Old Hollywood may have treated performers like baseball cards to be swapped, hoarded or sold, but at least under the studio system a young actress could build an impressive career. Ingrid Bergman made most of the movies she's adored for before the age of 35 -- "Casablanca," "Gaslight," "Notorious," "Spellbound," "Joan of Arc," "For Whom the Bell Tolls" -- and Bette Davis had "Of Human Bondage," "Petrified Forest," "Jezebel," "Dark Victory," "The Little Foxes" and "Now, Voyager" (to name but a few) under her belt by the same age.

Today, many movie actresses don't hit their stride until their mid-30s, when convention dictates that they have only a few years left as leading ladies. (Glenn Close wound up playing Mel Gibson's mother in "Hamlet," despite the fact that she's only nine years his senior.) In an industry that insists that few women can open a film, young actresses aspiring to be more than just this year's bimbo need to make their bid for distinction quickly and emphatically. Two talented women, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Juliette Lewis -- at least ten years apart in age -- prove cases in point.

Leigh has slowly grown from a little-known performer favored by discriminating cineastes to the kind of actor who commands the cover of Premiere magazine -- currently for "Georgia," penned by her mother, Barbara Turner. "Georgia" is less a movie than a platform for Leigh's full-throttle Sadie, a talentless, vice-prone rock and roll singer fixated on her gifted older sister. To say Leigh's performance calls excessive attention to itself will not do -- it's like a black hole that inhales the rest of the film, culminating in a much-talked-about eight-minute rendition of Van Morrison's "Take Me Back," Sadie's desperate, croaking and ultimately failed grope at self-expression in front of a crowd of 3,000.

Actors notoriously love this sort of role, but for Leigh, Sadie represents more than just a one-shot opportunity to chew some scenery. She's the culmination of a series of Leigh performances in which substance abuse provides one remarkably consistent theme ("Rush," "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle," "Dolores Claiborne") and prostitution ("The Men's Club," "Miami Blues," "Last Exit to Brooklyn" and, more or less, "Short Cuts") another. Leigh has voiced a stubborn preference for sullen, self-destructive characters, and by now even some of her most ardent admirers have begun to complain of monotony. Apparently, a girl doesn't need Jack Warner to be typecast.

Next page: The tame rebellion of the bad girls