A fearless actress who always managed to balance her film career with her love for music and live performing, Juliette Lewis turns 50 today.
Versatile is almost not a big enough term to describe her career and her choices. Always drawn to darker characters, her talent attracted an array of mega-directors who wanted to cast her in their movies.
Born in Los Angeles to a graphic designer mother and an actor father, she knew at six that she wanted to go into showbusiness, had her first acting role at 12 and was 16 when she played opposite Brad Pitt in Too Young to Die (1990). It was this film that got the attention of Martin Scorsese who cast her in Cape Fear, co-starring Robert De Niro. The performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
She continued to act in the most critically acclaimed films, from Husbands and Wives (1992) and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) to Natural Born Killers (1994), in cult hits like From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and in comedies like The Other Sister (1999) and Old School (2003). Lewis was and excellent in every one of them.
As much as she enjoys acting, her true love was and always will be music. She has toured the world and has a big following as a musician. She first fronted the rock band Juliette Lewis and the Licks from 2003 to 2009, and subsequently formed another, The New Romantiques, and released her album “Terra Incognita”, before reuniting the Licks in the mid-2010s. “I was always a musician who happened to get started in acting first”, she told me in a TV-interview.

Called ‘the wild child’, a moniker she finds boring, she made some extra money in between films with odd jobs: “I was a barrel racer and won third place, western riding. I was very equestrian as a young girl, and people wouldn’t know that because they always put the wild stamp on me. That’s part of my wild is that I rode horses bareback, we set up jumps in my backyard. As far as jobs, I’ve done all kinds of wild things for my job, like l learned street fighting and Roller Derby”, she said to the HFPA.
As much as she enjoyed being a bit of a daredevil, she continued to says that age has mellowed her: “It’s sad how fear can develop. I can have a fearlessness in my work and a sense of adventure. But now we understand consequences. When you’re younger you’re not thinking about consequences. I had to ride in a movie but now I’m too respectful of horses. Like, I shouldn’t be on you. You’re your own creature. I should leave you alone.”
She loves her directors and would work with any of them again and again, from Quentin Tarantino to Scorsese and Oliver Stone, Alexander Payne and Spike Jonze, Kathryn Bigelow and Lasse Hallström. She credits Scorsese for making her more fearless in her choices and trusting her instincts. It is not lost on her that she had the privilege to work with so many award-winning filmmakers: “They’re people that allow for adventure in the work.”
Personally, she is proud of her own evolution and that she has learned to break away from any addiction to fame and its trappings as well as non-stop career-building: “It’s important to break that cycle and strengthen your relationships with friends, family, with other cultures. Travel is hugely important, and I’ve done all those things.
Some time ago, she read a quote: “Be normal and practical in your life so that you can be dangerous and fearless in your work.” And she has certainly always lived by that.