Anxious to get on with her acting career, precocious Juliette Lewis dropped out of high school at age 14, passed a proficiency course and became an emancipated minor a year later, unbound by child labor laws. Despite having no training, she had already landed daughter roles in the Showtime miniseries "Home Fires" (1987) and the ABC series "I Married Dora" (1987-88), and though she would return as a series regular in "A Family For Joe" (NBC, 1990), starring Robert Mitchum, she found sitcoms constraining, resenting her directors' insistence that she do nothing with her hands while standing stiffly, geared for the punchline. The TV-movie "Too Young to Die?" (NBC, 1990), which teamed her with longtime love interest Brad Pitt, provided a sample of the dramatic work to come, casting her as 15-year-old facing the death penalty for murder, but her feature debut as Chevy Chase's daughter in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" (1989) confined her to emotional territory very much in keeping with the sitcoms she loathed. Lewis' breakout role as the thumb-sucking nymphet struggling for independence from her warring parents in Martin Scorsese's remake of "Cape Fear" (1991) rescued her from sitcom purgatory and earned her an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Her sensuous scenes with a psychotic killer (played by Robert De Niro) were the sensation of the movie, and Lewis' small, brightly piercing eyes and pouty mouth suggested a waifish but free-spirited and sexually--indeed, sometimes dangerously--provocative young woman questing for answers and emotional fulfillment, shattering any notion that she would ever be sitcom fodder again. She stepped in for Emily Lloyd as the college student who becomes involved with her professor in Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives" (1992), sympathetically essaying the would-be "other woman" role in a film whose story of a crumbling marriage and the husband's affair with a much younger woman mirrored the Allen-Mia Farrow breakup.