What will you do when a teen star becomes an adult and realizes that the spotlight is the only thing that is not fitting any more?
To most cinema fans, Leelee Sobieski remains solidly stuck in late-1990s film: intelligent, consistent in Deep Impact, and brash in Never Been Kissed and the youthful actor holding her own with the heavyweight casts. She was a quick and frequent worker, nesting credits as most performers have not yet opened their books in college, and she was early the recipient of serious awards. Her career made it when Deep Impact earned more than three hundred and forty-nine million dollars across the globe, and she was nominated as both an Emmy and a Golden Globe nominee as Joan of Arc when she was still a teenager.
Paperwise, the path appeared to be easy, high-profile projects, large directors, and straight up. Off camera, Sobieski shared a different account of that- a situation that required her to deal with the pressures of acting particularly as she moved out of the childhood roles but she felt uneasy and could not ignore it. In 2012, she said to IGN, “It’s been happening for a while now… But I don’t notice,” meaning such attention of the public as had become more of background noise than of fuel. In the same year, she further clarified the reason behind why the industry was increasingly a poor fit.
In an interview with Vogue in 2012, Ninety percent of acting roles involve so much relations stuff with other people, and I don’t want to do that. The remark was a stop, rather than a publicity patter, especially since the young actresses are so frequently pushed to be “mature” on screen as a sign of earnestness. She elaborated on that awkwardness in 2018, during an interview with AnOther in 2018, when she said that she would “cry every time I had to kiss somebody,” that intimate scenes made her feel cheap. She also doubted the bigger picture surrounding child actors: “I don’t know why it’s legal for a child to act. It’s a crazy double standard, and that’s super weird for me,” adding, “Now that the MeToo movement has come forward, people understand more that it’s pretty gross and uncomfortable.”
By 2012, she was already moving out of the way and she used this to mean leaving a whole eco system and not a hiatus. “I don’t do movie stuff anymore. I am totally an outsider. Just a mom and an outsider,” she said to Us Weekly in the same year. Motherhood was included in the boundary-setting, but not the exclusive element. Sobieski has later made similar statements about acting as draining personal experience, how role to role transition could make life process seem like acting, adopted, and used until it ceased to be her own.
It was during the following years that the public witnessed not so much of “Leelee Sobieski,” but of a reserved individual, who constructed the second identity. She started showing visual art and adopted a name Leelee Kimmel in 1994 (the maiden name of her husband Adam Kimmel, a fashion designer) in 2010. As her work moved the audience off the theaters and onto the gallery walls, her visibility had reduced to what she wanted to share, which were paintings, sculpture and studio life. It was a re-introduction on different conditions less to be observed, more to create something, which did not entail to be a different person.
