[7] One of her sisters is model and photographer Donya Fiorentino, who had been married to filmmaker David Fincher and British actor Gary Oldman.
She comes off as very bold, but she's really very shy.”[7] In 1976, Fiorentino graduated from Washington Township High School in Sewell, New Jersey, where she excelled in basketball, baseball and cheerleading.
[15][16] Film critic Roger Ebert said of the newcomer, "Without having met the actress, it's impossible for me to speculate on how much of Carla is original work and how much is Fiorentino's personality.
Giving the film two stars out of four, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the European sequences as "a well-directed cat-and-mouse game" that lost its way in the final act after returning to the United States, with the film's main flaw being a focus on Edwards' character when Fiorentino was far more intriguing: "I'll bet the men who made this movie just assumed it had to be told from his point of view, and never considered hers.
[22] In its review of The Moderns, Variety wrote: "Fiorentino is ideal as the gorgeous American of a prosaic background over whom men may lose their hearts, mind and lives.
[24] In the early-1990s, director Paul Verhoeven invited Fiorentino to have a supporting role in Basic Instinct (eventually played by Jeanne Tripplehorn).
[9] Fiorentino experienced a resurgence after she received accolades for her performance in director John Dahl's 1994 neo-noir film The Last Seduction, playing the murderous femme fatale Bridget.
[14] The New York Times described Fiorentino as "a sleek seductress who, like the femmes fatales of [Barbara] Stanwyck's day, will stop at nothing to get her way.” Coldhearted enough to double-cross her husband (Bill Pullman) after she persuades him to pull off a drug deal, Bridget heads to an upstate New York town where she goes by "Wendy" and she involves Mike, a gullible hick (Peter Berg) in a murderous scheme.
[14] The Last Seduction has gained a cult following over time, and its main character, Bridget Gregory, has been recognized as one of the most iconic female villains in film history.
"[29] After seeing Fiorentino in the part, Christopher Tookey, the film critic at The London Daily Mail, wrote: "The role could easily have been a misogynistic fantasy-woman.
What's crucial is that she plays these roles with relish: She seems to enjoy the freedom a script like The Last Seduction gives her, and the result is a movie that is not only ingenious and entertaining, but liberating, because we can sense the story isn't going to be twisted into conformity with some stupid formula.
[30] In a 1994 appearance on Late Show with David Letterman, Fiorentino said she chose to stop acting for a period of time after Warner Bros. executive Mark Canton told her during the filming of Vision Quest, "you have a great ass, but I think your jeans need to be tighter."
[31] The same year when asked about her newfound fame, and what she would do if she could never act again, Fiorentino told The New York Times: "You mean I don't have to wake up at 5 in the morning and put makeup on?
Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: "Though the combination of Linda Fiorentino, Chazz Palminteri and David Caruso promised Jade some fire, it winds up with no more spark than a doused campfire.
It had William Friedkin directing, it had Chazz Palmenteri, who was nominated that year for an Academy Award, it had Linda Fiorentino, who had just come out with that famous movie she did The Last Seduction, and it had David Caruso, who's a brilliant actor when given the right material, and a very smart guy.
Bogutskaya suggests that the characterization of Anna / Jade contributed to her perception as hard to work with, referencing her personality conflict with Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, and ultimately culminating in her gradual exit from acting.
Reviewer Bryant Frazer gave the film a C− and wrote, "Liotta and Fiorentino look kind of sleepy throughout the whole proceeding ... but still, it has its moments, including the very ending, that really work—as if somewhere, buried inside this mess, there's a good movie trying to get out.
"[35] Fiorentino played the female lead, Dr. Laurel Weaver, in the 1997 film Men in Black, for which she was nominated for a Blockbuster Entertainment's Award for Favorite Supporting Actress in Science Fiction.
[36] She appeared alongside Ving Rhames, John Leguizamo and David Caruso in the 1998 direct-to-video film Body Count, which Variety called "an after-the-heist road movie that sizzles here and there but ends up going no place special".
She was ticked off that there were other people in the movie who were more famous than she was.” He also accused Fiorentino of avoiding promotional duties after “going nuts” at the film's poster, which had spliced her head onto another woman's body and amplified her cleavage.
However, in 2018, Smith stated that rumors of a falling out between the two had been misconstrued and overstated, and that while the two had not spoken in years, they amicably reconnected following his near-fatal heart attack.
Kristin Lopez, writing an expose for RogerEbert.com titled "Hollywood's Difficult Women", brought up rumors that Jones' return was in fact contingent upon Fiorentino's absence, and that the studio responded to this stipulation accordingly.
[24][42][43] In 2007, Fiorentino optioned the rights to a screenplay about Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, with plans to produce and to possibly star in and direct, but the project was dropped.
Fiorentino married film director and writer John Byrum, whom she had previously worked with on the unfinished movie The War at Home, on June 23, 1992.
[10][46] In an interview with film critic Roger Ebert shortly after The Last Seduction came out, Fiorentino admitted that the men she met in real life expected her to be like her devious characters, and said that when it came to the parts that she was offered, “Maybe others see in me what I don't necessarily see in myself.