For four seasons on NBC, Melissa Leo played Kay Howard on Homicide: Life on the Street and sustained one of the most compellingly unglamorous characterizations in the history of American network TV. A mess of exposed Hooksexup endings and untamed brick-red hair, Howard was a capable, dedicated detective shackled to a self-destructing partner (Daniel Baldwin) and a locker-room professional atmosphere that demanded that she keep her softer feelings under wraps as part of her eternal duty to prove that she was One of the Guys. Leaving that series just around the time that the actors populating its sets began to look less like a cops and more like Gap ad models, Leo began appearing in a lots of movies, many of which were so embarrassed by their failure to be worthy of what she brought to them that they wouldn't have dreamed of acquiring a theatrical release. (Two of her better roles can be found in movies written by Guillermo Arriaga: The Two Burials of Melquiades Estrada, directed by its star, Tommy Lee Jones, and 21 Grams, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, in which her brief performance as a hard-bitten but not insensitive woman whose husband--Benecio Del Toro--upends her family's life by accepting insisting on taking responsbility for his actions is practicially a movie in itself.) This weekend, Courtney Hunt's Frozen River opens in theaters after an attention-getting run on the festival circuit, and it offers what many fans have been waiting for: the chance to see Leo carry a highly touted movie. She plays a single mother, up against it financially after her husband absconds with her savings, who is driven to raise money by smuggling illegal aliens into the country across the Canadian border.
In a New York Times piece on the actress and the movie, Leo is quoted as saying that “I do the work that’s in front of me.”But, as Karen Durbin reports, she'll go that extra mile for a really good role, as when she agreed to go to California to audition for the part in 21 Grams after she'd already sent the filmmakers a taped audition, and then another. In the case of Frozen River, her determination seems to have included propping up the first-time director. "Ms. Leo agreed, as she has on other occasions with novice directors, to appear in a short film by Ms. Hunt, who was hoping to make a calling card to raise money for the feature. 'I didn’t realize she had a full-length script until after the short was finished,' Ms. Leo said. At which point enlightened self-interest kicked in. It took four years and a lot of bad meetings before the money was raised, and more than once Ms. Hunt nearly gave up. So Ms. Leo would call every so often and ask, 'We still making our movie?'” Whatever Leo saw in the script, it wasn't the chance to play the glamour star. Durbin writes that Frozen River affords viewers "the weird pleasure of seeing how bad Ms. Leo is willing to look for the camera. Ray is old and haggard before her time, her gullied face framed by terrible hair, crimped and dyed a harsh, aging red with bangs that coil wormlike across her forehead but telegraph the message: I’m still trying. 'That was mine,' Ms. Leo said proudly. 'Successful or not, Ray’s hair and mascara say that she’s a woman, and she cares to be pretty. It’s something she did in high school when she met her husband, and it worked then, so maybe it’ll work now.'”