Please Rewind Talent Wall

Chloe Webb

Chloe Webb has built a career around characters who rarely fit neatly into the frame. Born in Greenwich Village on June 25, 1956, and primarily raised in Syracuse, New York, she first pursued singing, studying at The Boston Conservatory and later Berklee College of Music. Performing in bars helped clarify where her strongest instincts lay: not in singing, but in acting. Webb joined the Off-Broadway revue Forbidden Broadway in 1982, a fitting early stop for a performer with a sharp feel for heightened personalities. Her film debut arrived four years later in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy, where she played Nancy Spungen opposite the film’s portrait of Sid Vicious. It was a difficult, abrasive role, and Webb did not soften its edges. The performance earned best actress honors from the National Society of Film Critics and critics’ groups in Boston and San Francisco. Her subsequent work shows a particular gift for making eccentricity feel specific rather than decorative. She played a socialite in Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect, an aspiring singer in the television drama China Beach and Danny DeVito’s character’s offbeat girlfriend in Twins. A brief appearance in Ghostbusters II cast her as a woman convinced she had been abducted by aliens. She later worked alongside Denzel Washington and Bob Hoskins in Heart Condition and reunited with Cox for Repo Chick. Webb has moved easily among film, television and theatre. Her stage credits include Los Angeles productions of The House of Blue Leaves and The Model Apartment, with award-winning performances in both. On television, she brought the eccentric Mona Ramsey to Tales of the City and appeared in series including Judging Amy, House, Medium and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. As Monica Gallagher in Shameless, Webb again found a role built on instability and emotional friction; the performance brought her a Critics’ Choice Television Award nomination. Across these parts, her appeal lies in her refusal to make complicated people comfortable.