The best Jennifer Jason Leigh movies and TV shows include a strong mix of genre releases and some top independent efforts. She is a second-generation actor, her father being Vic Morrow. Leigh was 21 years old when her father died in an on-set accident while filming The Twilight Zone, but she was already entrenched in the Hollywood industry by this time, having appeared in Fast Times at Ridgemont High the year before his death.

Since then, Leigh has starred in everything from thrillers like Single White Female and crime dramas like Road to Perdition to TV shows like Fargo and Hunters. Over her career, she has proven to be able to take on any role, from villains to heroes to ing roles, and she never misses a beat. She has earned both Oscar and Golden Globes Award nominations for the same role. She has also moved from movies to television shows, and seems to have found her niche on the small screen.

10 Single White Female (1992)

Hedy Carlson/Ellen Besch

One of the biggest roles of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s career came in 1992 when she starred as an unhinged woman who begins to torment another woman whom she is renting an apartment with. Bridget Fonda stars as Allison, the woman who puts out an ad for a roommate, and chooses Hedra (Leigh), a single woman who says up front that she is a woman alone in the world. When Allison decides to move in with her boyfriend, Hedy becomes obsessive and dangerous.

Leigh was great in her role as the dangerous stalker who would kill anyone to keep what she believed she deserved. Single White Female was a small box office success, making $48 million on a $10 million budget (via Box Office Mojo). The film received mostly positive reviews, with critics praising Leigh’s performance as a “slasher” villain, and she went on to win the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain that year.

9 The Hitcher (1986)

Nash

Jennifer Jason Leigh starred in The Hitcher, and the movie presents one of her most terrifying moments. In the film, C. Thomas Howell stars as a young man delivering a car from Chicago to San Diego. However, on this road trip, he makes the mistake of picking up a hitchhiker in West Texas who proves to be a serial killer. The film sees Jim temporarily escape the killer, but things get bad when he meets Nash (Leigh), a waitress.

Nash has one of the most disturbing deaths in any slasher movie when the Hitcher ties her between a large Mack truck and a trailer hitch. Just when it seems that Jim can save Nash, it goes south, and she ends up ripped in half. This was a movie that proved that Leigh could play a sympathetic character and someone who people want to see survive, making her death traumatic for both the audience and the characters.

8 Hunters (2023)

Chava Apfelbaum

Hunters is an Amazon Prime Video series that focuses on the Nazi hunters who hunted down all the former Nazis who went into hiding after World War II. The main characters are a group of hunters in New York City in 1977, who learn that some escaped Nazi officers were trying to start a new Fourth Reich in the United States by relocating Nazi scientists to the country.

Logan Lerman is a young genius who takes his grandmother’s place amongst the Hunters and works with Al Pacino’s Meyer Offerman, a man helping lead the Hunters to kill and take out the Nazis in the country. As for Jennifer Jason Leigh, she stars as Chava "Ima" Apfelbaum, a Jewish Nazi hunter, Jonah's (Lerman) great-aunt, and his Hunter grandmother’s sister. The series lasted for two seasons and 18 episodes.

7 Dolores Claiborne (1995)

Selena St. George

In 1995, Jennifer Jason Leigh starred in a Stephen King adaptation that many fans might not know is from the King of Horror since it is not technically a horror movie. Dolores Claiborne stars Kathy Bates as the titular character, a woman who works as a domestic servant for the elderly paralyzed Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt). When Vera falls down the stairs and dies, Dolores is investigated for murder charges.

Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as Selena Sr. George, a successful New York City journalist who is Dolores' daughter. She deals with depression and addiction issues and comes to town to her mother, even though she doubts Dolores' innocence. This is especially true since the town believes Dolores previously killed her husband and got away with it. Bates and Leigh both earned Saturn Award nominations for their performances.

6 Atypical (2017-2021)

Elsa Gardner

Atypical is a Netflix original series that follows the life of an 18-year-old named Sam (Keir Gilchrist) who was diagnosed with autism. While the first season received criticism for not using any autistic actors, the second season rectified that, and it has received mostly positive reviews in its depiction of the characters and their interactions. Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as Elsa, Sam’s overprotective mother.

