jacob's crackers

Here's a short list, which I choose to entitle, pithily, Lady Actors Who I Saw In A Film I Really Liked And Additionally Thought They Were Very Attractive In A Quirky And Feisty Kind Of Way Whereupon Clearly Absolutely No-One Agreed With Me Because They Were Pretty Much Never In Anything Else Of Any Consequence Ever Again. Here goes:

• Kim Greist as Jill in Terry Gilliam's Brazil in 1985. She was also in Manhunter a year or so later as Will Graham's wife, and then, nada.
• Laura San Giacomo as the fantastically sexy Cynthia in sex, lies and videotape in 1989. She played Julia Roberts' prostitutional mentor in Pretty Woman the following year, and, thereafter, zip.
• Elizabeth Peña as Jezzie in Jacob's Ladder in 1990. Apparently she was the voice of Mirage (the blond lady in this clip) in The Incredibles, but, that aside, bupkis. 

Jacob's Ladder, incidentally, in addition to being a genuinely weird and creepy movie, is a filmic embodiment of a trope used occasionally in fiction (as discussed briefly in this book review) - a narrative pretty nearly the entirety of which turns out to be the thoughts of someone dying, the actual dying bits of which tend to bookend the imagined bits. It was being familiar with Jacob's Ladder that enabled me to nod sagely to myself about ten minutes into The Sixth Sense and say: aye aye, I can see where this is going. Granted, that was slightly different in that the Bruce Willis character is already dead and spends most of the film as a ghost, but I clocked the basic plot premise early on. I'm not saying that makes me a genius or anything, but there it is. Even allowing for that I thought The Sixth Sense was OK; it was the follow-up Unbreakable which was the one that was so utterly terrible as to put me off ever seeing an M. Night Shyamalan film ever again.

Back to the death thing, the canonical example of this (and the apparent inspiration for Jacob's Ladder) is Ambrose Bierce's short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which was made into a short film in 1962, later broadcast as an episode of The Twilight Zone, the entirety of which appears (I haven't watched the whole thing) to be available here.