Zoë Lund

Biography

Zoë Lund (née Tamerlis; February 9, 1962 – April 16, 1999), also known as Zoë Tamerlaine, was an American musician, model, actress, author, producer, political activist, and screenwriter. She was best known for her association in two films with film director Abel Ferrara: Ms .45 (1981), in which she starred, and Bad Lieutenant (1992), for which she co-wrote the screenplay.

== Early life == Lund was born Zoë Tamerlis in New York City on February 9, 1962 the only child of Barbara Lekberg (née Hult), an American sculptor originally from Portland, Oregon, and Victor Tamerlis, a rare-books seller. Her mother was of Swedish descent and her father was of Romanian descent. She dropped out of college.

== Career == At a young age, Lund was an accomplished composer and musician; but the power of celluloid took a firmer grasp. "I could write a concerto with 17 violins that could be very powerful, but film works on a more visceral level where I can go into the collective audience and make sure my point gets across." Lund was also a pianist.

=== Ms .45 === Lund made her debut in Abel Ferrara's Ms .45 (1981). She was only 17 years old during the making of the film. Lund said in an interview that she had a lot of input manifesting the character: "In the beginning stages of the film, the only material that existed was vague descriptions of several scenes. Being that my face is on camera, without dialogue, for something like 98% of the time, I was involved very much. As to the film being pro-woman, I go beyond that by saying that the film is as much pro-woman as it is pro-garment worker, whatever." Although it was not an immediate success, Ms .45 eventually became a cult film in later years.

=== 1980s work === Not wanting to become part of what she called "Abel's stable", she marked her own career path. Three years after Ms .45 was released in 1981, Lund got her second chance to star in a movie, this time playing a double role in Special Effects, written and directed by Larry Cohen. Lund plays a wannabe starlet who is murdered on film by a fallen director portrayed by Eric Bogosian, who then finds a lookalike (also Lund) to take her place in the movie he decides to make around the snuff footage. As the starlet, Lund's voice was dubbed by another actress, meaning it wasn't until an hour into her second movie that audiences finally got to hear her distinctly New Yorker inflections (Lund's character in Ms .45 was mute). Lund also appeared in an episode of Miami Vice, which was directed by Paul Michael Glaser and titled "Prodigal Son". She later appeared in The Houseguest (1989) and Temístocles López's Exquisite Corpses (1989). Lund later appeared in the ABC series Hothouse.

=== Bad Lieutenant === Despite her reluctance to be identified too closely with Ferrara's work, Lund collaborated with Ferrara again on Bad Lieutenant (1992), which she co-wrote. Lund also agreed to appear in the film, playing the woman who helps Harvey Keitel's title character first smoke, then shoot heroin. According to Lund, "There was a lot of rewriting done on the set. Two other characters were cut, and my character modulated and took on more and more. A lot of things had to be changed and improvised. The vampire speech – which is crucial to the Lieutenant – was written two minutes before it was shot. I memorized it and did it in one take. The speech is important because she is acute in knowing the journey the Lieutenant makes. She shoots him up, sends him off, knowing of his passion, she lets him go." Lund said in an interview that Bad Lieutenant was the most personal film she had ever acted in. She also claims in another interview that she wrote the screenplay all by herself. She also claimed that she co-directed several scenes in Bad Lieutenant.

=== Later career === As a director, Lund made two shorts: The Innocent Tribunal (1986) and Hot Ticket (1996). She also wrote the pilot episode of FBI: The Untold Stories. Lund worked on unproduced screenplays about famous drug addicts such as John Holmes and Gia Carangi. Lund attempted to publish several novels, including Curfew: USA and 490: A Trilogy and Kingdom for a Horse. A film adaptation of Curfew: USA and the screenplay about Holmes were both projects that Ferrara had considered filming. Other unproduced screenplays that have been credited as Lund's works included Last Night of Summer and Free Will and Testament. Although she had never met supermodel Gia Carangi, she was working on a biographical screenplay of Carangi's life at the time of her death, and she appeared posthumously in the documentary The Self-Destruction of Gia. According to Abel Ferrara: "...one time in the ‘90s, we were going to try to do Pasolini's story but only with Zoe as Pasolini, a female director living the life that Pasolini lived." However, her death led to a fifteen-year hiatus with the project until Ferrara's film Pasolini (2014) was released. In 1996, Lund also wrote the first draft of Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel (1998), based on William Gibson's 1984 short story of the same name.

== Personal life and death ==