The series ran for three seasons and 38 episodes before finally wrapping up in 2021. The second and third seasons received 100% fresh scores on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising the show’s ability to show autism in a positive manner and allowing the characters to achieve success as people, rather than as needing to overcome anything. Its only award recognition came from the Satellite and Peabody Awards, but it remains a highly praised series.

5 Road To Perdition (2002)

Annie Sullivan

Directed by Sam Mendes, Road to Perdition is based on the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner. The movie has an all-star cast, with Tom Hanks leading as Michael Sullivan, Sr., the most trusted enforcer for Irish Mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman). However, when Michael’s son witnesses a murder, his dad puts his own life on the line to protect him from his trusted boss and the hitmen sent to clean things up.

Leigh stars as Annie Sullivan, Michael’s wife. She had a small role in the movie, but an important one. When Michael sees a letter that has ordered the death of him and his family, he races home to his wife and finds that Daniel Craig’s Connor Rooney has already killed her and their children, with only Michael Jr. surviving the attack. The film received six Oscar nominations, winning for Best Cinematography.

4 Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982)

Stacy Hamilton

The first major movie role for Jennifer Jason Leigh came in 1982 in the coming-of-age comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Based on the book by Cameron Crowe, the film chronicles the lives of high school students in San Diego, California. The Fast Times cast was impressive, with Sean Penn, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in roles as the students and Ray Watson as Mr. Hand, the curmudgeonly history teacher.

Leigh stars as Stacy Hamilton, a 15-year-old freshman who works at Perry’s Pizza. She is Brad’s (Reinhold) younger sister. This was a nice introduction for Leigh to the world as she played a high schooler who had to decide if she was more interested in having casual sex or finding love, although she had a lot of time to figure it out and still hadn’t reached that point at the end of the movie with her boyfriend Rat (Brian Backer). In 2005, the Library of Congress entered the film into the United States National Film Registry.

3 Annihilation (2018)

Dr. Ventress

In 2018, director Alex Garland released his science fiction film Annihilation, which was headlined by an all-female led cast. A giant dome-like structure popped up in Florida following a meteor crashing there a few years prior. When a team of soldiers were sent in and never returned, a new team is sent in with the only person from the first to return alive – a former soldier named Lena (Natalie Portman).

This entire new team is led by all women, with Jennifer Jason Leigh as psychologist Dr. Ventress, Tuva Novotny as Cass, a geomorphologist, Gina Rodriguez as Anya, a paramedic, and Tessa Thompson as Josie, a physicist. What they find is a horror similar to Lovecraftian science fiction creatures. Annihilation has an 88% Rotten Tomatoes score and was named on several best-of lists for the year.

2 Fargo (2023-2024)

Lorraine Lyon

Jennifer Jason Leigh ed the cast of the anthology crime series Fargo in its fifth season. This was the first season that had no connection at all to any of the previous seasons and stars Juno Temple as Dot Lyon, a Midwestern housewife with a mysterious past that comes back to haunt her. When two criminals kidnap her, she fights back and proves to be more than a match for them. Soon, it becomes known that she is on the run from her abusive husband (Jon Hamm).

Leigh stars as Dot’s mother-in-law, the billionaire CEO of “Redemption Services,” the largest debt collection agency in the United States. The season was a strange one, adding in some bizarre supernatural mythology, although there is a chance it was all in one character’s head. However, Leigh delivered a great performance as a mother-in-law who wanted nothing to do with Dot at first but then proved her most valuable ally when the chips were down. The series earned six Primetime Emmy Award nominations.

1 The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

Amy Archer

In 1994, Jennifer Jason Leigh starred in one of the Coen brothers' best, yet underrated, movies of their career. In The Hudsucker Proxy, Tim Robbins stars as a naïve but ambitious business school graduate named Norville Barnes who is named president of a manufacturing company by Paul Newman’s Sidney J. Mussburger. While Mussburger did this as part of a stock scam, Norville proves to be the perfect man for the job.

Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as Amy Archer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter assigned to write a story about Norville to see what kind of person the new president is. She gets hired as a secretary to work undercover for her story and eventually falls for him before success changes him as well. The Hudsucker Proxy received only average reviews and wasn’t a box office success, but it has become a massive cult classic and a beloved part of the Coen brothers’ filmography.