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| Born in New York, Lyonne began her professional career at the age of six, after demonstrating her aptitude by reading newspapers outloud on the subway. Her parents found her an agent and soon she was cast as Opal in the original Pee-Wee's Playhouse. After a stint as a contact player on As the World Turns, she made her feature film debut as Meryl Streep's niece in the Mike Nichols film Heartburn, based on the book by Nora Ephron. When her parents marriage began to fall apart, the family moved to Israel while they tried to patch things up. Upon return, and the eventual split of her parents, Lyonne lived with her mother in Manhatten and was sent to a posh private school, which was an unpleasant experience. She then landed a role in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and the school suggested that she leave. After the film, she applied to NYU and was accepted a year early after reading her essay comparing T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men to working on Woody Allen's movie. But projects kept coming up and to date, Lyonne has deferred three times. She was next seen as Richard Dreyfuss' daughter in the comedy Krippendorf's Tribe (1998). But Tamara Jenkins' Slums of Beverly Hills (also 1998) offered the rising star one of her best screen roles to date as a teenager coping with the onset of puberty and herd ysfunctional (all male) family's constant movement from apartment to apartment. The young thespian delivered a winning and assured performance that garnered her a Chicago Film Critics nomination as Most Promising Actress. She followed with a decidedly supporting turn in the horror comedy Modern Vampires (1999). She then appeared in Detroit Rock City, opposite Edward Furlong, which is set in 1978 and focuses on four young teenagers who embark on a wild adventure to attend a KISS concert. Lyonne then segued immediately into Matthew Bright's indie pic Confessions of a Trick Baby, the story of two young women who meet in prison and plot their escape to freedom, followed by But I'm a Cheerleader, opposite Clea DuVall, in which she plays a naieve 17-year-old who is sent to a "re-hab camp" when her family and friends suspect that she may be a lesbian. Finally, Lyonne recently enrolled at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts to major in film and philosophy. |
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