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This hyperkinetic blond actress with the crooked smile and penchant for provocative wardrobe, a former Andy Warhol confrere and disciple of Lee Strasberg (who taught at the Actors' Studio), got her 15 minutes of fame as the Academy Award-nominated star of Anna (1987), in which she played a failed Czech actress struggling in New York. Long before that, she'd won supporting roles in a number of high-profile filmsincluding The Sting, The Way We Were (both 1973), A Star Is Born (1976), and Private Benjamin (1980), The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981)-and a slew of unsuccessful movies, many of them exploitative, low-budget, avant-garde turkeys, such as Coming Apart, Futz (both 1969), The Young Nurses (1973), Big Bad Mama (1974), Pipe Dreams (1976), Talking Walls (1982), and Love Letters (1983). Despite her personal success in Anna (a fine performance), Kirkland was unable to land decent follow-up roles in major movies; she starred instead in a string of minor films, some of which went straight to videotape: White Hot (1988), Best of the Best, Cold Feet (both 1989), Paint It Black, Two Evil Eyes, Revenge (all 1990, the last a high-profile film that bombed), and In the Heat of Passion (1992, a semipornographic "erotic thriller"). She fared much better on TV, winning juicy supporting roles in a number of made-for-TV movies and appearing in several episodes of "Roseanne." Kirkland, probably the only Academy Award nominee who was a regular habitue of "The Joe Franklin Show," also had a bit role in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). In 1992, she acted in and coexecutive produced Paper Hearts
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