Phoebe Cates - Acting Career

Acting Career

After ending her modeling career, Cates decided upon acting. Although her father was an actor as well, he was not enthusiastic about his daughter's prospective new career. Cates's movie debut was in Paradise (released 1982). At the age of 17, she played a starring role and did several fully nude scenes in the movie, which had a plot very similar to The Blue Lagoon. Cates later regretted being in the movie and said: "What I learned was never to do a movie like that again." According to her co-star Willie Aames, "she will have nothing to do with the film. She's really upset about it. She won't do any promotion with me."

Later in 1982, Cates starred in Fast Times at Ridgemont High which features "the most memorable bikini-drop in cinema history." She was quoted as saying that she had the most fun in filming that movie. The following year, she was in the sex comedy Private School (which co-starred Matthew Modine and Betsy Russell), for which she sang on two songs of the film's soundtrack.

Her later film roles were more modest and largely oriented toward younger audiences, such as the two Gremlins films and the 1991 film Drop Dead Fred. Her face graced the covers of teen magazines such as Seventeen, Tiger Beat, Teen Beat and others. In 1984, she starred in the TV mini-series Lace. She sought the role of Lili "to get away from a sameness in her movie portrayals." During her audition, she so impressed the writer, that he wanted to hire her there and then. Cates struggled with the portrayal of a bitter movie star because, despite her character's vicious persona, she intended for the audience to sympathize with her. She did not read the novel on which the movie was based because she did not want to have a "fixed image".

In 1985, Cates appeared Off-Broadway in Rich Relations, written by David Henry Hwang of the Second Stage Theatre. In 1994, she starred in the romantic comedy Princess Caraboo.

Cates retired from acting in the mid-90s in order to raise her children. She did return in 2001, however, with her family, for one film The Anniversary Party, as a favor to the director, her best friend, Jennifer Jason Leigh.