and raw (not to mention refreshingly unapologetic) sexuality that seemed to put De Mornay a cut above most of her contemporaries. Indeed, it was those very qualities that helped get her a foot in Hollywood's coveted door and land a minor role in Francis Ford Coppola's largely forgotten 1981 musical romantic drama One from the Heart.

While One from the Heart failed to make much of an impact at the box office, it did earn an Oscar nomination for Tom Waits' brilliant original music. Coppola's film also earned praise for its impressive cast, all of whom gambled big that the director could find magic in a music venture that was a patently risky proposition circa early '80s. It didn't come together as the cast and crew may have hoped, but De Mornay made the most of the moment, delivering a memorable performance that put her leading lady chops on full display. 

She'd earn earn her first starring role in her very next film, and while that film seemed destined to make a star of the young actor, the stardom never quite materialized. Still, Rebecca De Mornay has done her best to hang around Hollywood for the past few decades, and we're betting you've seen her more than you realize. Here's where.

With the success of Risky Business, De Mornay's career took off like a freight train. She followed that breakout film with a supporting turn in 1983's Testament, but saw her stardom take a serious hit with the release of 1985's oh-so-rotten romantic baseball comedy The Slugger's Wife, though one could hardly blame the young actor for jumping aboard a film written by Neil Simon and directed by the legendary Hal Ashby.  

Luckily, De Mornay found her footing again with a pair of solid supporting turns in two of 1985's more memorable films. The first — a heartfelt little drama called The Trip to Bountiful — found her trading scenes with screen legend Geraldine Page in what would become Page's only Academy Award-winning performance. The second found De Mornay again boarding a train, though this one came with no brakes, no driver, and outfitted with two escaped convicts in Jon Voight and Eric Roberts. Gritty, claustrophobic, and thrilling in all the best ways, Runaway Train is the very definition of "pulse-pounding thriller." It stands as one of the most oft-overlooked films of the '80s, rarely remembered despite earning three Oscar nominations, and seemingly righting the ship amidst the choppy waters of Rebecca De Mornay's early career.

It would be a few years before De Mornay would be able to claim number one status of any sort again, as she spent the second half of the '80s starring in a string of projects that ranged from questionable to down right abominable, including And God Created Woman, Feds, and Dealers. Just FYI — those are the questionable projects. The "abominable" project in question came via 1987's mind-bogglingly bad version of Beauty and the Beast.

Now, on paper that adaptation could've been something special — it was just the second English-language film of the fairy tale, and the first to make the bold choice to turn the work into a musical (a full five years before Disney made Beauty and the Beast into one of their most iconic animated features), and producers had cast an intriguing actor in John Savage to play beast to De Mornay's beauty. That intrigue did not translate to the finished product, and the film plays as a half-hearted, rose-colored sort of cut-and-paste version of the original fairy tale; one with less than stellar make-up effects and poorly constructed songs, though De Mornay and Savage should be commended for performing those substandard ballads themselves.

As De Mornay continued to cement movie star status in her professional life, she also found a welcome bit of stability in her personal life when she began a years-long partnership with legendary singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen. After meeting sometime in the '80s, the pair went public with their relationship in the early '90s and remained together for a few years. At one point, they were even engaged to be married. Over that period, the pair were all but inseparable, with De Mornay becoming quite involved with the inner workings of both Cohen's personal and professional lives. She even claimed co-producer credit on a song from Cohen's 1992 album The Future, which is also dedicated to her.

Though the pair eventually went their separate ways, they apparently remained close over the years. De Mornay even offered a few supremely kind words about Cohen after his passing in November 2016, claiming that she "really cannot fathom what life will be like without him in it."

Rebecca De Mornay's career continued to flourish throughout the '90s, but 1997 saw the actor take one of her biggest risks yet when she landed the role of Wendy Torrance in the high profile made-for-television adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. Yes, the same story that had already inspired Stanley Kubrick's legendary big-screen scare fest almost two decades prior, with its iconic performances from Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall.

Obviously, the stakes were high in bringing the three-part miniseries to fruition, particularly as King — himself no particular fan of Kubrick's bone-chilling adaptation — was scripting all three episodes of the adaptation himself. Clocking in at four-and-a-half hours long, those three parts are as faithful — for better or worse — to King's original novel as cinematically possible. As for De Mornay and her on-screen husband/menace Steven Weber, the pair don't quite chew the scenery as emphatically as Duvall and Nicholson, but each finds a way to make the characters their own, and helped make their version of The Shining the only adaptation to meet with the horror master's approval.

Though she's had serious successes on the small screen, Rebecca De Mornay has always oozed big screen charisma. A shrewd bit of casting gave De Mornay a chance to showcase both when she played the role of an aging TV star with a nasty streak in James Mangold's psychological thriller Identity. Conceived as an Agatha Christie-style whodunnit, the film is an ensemble piece (featuring the talents of John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, Clea Duvall, John Hawkes, and Alfred Molina) that simultaneously follows a group of strangers being stalked by a murderer in a seedy, isolated motel. Testimony of a potentially schizophrenic death row inmate may hold the key to the gruesome mystery at hand.

Needless to say, there's a lot to unpack with Identity as the film twists and turns with the unpredictability of a tornado. With some crackerjack scripting from Michael Cooney and an unwavering vision from Mangold, Identity manages to add serious intrigue to an essentially formulaic setup. Over 15 years after it's release, Identity remains a genuinely satisfying mindbender of a film, and one of the great — if often overlooked — psychological thrillers of the 21st century. It also happens to feature one of the best performances of Rebecca De Mornay's career.

Now over four decades into her career, Rebecca De Mornay's professional life has continued to flourish. Still, like so many former starlets before her, choice roles have become a little harder to come by. Nevertheless, De Mornay has made a second career of sorts out of playing a matriarch on screen. In the last 15 years alone, she's played materfamilias in over a dozen projects on big screens and small, including memorable roles in HBO's John From Cincinnati, American Reunion, Mother's Day, American Venus, and Hatfields & McCoys; and all that while playing mom to two daughters of her own.

Of course, De Mornay's most memorable turn as a fictitious mother has been as Dorothy Walker. Yes, that's De Mornay as the venomous, fame-hungry woman who spawned Trish "Patsy" Walker, and played guardian to the one and only Jessica Jones — not that the tough-as-nails detective ever really needed it — on the hit Marvel/Netflix series. Like many of her supporting turns over the years, De Mornay brings a stark bit of duality to the role, helping make a complex human being out of what might otherwise have been a shrill, patently unlikable character.