Biography
With her blue eyes, pillow lips and sex-kitten-on-helium voice, Joey Lauren Adams looks and sounds like
Melanie Griffith's long-lost little sister. Adams, however, is an actress in her own right, having done solid work in a number of films, including
Dazed and Confused and
Chasing Amy.
Hailing from North Little Rock, Arkansas, where she was born January 6, 1971, Adams began acting early in her life, performing at local church productions. She left home for Los Angeles while still a teenager, and got her first break with roles on various television shows. She won a limited amount of fame--or notoriety, depending on one's point of view--for her work on Married with Children, on which she played the woman who relieved Bud Bundy of his virginity.
Work on the short-lived series Vinnie & Bobby and Top of the Heap followed before Adams broke into film in 1993. That year, she had supporting roles in
The Program,
Coneheads and
Dazed and Confused, the last of which featured her as one of
Parker Posey's high school cronies. The next year, she appeared in the independent films S.F.W. and
Sleep with Me, and then had a secondary role in
Mallrats (1995), her first collaboration with then-boyfriend
Kevin Smith. It was Smith who gave Adams her true film breakthrough when he cast her as the female lead in
Chasing Amy. The 1997 film--a look at the relationship between a comic book artist (
Ben Affleck) and his "ideal" woman (Adams), who happens to be a lesbian--won favorable reviews and effectively put Adams on the Hollywood map. In 1999 she had a lead role in another independent film, the drama A Cool Dry Place with
Vince Vaughn, and also starred in her first big-budget Hollywood feature, the hit
Adam Sandler comedy
Big Daddy.
The actress entered the new millennium without slowing down, appearing in a wide variety of low-profile films and independent features such as
Anne Heche's 2001 project Reaching Normal and the 2002 crime thriller
Beeper with
Harvey Keitel. In 2004's
The Big Empty, she starred alongside
Jon Favreau, who she would rejoin for 2006's (un)romantic comedy
The Break-Up. Supporting mainstream stars
Jennifer Aniston and
Vince Vaughn bolstered the actresses profile, while her performance as Aniston's best friend and ally in her hilariously messy break-up won audiences over.
~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide