Leelee Sobieski

The Face Hollywood Wanted to Clone

A talent scout discovered her in the cafeteria of her high school in New York in the mid-1990s. Leelee Sobieski wasn't looking to become an actress, but her physical resemblance to Helen Hunt and a gaze unusual for her age immediately opened the doors of major studios to her.

In 1997, she made her commercial film debut in Jungle 2 Jungle. Just one year later, she joined the cast of Deep Impact, and the film grossed $349 million worldwide. That figure put her permanently on the radar of the industry's most demanding directors.

Stanley Kubrick cast her in Eyes Wide Shut during 1999. It was a brief role at the Rainbow costume shop, but her presence was so unsettling that it at times overshadowed the leading stars. Sobieski had a strange ability to seem like an adult trapped in a teenager's body.

Nobody made her leave.

Joan's Armor and the Weight of the Industry

In 1999, she starred in the miniseries Joan of Arc and earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations at just seventeen years old. Critics compared her to the great ladies of classic cinema for her dramatic restraint. But the pressure of major projects began to take its toll shortly afterward.

She shot The Glass House in 2001 and Joy Ride that same year. They were commercial thrillers that did well at the box office but pulled her away from the art-house films she truly cared about. Sobieski always preferred small shoots and edgy stories over the red carpets of Los Angeles.

The industry is a strange place for a teenager.

In 2006 she appeared in The Wicker Man alongside Nicolas Cage, and the film was panned by specialized critics. That failure, along with low-budget productions such as In the Name of the King in 2007, marked a change in her personal priorities. Film stopped being the center of her life.

The Canvas Replaces Celluloid

In 2009 she married designer Adam Kimmel. From that point on, her on-screen appearances became rare, and her interest in visual arts began to grow. So she voluntarily retired from acting to devote herself full-time to painting and sculpture.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2012 she shot her last film, The Last Film Festival, though its release was delayed by several years due to post-production problems. Since then, she has signed her works as Leelee Kimmel so that her past fame does not affect how people perceive her art. In 2018, she held her first solo exhibition, titled Channels, at the Journal gallery in New York.

Her paintings tend to be abstract and large-scale, with a dense visual impact. In 2019, she presented an exhibition at the Simon Lee gallery in London titled Wormhole. The artist lives in New York with her two children and has no intention of reading another film script. Her last credited feature film appearance dates to 2012.