Gold Rush

SPOTLIGHT

as an actress Jennifer Jason Leigh has taken so many walks on the wild side, it's a wonder her ankles don't wobble. She's hauled her booty around the block and back. After dieting down to eightysix pounds to play an anorectic teenager in the telefilm The Best Little Girl in the World (talk about hunger artists!), she proceeded to lose her cherry in the few awkward moments it took to stare at the ceiling in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. From then on, it was studded collars, cinched waists, and spike heels. She played a prostitute in The Men's Club, a call girl in Miami Blues, and a streetwalker in Last Exit to Brooklyn, where she endured a horrific gang bang, emerging as a ravaged angel. "It's not my body up there," she explains. It's an amazing facsimile.

Dipping into her kinky bag of tricks helped win Leigh the New York Film Critics Circle's best-supporting-actress award, but now she's spending some quality time upright. She plays Characters Searching for Themselves in Crooked Hearts and Backdraft. After this double dose of normalcy, she'll soon be crouching again to cope with the gut check of Rush. Directed by Lili Zanuck, Rush is based on Kim Wozencraft's rugged, ragged novel about an undercover narc who becomes a druggie. "It's an examination of the dark side," says Leigh, who turns twenty-nine next month. Dark side, wild side—it's all the same prowl. Without wallowing in masochism, Jennifer Jason Leigh shows the street cost of being a material girl.

JAMES WOLCOTT