The Return of Juliette Lewis

The once-Oscar-nominated young actress talks about spinning out on drugs and slowly finding her way back to acting with director Garry Marshall in The Other Sister.

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I'm sitting in a darkened screening room, and something unusual is happening. I'm watching an old-fashioned love story and I'm not looking at my watch. On the contrary, I'm laughing, I'm crying, I'm rooting for two characters to get together. Mind you, this is no Hungarian film with a cuddly kid and lots of train stations. This is a big-studio film by Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall that's burdened with the innocuous title The Other Sister. But get past the title and the logy opening scenes and you discover that what Marshall and his cowriter, Bob Brunner, have done is taken your basic TV-movie ingredients (two mentally handicapped young adults who fall in love, plus the hard-assed mom who doesn't think the man worthy of her daughter) and ladled in loads of laughs and two actors who give Oscar-worthy performances.

Giovanni Ribisi is one of the leads. The other is ... Juliette Lewis. As I watch Lewis bring forth an honest, gentle, daring, completely convincing performance, I try to think when I last saw this spindly, wide-eyed actress on-screen. I can't remember. I certainly remember the first time I saw her. She played Nick Nolte's nymphet daughter in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear. The film featured a kinky, thumb-sucking scene with Robert De Niro and brought Lewis (at age 18) an Oscar nomination.

The next day, I hotfoot it to my local video store and try to pick up Lewis's trail. As I sift through the Lewis oeuvre, I find her in an astonishing array of edgy, ultrahip and too-hip films, most of which sport brand-name directors and big-time costars. Kalifornia, through which Lewis ad-libbed with Brad Pitt. Husbands and Wives with Woody. Oliver Stone's acid-driven Natural Born Killers with the other Woody. What's Eating Gilbert Grape with Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio. Kathryn Bigelow's futuristic Strange Days, which features Lewis crooning P.J. Harvey's "Rid of Me." The vampire tale From Dusk Till Dawn with George Clooney. That's quite a run. Then there's 1996's Terms of Endearment sequel The Evening Star with Shirley MacLaine. Right after which, Lewis immediately fell off the radar screen. I don't mean she went off and did some low-budget indie pics or straight-to-video losers. I'm talking nothing. Kaput. Out of circulation

Where has Juliette Lewis been? How did she find her way back from wherever she was? These are the questions percolating when, on a balmy Los Angeles afternoon, I journey toward a strip-mall deli deep in the heart of Hollywood. A few doors away is a coffeehouse called the I Bourgeois Pig. Across the street is the manorial Scientology Celebrity Center, around which pedals a uniformed security guard who presumably shoos away nomadic non-celebrities. Shortly after I arrive, Lewis struts in, greets the owner (whom she knows) and hurries toward my table. Her hair (which has undergone many incarnations, most notably the cornrows she sported one year at the Oscars) is reddish brown and straight. Her long legs are made even longer by three-inch heels. In her tight jeans and clingy, black Motor City T-shirt she's as sleek as a greyhound. "This is my rock-and-roll attire," she tells me. On her wrist is a tattoo of the cartoon "My Melody" bunny. On her earrings dangle bird feathers.

"Thank you for seeing The Other Sister," she says.

"I was unprepared for how good it was," I say.

"Oh, that's nice," she purrs dreamily. "Disney is still trying to figure out how to market it." The studio is obviously jazzed about it, though, since Michael Eisner himself showed up at a test screening out in the boondocks.

We both order chicken soup. The doughy-armed waitress tells us there's a $10 minimum at lunch, and we're short. Lewis calms her by ordering a double cappuccino.

Juliette Lewis has been acting professionally for half her life. She is now 25. This is the first interview she's done in four years, and she's understandably a little skittish. She eyes everyone who ambles by our booth, and some guys check her out as well. She says that despite her long hiatus, she may be even more recognizable now because of cable and video. Several times during our chat she'll stop in the middle of a sentence, look around and ask me if she's talking too loudly. At other times she'll fret about her syntax or her inability to find the right word.

But she's perfectly forthright about her employment gap. When I mention that the most recent article I could find about her concerned not a movie but the sale of her Hollywood Hills home for $929,000 in 1996, she says, "I totally self-destructed with drugs. On the set of The Evening Star I was a complete mess. I was late, apathetic and miserable. In some I scenes my eyes are completely dead."

Take a look at the film--she's right about that. In the story, her character has boyfriend troubles, and--talk about an eerie coincidence--she overdoses on pills. After shooting The Evening Star, Lewis fled California, went to Florida and moved in with her mother. "All my pride was gone," she says. "I had become this little meek creature. I didn't want to act anymore. I wanted to change my name and become a waitress."

These are stunning admissions from a formerly outspoken and headstrong actress who from a very early age seemed to know exactly where she was going and how to get there. And get there she had. Indeed, so convincing were Lewis and costar Woody Harrelson as Oliver Stone's reckless and ruthless natural born killers that the movie allegedly inspired some real-life mayhem, prompting John Grisham to lambaste Stone in the pages of Vanity Fair and inspiring legions of young, rebellious fans to idolize Lewis. Ironically, these days Natural Born Killers makes Lewis cringe. She admits that the raw power and the technical virtuosity that Stone brought to the film are impressive, but says, "All I did in that movie was yell. I was watching it the other night, and I'm like, 'Shut up, you idiot.' That movie doesn't make me feel good."

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