Jennifer Tilly
Jennifer Tilly is an actor, born 1958.
Tilly's voice arrived before she did. That breathy, high, faintly cartoonish delivery got her cast through the 1980s as the dim girlfriend, and the shape of her career ever since has been the pleasure of watching her wear it as a disguise. Bullets Over Broadway in 1994 made the joke explicit: Olive Neal is a gangster's girlfriend with no talent and total confidence, and it brought Tilly an Academy Award nomination.
Two years later she played Violet opposite Gina Gershon's Corky in Bound, and it is still the best evidence of what she can do. Violet is the femme fatale of a tight, nasty Wachowski crime film, and Tilly performs her as a woman deliberately playing the exact character everyone assumes Jennifer Tilly to be. Nothing in her filmography is smarter.
Since then she has run three careers at once. She is a voice actress, Celia in Monsters, Inc. and Bonnie Swanson on Family Guy for a quarter of a century. She is the queen of a horror franchise, playing Tiffany Valentine from Bride of Chucky through the television series, including Seed of Chucky, where she also plays a fictional version of herself as a fading Oscar nominee. And she is a professional poker player, which explains rather more about the acting than it sounds like it should.
Movies (58)
- Monsters, Inc. (2001)
- Bound (1996)
- Liar Liar (1997)
- Stuart Little (1999)
- Bride of Chucky (1998)
- Home on the Range (2004)
- Seed of Chucky (2004)
- Curse of Chucky (2013)
- The Getaway (1994)
- Cult of Chucky (2017)
- A Cinderella Story: If the Shoe Fits (2016)
- The Doors (1991)
- The Haunted Mansion (2003)
- The Crew (2000)
- Embrace of the Vampire (1995)
- Unity (2015)
- Bartok the Magnificent (1999)
- Bullets Over Broadway (1994)
- The Wrong Guy (1997)
- The Muse (1999)
- High Spirits (1988)
- Second Best (2004)
- Made in America (1993)
- Bella Mafia (1997)
- House Arrest (1996)
- Play It to the Bone (1999)
- El padrino: The Latin Godfather (2004)
- Tideland (2005)
- Empire of Silver (2009)
- An American Girl: Chrissa Stands Strong (2009)
TV (13)
- Family Guy (1999)
- Chucky (2021)
- The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (2010)
- School Spirits (2023)
- Monsters at Work (2021)
- Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja (2012)
- It's Garry Shandling's Show (1986)
- Calls (2021)
- The Chris Isaak Show (2001)
- Bee and PuppyCat (2022)
- Out of Practice (2005)
- Gun (1997)
- Pigs Next Door (2000)
Where to start with Jennifer Tilly
Bound is the one. It is a lean, stylish crime picture, and Violet is the performance everything else about her should be judged against: she uses the voice as bait and the film knows exactly what it is doing with the audience's assumptions.
Then Bullets Over Broadway for the Oscar-nominated comic version of the same instrument, all timing and no shame. The Chucky films are their own long argument. Bride of Chucky is where Tiffany arrives fully formed, Seed of Chucky is the strangest thing she has ever agreed to do, and the Chucky series is the most sustained work of her later career. For the family shelf, Monsters, Inc. gets a few minutes of screen time and a decade of quotes out of her. The Fabulous Baker Boys is the early one worth digging out, a hopeless audition that walks off with a whole scene.