Cinemaura
Today
Lili Taylor is the kind of actress who makes you forget you are watching a performance. If you grew up in the late eighties and nineties, you have seen her face, maybe in Mystic Pizza or Say Anything, maybe screaming through The Conjuring years later. But ask most people to name her best work and they go quiet. That is exactly why she is our second Acteaur Collection spotlight. She has spent almost four decades choosing the honest role over the easy one, and she deserves to be celebrated for it.
She was born on February 20, 1967, in Glencoe, Illinois, just north of Chicago, the fifth of six children. Her father ran a hardware store and her mother was an artist. She graduated from New Trier High School in 1985, studied at The Theatre School at DePaul University and trained at the Piven Theatre Workshop. Small supporting parts in Mystic Pizza (1988) and Say Anything (1989) got her noticed, and then the nineties turned her into one of the key faces of American independent cinema.
The role I keep coming back to is Rose in Dogfight (1991), directed by Nancy Savoca. It is San Francisco, the night before President Kennedy is assassinated, and a young Marine played by River Phoenix brings a shy waitress to a cruel party where the men compete to bring the least attractive date. It sounds like a hard film, and parts of it are. But Taylor turns Rose into someone so open, so funny and so wounded that the movie becomes a love story about seeing a person for who they truly are. The critic Danny Peary even argued in his book Alternate Oscars that she deserved the Best Actress Oscar for it. I agree with him.
She reunited with Savoca for Household Saints (1993) and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female. That same year she worked with Robert Altman in Short Cuts. In The Addiction (1995), Abel Ferrara cast her as a philosophy student who becomes a vampire, and she earned another Spirit nomination. Then came I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), where she played Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Warhol, and received a Special Recognition award at the Sundance Film Festival. She is a performer who never asks us to like her characters. She asks us to understand them, and that is much braver.
Hollywood noticed too. She appeared in Born on the Fourth of July, Rudy, Ransom, High Fidelity and Public Enemies, where she played Sheriff Lillian Holley opposite Johnny Depp's John Dillinger. A whole new generation met her as the haunted mother Carolyn Perron in The Conjuring (2013). On television she earned three Emmy nominations: for The X-Files, for her role as Lisa on Six Feet Under, and as the grieving mother Anne Blaine in American Crime. She is also set to play Mags in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which is a lovely reason for younger audiences to look back at everything she did before.
What moves me most is how she lives beyond the screen. She loves birds, sits on the boards of the National Audubon Society and the American Birding Association, and in 2025 published a book of essays, Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing. Noticing is the perfect word for her. She notices people, and she makes us notice the ones movies usually overlook.
If you are new to her work, start with Dogfight. In the US it is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play and Fandango at Home. Then try I Shot Andy Warhol for her fearless side, Household Saints for something strange and tender, and The Conjuring if you want to see her hold a big studio horror film together. Lili Taylor has been quietly giving us gold since the eighties. This week, the Acteaur Collection is about giving some of it back.
