Adrienne Shelly

Hal Hartley's muse

Adrienne Levine (Adrienne Shelly), actress and director: born New York 16 June 1966; married Andy Ostroy (one daughter); died New York 1 November 2006.

When the New Wave of US independent film-making crashed into cinemas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the elfin actress Adrienne Shelly was one of its most recognisable and endearing faces, thanks to her collaborations with the writer-director Hal Hartley.

Shelly's first film role was in Hartley's début feature, The Unbelievable Truth (1989), in which she played a woman in love with an ex-con who may or may not be a killer. Hartley's writing was clipped and absurdist, his directing style appealingly lean - one studio executive called him "an acquired taste . . . an American Harold Pinter". And Shelly was perfect at playing his sober screwball material with the requisite poker face.

Born Adrienne Levine in Queens, New York, in 1966 (later changing her name to Shelly), she had her first acting experiences at summer camps in upstate New York, and in musicals at Jericho High School. She said in 1996 that talent agents had wanted to sign her as a child actress, only to be thwarted by her father, who told them, "I will not have my daughter jumping out of a window when she's 30." She later attended Boston University to study journalism. "I thought I wanted to be an anchor lady," she said. "Can you imagine me? I think I'm too silly. And I'd need a lot more hair mousse." She dropped out in her junior year, moving to Manhattan to pursue an acting career.

She landed the female lead in The Unbelievable Truth when Hartley saw her CV and photograph, which she had given to a producer who was casting a music video. Nothing about Shelly conformed to Hartley's specifications for the role of Audry Hugo. "I needed a young woman who was a model," the director recalled. "Adrienne was way too short." Shelly had listed her height as "6'1½" minus exactly 1 foot." But, after meeting her, Hartley relaxed his restrictions:

I saw her and just kind of got knocked out. I said, "Wow, she's interesting and pretty." She was also the best actress.

The film was one of the key successes of that revolution in American film-making, which would climax, and arguably implode, with the cult of Quentin Tarantino and his independent-in-theory-only 1994 hit Pulp Fiction. The Unbelievable Truth was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival, but Shelly was ambivalent about the attention she received:

We took the film to Sundance and it was very intimidating. We were getting all the attention and I didn't love the limelight. I wasn't a trained, seasoned actor. But people were writing about us as if we were the Second Coming. And, with all the attention, my friends around me changed. There was a lot of jealousy and competition. So I just stayed in New York, refused to go to LA and cultivated myself for a decade.

She only made one more film with Hartley - Trust (1990) - but it was largely regarded as the best work that either of them produced, and cemented the idea of Shelly as his muse. She was heartbreaking as the pregnant teenager Maria, who befriends a sardonic, grenade-carrying misfit (played by fellow Hartley regular Martin Donovan); the friendship provides both characters with a sanctuary from their volatile domestic lives. The picture won the audience award at the Deauville Film Festival, as well as the screenwriting award for Hartley at Sundance.

But, as quickly as it had taken off, the US New Wave was beginning to be permeated by commercial considerations. Shelly was not slow to understand that the spirit of independence was dying out as fast as it had blossomed. "Independent film is a broad term," she noted:

You can make an independent film for Miramax, but that's not independent by the standards I'm used to. In the independent world I'm used to, you make more money as a waiter. You make a film for $10,000 and shoot it on video. It's not easy to make a great living at it.

After her collaborations with Hartley, Shelly found less visible success in acting, though she worked constantly in film, theatre and television. She founded the Missing Children theatre company, wrote plays (including the black comedy Francis Ford Coppola and the Dream of Spring), appeared as a guest star in TV series such as Homicide and Law & Order, and eventually became an acclaimed writer-director in her own right with Sudden Manhattan (1997) and I'll Take You There (1999), the latter a romantic comedy that earned favourable comparisons with Woody Allen.

In recent years, she seemed determined to shake off the image that she had acquired from her films with Hartley. "When you read 'quirky' over and over again, 'quirky' starts to feel like an insult," she complained. In 2002, she played the fiancée of a schizophrenic in Revolution No 9, while she was seen last year alongside Matt Dillon in the Charles Bukowski adaptation Factotum.

Last week she was found dead in her office in Greenwich Village. She was in post-production on Waitress, her third feature as writer-director.

Ryan Gilbey