Laura San Giacomo
Laura San Giacomo is an actor, born 1962.
The voice arrives before she does: low, smoky, faintly amused, a New Jersey instrument that can make a polite sentence sound like a dare. It got her noticed at once. Her breakthrough was Cynthia in sex, lies, and videotape, the sister who talks to a camera with unnerving frankness, and it won her the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female.
Hollywood's response was to cast her as the friend. Kit De Luca in Pretty Woman is the streetwise roommate, a small part played with enough grit to survive a very sweet film. Crazy Cora in Quigley Down Under gave her more room and a harder edge. Then The Stand cast her as Nadine Cross, and Just Shoot Me! kept her in prime time from 1997 to 2003 as Maya Gallo, the serious journalist stranded at a fashion magazine. That turned out to be a natural fit, because she is funniest when the joke is that she refuses to find anything funny.
Since then the work has been steady and mostly supporting, trading on dryness and authority: Rhetta Rodriguez on Saving Grace, Dr. Grace Confalone on NCIS, an arc on Barry as Annie Eisner. She is a BAFTA and two-time Golden Globe nominee. She also voiced Fox in the animated Gargoyles, which a certain generation will insist is the definitive use of that voice, and she narrates the true-crime series Snapped, which is the same instrument doing a completely different job.
Movies (14)
TV (11)
Where to start with Laura San Giacomo
Everything worth knowing is in sex, lies, and videotape. Cynthia is written as the disruptive sister and San Giacomo plays her as the only person in the film enjoying herself, which is what makes the rest of it land. Watch that, then Pretty Woman purely to see how much she gets out of a sidekick role that offers her almost nothing on paper.
Quigley Down Under is the underrated one, a western that hands her a damaged, difficult part and lets her keep her dignity inside it.
On television, Just Shoot Me! used her properly and holds up better than its reputation, while The Stand is early proof she can do menace. Completists should find Gargoyles for the Fox voice and Barry, where a handful of late scenes show she can still take the air out of a room.