She is also the co-writer and co-director of the film The Anniversary Party, made with fellow actor Alan Cumming. Leigh is known for her emotionally raw and often sexually explicit portrayals of vulnerable and damaged women, and for her intensive method inspired research into her roles. Leigh’s birth name was Jennifer Leigh Morrow. Leigh also has a half-sister actress Mina Badie, from her mother’s marriage, who acted alongside Leigh in The Anniversary Party. She made her big screen debut playing a blind, deaf, and mute rape victim in the 1981 slasher film Eyes of a Stranger.

Leigh also has a half-sister actress Mina Badie, from her mother’s marriage, who acted alongside Leigh in The Anniversary Party. At 14, she attended Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center in Loch Sheldrake, New York summer acting workshops given by Lee Strasberg and landed a role in the movie The Young Runaways (1978). I’m not good at that, and I’m not interested in that.” Leigh found more success in the gritty crime drama Rush (1991), in which she portrayed an undercover narcotics policewoman who becomes a junkie in the line of duty in and falls in love with her partner Jason Patric. Leigh took her first lead role as the writer and critic Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph’s film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). For the role, Leigh dropped to 90 pounds (41 kg) and sang all her songs live, including a rambling 8½-minute version of Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back” performed as her character is under the influence of alcohol and drugs. in 1993, she joined the ensemble cast of Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, playing a phone-sex operator who diapers her newborn baby while talking to clients. Leigh reportedly interviewed phone sex operators as part of her research for the role, and wrote most of her own dialogue for the phone sex scenes. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle commented that “As the downtrodden, sexy, trusting and quietly funny prostitute, Leigh is, of course, in her element”.