Character: Cora Papadakis

Directed by: Bob Rafelson

Written by: David Mamet

Produced by: Charles Mulvehill, Bob Rafelson

Cast Members: Jack Nicholson, John Colicos, Michael Lerner, John P. Ryan

Released date: March 20, 1981

Genre: Crime, Drama, Romance

Itinerant troublemaker Frank Chambers has a meal at a roadside restaurant and meets devastating femme fatale Cora Papadakis. As it turns out, Cora is married to the restaurant's owner, Nick. Happy to have a visitor, Papadakis offers Chambers a job. Chambers stays on and begins to help himself to whatever he likes -- including Cora. The two dive headlong into a torrid romance and begin to plot the perfect murder.

Taglines

• You Will Feel The Heat.
• If there was an Eleventh Commandment, they would have broken that too.
• In the heat of passion two things can happen. The second is murder.

Trivia

• When plotting the characterization for the role of Cora, Jessica Lange decided the young woman had first tried to make it as a movie actress in Hollywood, struck out, and eventually married. When Jack Nicholson learned this, he gave her the autobiography of trashy, blonde, B-movie actress Barbara Payton (“I Am Not Ashamed”, published in 1963.) Lange based her character’s history partly on Payton, who, like her, was born in Cloquet, Minnesota.

Character’s Quotes

• I’m getting tired of what’s right and wrong.
• I knew that when I met you… You’ll never change.
• All I know is, it went dark… If he’d have turned around, Frank, they’d have hanged us for it… and something… something put that cop there… It’s an act of God those lights went out!