Lili Taylor: for a working-class girl, from the white-collar suburbs of Chicago who has always refused to have her edges buffed--and who has a resume filled with more damaged, insecure, and shockingly unstable characters than a Hollywood studio boardroom--the journey through moviedom has been less about making choices than winning battles.(Interview)(Biography)

Lili Taylor's onscreen foibles have at times verged on the cruel and unusual: She has haplessly written songs about unrequited love (Say Anything, 1989), has been squired as part of an "ugly date" contest (Dogfight, 1991), and has had her attempts at domestic idyll summarily and fatally quashed (Six Feet Under, 2002-2004)--and that's just a sampling. There was a time when it would have been easy to peg Taylor as a poster girl for sad naivete. But when it comes to both poking holes in Hollywood's limited expectations for women and burrowing down to the unbreakable core of the terminally underestimated, she is as shrewd as they get.

After making an impression in early films like Mystic Pizza (1990) and Arizona Dream (1993), Taylor blossomed during the indie boom of the 1990s with a string of critically lauded performances in such movies as Household Saints (1993), The Addiction (1995), and most notably, Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), in which she played sixties radical and Warhol trigger-woman Valerie Solanas. She's a shape-shifter to be sure. But if Taylor does share one thing with her characters, it's a compulsion to bare her heart completely. Her own unwillingness to bat an ironic eye at their vulnerabilities and weaknesses--or to obscure them behind any affectations of detached coolness--has allowed her to transform all the bad luck, bad bets, and poor decisions that make them easy marks into a sort of monumental hope that Is quickly becoming Taylor's hallmark.

Having recently reunited with Harron for the director's new biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page, Taylor will be seen later this summer starring opposite Matt Dillon in Bent Hamer's Factotum, based on Charles Bukowski's novel of the same name. Here, the 39-year-old actress talks with her Arizona Dream co-star Johnny Depp, who gets the measure of the woman.

JOHNNY DEPP: Hi, sweetheart.

LILI TAYLOR: Hi, darlin'. How are you?

JD: I'm all right. How you doing?

LT: Thanks, Johnny, for doing this.