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Article snippet: One result of moviemaking — and a side effect of moviegoing — is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors. For them, you feel something like ardor, because plain old love won’t suffice. That, for many years, was what I felt for Annabella Sciorra — utter ardor. It was inexplicable. It was true. The early 1990s were her peak — a small, spicy part in “Cadillac Man”; the emotional center of Spike Lee’s third-rail social melodrama “Jungle Fever”; a starring role in “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” which needed her to play dumb until the light bulb that had been on the fritz for 100 minutes stayed on long enough to show her that the nanny from hell needed to be sent straight back. In all of these movies (and lots more), Ms. Sciorra is steely and luminous and game — fragile and feral and fierce. Sexy and dire. She can put the feelings you want to see from an actor, feelings you experience as a human being, right there on the surface, as portents of other psychological, emotional and romantic depths. I don’t know how you teach a performer to be that transparent yet also a little mysterious. You probably can’t. That transparency brings you closer to the smolder that’s among her most essential qualities. The other is her realness. Ms. Sciorra is a member of a dwindling fleet of actors who actually sound like they come from some... Link to the full article to read more