Career
Cusack has twice been nominated for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, for her work in Working Girl and In & Out. She appeared with her brother John in the movies Sixteen Candles, Grandview, U.S.A., Class, High Fidelity, Grosse Pointe Blank, Say Anything..., Cradle Will Rock, Martian Child, and most recently, War, Inc. She also starred in the short-lived ABC sitcom What About Joan? in 2001–02. For many years, Cusack was also the commercial spokeswoman for U.S. Cellular. She also voiced Jessie in Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, and played Dr. Burton, the therapist of Charlie (Logan Lerman), in the teen film The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012).
Cusack was a cast member on the NBC sketch show, Saturday Night Live, from 1985 to 1986. Her recurring characters on Saturday Night Live included, "Salena," a socially inept girl who tries to ask out her boyfriend, "Biff" (played by Jon Lovitz), who is also socially inept. In addition, she did celebrity impersonations of Brooke Shields, Jane Fonda and Queen Elizabeth II.
She has been nominated four times for the American Comedy Award, in the category of "Funniest Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture" and has won three times, for Runaway Bride, (1999), In & Out (1997) and Working Girl (1988). She has also won the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for "Best Supporting Actress" for In & Out.
In 2003, both Joan and her brother John signed the "Not in My Name" resolution (along with people such as Noam Chomsky and Susan Sarandon) opposing the invasion of Iraq.
Cusack narrates the public TV animated series Peep and the Big Wide World. In September 2010, Cusack guest starred on NBC's Law & Order: SVU.
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)