Born Jennifer Leigh (or Lee) Morrow on February 5, 1962, Los Angeles, CA. Jennifer is the daughter of the late actor Vic Morrow and scriptwriter Barbara Turner, who split when Jennifer was quite young.  Known for his bad temper and roles that used that disposition to an advantage, Vic Morrow died during the July, 1982 filming of Twilight Zone the Movie when a failed helicopter stunt killed Morrow and two children. Apparently as a father, Morrow favored his daughter Carrie over Jennifer, but he stated that he thought Jennifer's work in Best Little Girl
in the World was praiseworthy.

"It was a weird situation. He never called me, I never called him...I respect Vic as an actor. I just don't know him. He's a stranger," says Leigh.

Jennifer always had an uneasy relationship with her father, so when she changed her name,
for professional reasons, to Jennifer Jason Leigh, Morrow seems to have taken it as a personal affront and in his will, published after his death, left Jennifer a paltry $100. The true reason for the name change was to distance herself slightly from Morrow, not wanting to be seen as trading on
a famous name, and wanting to be judged in her own right rather than as the daughter of a well-known actor-father. So, she dropped her surname and inserted 'Jason' in tribute to long-time family friend Jason Robards Jr. who was like an uncle to her in her younger years.
 

"She's just so smart. Of course, a daughter always wants to please her mother, always."
  Jennifer comments on her mother.
 

Leigh portrayed yet another unhinged character in Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female (1992). As Heddie, Leigh transformed herself from a frowzy seemingly supportive woman into the sleek "roommate from hell" who attempts to overtake Bridget Fonda's identity. She followed with the small role of a woman who works as a phone sex operator from her home in Robert Altman's episodic Short Cuts (1993). In the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Leigh essayed an award-winning journalist who goes undercover and romances the new president of an industrial company. Some critics faulted Leigh's use of Katharine Hepburn-inspired accent while others compared her work with that of such 1940s stars as Rosalind Russell and Barbara Stanwyck. Her eccentric yet powerful portrayal of writer Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph's
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) won her citations as the year's best actress from the National Society of Film Critics and the Chicago Film Critics Association. Her performance was not without controversy; some found her accent indecipherable, yet Leigh insists that she studied audio recordings of Parker and patterned her speech on them. Leigh lists Dorothy Parker as her current favorite poet and writer.

In 1995, Leigh again displayed her versatility, first in Dolores Claiborne as the title character's haunted careerist daughter and then as a drug-addicted singer wannabe in Georgia where her character was scripted by her mother, Barbara Turner, and was based in part on Leigh's older sister Carrie. Again, critics were divided over her emotionally vivid depiction of a character constantly living on the edge. Leigh clearly relishes difficult, unglamorous roles ("sluts and nuts" as critic Rex Reed described them) and inhabits them with conviction. She starved herself down to 86 pounds for both The Best Little Girl in the World and Georgia and is well-known for the intensive research she does on each of her characterizations.

Jennifer has had relationships with actors David Dukes, Bruno Kirby, Eric Stoltz, and student director, Steve Shainberg. She's still single and lives in her Manhattan apartment, but has been seriously involved with one man for the past three or four years.

"I'm in a relationship that I've been having for a number of years now. He is not an
actor and I think that is why it has worked this long."
Jennifer wants to keep this one private.
 

"My agent brought me the script. I was very excited when I saw it, so I had two friends who were also Cronenberg freaky fans come over to my house and we just read it out loud together and loved it.  I was very passionate about doing this film, so I met with Cronenberg the next day and told him I would do it."

"I have a Mac and I just love my computer and spend a lot of time on it working on it not just for research but for art projects with PhotoShop and Quark and Illustrator. I have a scanner and a digital camera. I love it. I do a lot of very intense collages and flyers for my girlfriend's band and calendars for my mother. It can completely take you over. You can work on a single project for days and day and days.  You just don't know where the time went and that is a lot like what happens in eXistenZ.  I played some games to research the area, but there is no equation. There is no game that is like what we have
in the film.  I don't really like most videogames. I get bored by them. I like instant gratification in games like Tekken and the martial arts games.  I appreciate the beautiful pictures and graphics, but I get bored by the games. I don't want to have to figure anything out."

