For four seasons on NBC, Melissa Leo played Kay Howard on Homicide: Life on the Street and sustained one of the most compellingly unglamorous characterizations in the history of American network TV. A mess of exposed nerve endings and untamed brick-red hair, Howard was a capable, dedicated detective shackled to a self-destructing partner (Daniel Baldwin) and a locker-room professional atmosphere that demanded that she keep her softer feelings under wraps as part of her eternal duty to prove that she was One of the Guys. Leaving that series just around the time that the actors populating its sets began to look less like a cops and more like Gap ad models, Leo began appearing in a lots of movies, many of which were so embarrassed by their failure to be worthy of what she brought to them that they wouldn't have dreamed of acquiring a theatrical release. (Two of her better roles can be found in movies written by Guillermo Arriaga: The Two Burials of Melquiades Estrada, directed by its star, Tommy Lee Jones, and 21 Grams, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, in which her brief performance as a hard-bitten but not insensitive woman whose husband--Benecio Del Toro--upends her family's life by accepting insisting on taking responsbility for his actions is practicially a movie in itself.)
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