You’ve got to have something when you co-star in one of the most laughable, disastrous feature films of all times yet come bouncing out of it with a career. This is precisely what happened to auburn-haired, pouty-lipped, smoky-eyed Gina Gershon, who uttered some embarrassing screen dialogue as Cristal Connors, the strip dancing queen in “Showgirls” (1995). Immediately after, while everyone else from above the line was ducking for cover, she went and filmed “Bound” (1996), playing an ex-con lesbian who teams with a mob moll (Jennifer Tilly) to steal millions from the hoods.
Gershon first won notice within the theater world as a co-founder of Naked Angels, a company of actors (including Rob Morrow, Sarah Jessica Parker) and writers (like Frank Pugliese, Jon Robin Baitz). Around the same time, she made her feature film debut with a small role in “Pretty in Pink” (1986) and her TV-movie debut in “Stark: The Mirror Image” (CBS, 1986). It took another two years before Gershon won a film role that anyone really noticed, playing a socialite who seduces Tom Cruise in “Cocktail”. That same year, she had a solid co-starring role opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Red Heat”, in which she played an ex-hooker. She continued to appear in small roles including one in John Sayles’ “City of Hope” (1991) and as a nasty development executive in Robert Altman’s “The Player” (1992). Before landing “Showgirls”, Gershon had her widest exposure in the 1992 CBS miniseries “Sinatra”, in which she was the singer’s first wife and mother of his children.