"I saw The Matrix and loved the fight scenes...I love martial arts, but that film is very futuristic looking and techno.  This film is more organic and from an unconscious place.
It's much more dreamy and disturbing, I think.  All the effects for eXistenZ were in the script. They are very visceral and real...not CGI. I got to see everything and take the pod home and get used to feeling it. I have it on my coffee table. I wanted it to be second nature to me, how it plugs in and how to handle it and how to play in the game.  Cronenberg's special effects are great because you can touch them and you don't have to work imagining something that will be put in later.  I've never done one of those films."

"The film is quite complex because you have three main characters working on three levels all the time. It was quite a challenge, but there are little secrets given out all through the movie so by the end you have everything you need to know to figure it out."

'The role was hard because I am not extroverted like my character and in the beginning of the film when she has to take control of the meeting in front of a lot of people she does not know it is frightening. It was hard for me. This kind of thing for me is difficult. Just what we are doing now is hard. It's very unnatural for me to talk about myself and about my approach to my work.  When I am acting I'm not shy because when I am acting I am another person like Allegra, and you don't have to take responsibility for what the characters do and you can expose parts of yourself that only you know what they are and you can invest in them and start to understand parts of yourself where other people can watch what you do and can grasp something and explore something in a very deep way but maybe not the way you would do in your own life."

"Every director is different and I have been lucky to work with some that I truly admired. Cronenberg has just such an amazing imagination. He's really remarkable.
His movies are so unique and so his own. As a person he is so easy going and so grounded and incredibly articulate and bright.  I feel that I could ask David Cronenberg any question about anything and he would know the answer. He's a really family man and a l ot of his family works on his movies and so does his crew, who have worked with him for years and it's like a big family. It's a great atmosphere to be on his set except for the days we shot the restaurant scene. It really smelled bad with all the fish and other food rotting under the lights. I really got nauseous.  Also the mutant creatures were so real it got to me. "

Before shooting eXistenZ, Jennifer had a filmed a cameo part for Eyes Wide Shut. When director Stanley Kubrick wanted to re-shoots her scenes do to script changes, Jennifer was shooting eXistenZ unavailable for the two weeks of the re-shoot. Subsequently, Jennifer's entire part was then reshot with another actress.

But, I did work with Kubick, that's the thing - I did! Unfortunately I won't ultimately get to be in the movie, but I did do it, and I'm glad about that. It was a huge deal to me and I can't believe that he's gone.  It's still such a great shock that he's gone. He was so young and did so much with his life and had so much more to give that we'll never get. He was also very open and...he was...a mensch. That's how I would describe him, a real mensch.
He was so sweet and knowing. The crews he used were very small and it was a timeless shoot...like being through the looking glass when you were working with him.  When you were acting for him it was like there was all the time in the world.  It was a shame that I couldn't do the reshoot. He need those two weeks and I was already shooting eXistenZ and just couldn't get away.  We talked on the phone and he was making changes and adding a scene and needed those particular two weeks and it also involved Tom Cruise' schedule and that was it."

The Future

"My next movie project is called Beautiful View and will be written by my mother, who is going to direct it, too - a first for her. It's a suspense thriller, and it concerns the tale of an enigmatic chambermaid played by me in a fancy Northern California hotel who puts herself in danger when she becomes obsessed with one of the hotel’s guests".

As with 1995's Georgia, Barbara Turner created the role specifically for Jennifer. Shooting will begin this Fall at a hotel on the Pacific Coast with a reported budget of $10 million.

             1981 EYES OF A STRANGER performer
             1982 FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH performer
             1982 WRONG IS RIGHT performer
             1983 EASY MONEY performer
             1984 GRANDVIEW, U.S.A. performer
             1985 FLESH + BLOOD/ ROSE & THE SWORD performer
             1986 THE HITCHER performer
             1986 THE MEN'S CLUB performer
             1987 SISTER, SISTER performer
             1987 UNDER COVER performer
             1988 HEART OF MIDNIGHT performer
             1989 THE BIG PICTURE performer
             1989 LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN performer
             1990 MIAMI BLUES performer
             1991 BACKDRAFT performer
             1991 CROOKED HEARTS performer
             1991 RUSH performer
             1992 THE PROM performer
             1992 SINGLE WHITE FEMALE performer
             1993 SHORT CUTS performer
             1994 THE HUDSUCKER PROXY performer
             1994 MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE performer
             1995 DOLORES CLAIBORNE performer
             1995 GEORGIA performer/producer
             1996 KANSAS CITY performer
             1996 BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA performer
             1997 A THOUSAND ACRES performer
             1997 WASHINGTON SQUARE performer
             1997 EYES WIDE SHUT cameo performance deleted
             1999 EXISTENZ performer