Fan Rant: Career Killing Crushes (Rachael Leigh Cook)

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http://news.moviefone.com/2010/01/09...lling-crushes/

Rachael first made a splash as the young Jackie O in The House of Yes (1997), and then starred in a genuine hit, She's All That (1999), as the nerdy girl who gets the question: "do you really need to wear those glasses?" Following that was a flurry of five major films in two years, all of which landed with a giant, collective thud. There was Sylvester Stallone's remake of Get Carter, the lame comedy Blow Dry, and the tepid Western Texas Rangers. The paranoid thriller Antitrust may well qualify as a guilty pleasure, at least, and Josie and the Pussycats is definitely a guilty pleasure. I loved that film; I loved the punk/pop music and its cheerful parody of the music business. But of course, everyone else hated it.

I think that small window of releases was Rachael's big chance. She needed to use that time to establish a screen persona, and couldn't do it with those five roles. It has nothing to do with her talent or presence, and certainly she has a unique combination of porcelain beauty as well as an adorable, approachable quality, matched with a tough tomboy matter-of-factness. I think she needed either to work with a great director or to score a big hit, or at least a cult classic. After that I saw disease-of-the-week movie Stateside (2004) at a press screening, which then never opened theatrically. The terrific little movie 11:14 was rescued from video oblivion and given a small theatrical release in 2005. And she appeared in Nancy Drew (2007), and that's about it. Fortunately she works a lot, and her IMDB resume has more than 60 films and TV shows on it over the course of 15 years.

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http://www.nickiswift.com/38926/holl...&utm_content=5

Back in the early 2000s, Rachael Leigh Cook was poised for greatness. First making her screen debut in a terrifying, but memorable anti-drug PSA, and starring shortly thereafter in She's All That, a.k.a. the cutest pre-Y2K teen comedy on earth. It should have been smooth sailing to stardom from there. But instead of taking her rightful place on the A-list, Cook just kind of… disappeared. Why did she drop off the radar? Looking back at her career, it all starts to make sense.

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