- Elizabeth Berkley, Showgirls, 1994. Scenarist Joe Eszterhas interviewed 50-plus exotic dancers and, aided by Hawaiian weed, came up with All About Eve in Vegas. And Pamela Anderson, Angelina Jolie, Denise Richards, Charlize Theron and the inevitable unknown, Vanessa Marcil (too shy for nudity) fled his sexy heroine, Nomi Malone.Jenny McCarthy was favourite, except she couldn’t dance. Producer Charles Evans then found Elizabeth Berkley, from Saved by the Bell. In one of its 2018 It Happened in Hollywood podcasts, Hollywood Reporter took unseemly delight in reporting she agreed to audition in his New York hotel room – even adding that “after being blown away by her performance,” he convinced Paul Verhoeven to give her a shot. Unable to land his dream mix of Madonna and Drew Barrymore as the 90s Bette Davis and Anne Baxter,the Dutch director decided to create his own star. He failed – and ruined Berkley’s career. “If somebody has to be blamed, it should be me because I asked Elizabeth to be abrupt in that way because her character had a history of drug abuse, so I tried to express that through her abruptness.” So Richards won Verhoven’s next flop,Starship Troopers, 1997, and not Berkley. She never made another A-List film since Woody Allen’s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion in 2001, yet survived on TV: CSI: Miami, Law & Order, The L Word.
- Portia De Rossi, Ally McBeal, TV, 1998-2002. Creator-producer-writer (of 112 epsiodes) David E Kelly wanted Marcil as Nelle Porter. Too late! She’d already signed for Beverly Hills 90210, 1998-200 – 39 episodes as opposed yo Ally’s 89. TV kept Marcil busy: Las Vegas, Lipstick Jungle, Without A Trace and 361 chapters of General Hospital, 1992-2015. Prince penned wrote his 1994 hit, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, about her. Leaving scant time for movies like…
- 3. – Jennifer Esposito, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, 1998. She read for Nancy, but lost out to Esposito in what Chicago critic Roger Ebert said assembled all “the building blocks of idiot-proof slasher movies: Stings, Snicker-Snacks, false alarms and point-of-view baits-and-switches.” The Californian Vanessas is a great-granddaughter of the celebrated French mime artist, Marcel Marceau.
Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls: 3