Kirkland began her acting career in several off-Broadway shows and avant garde productions, before joining Andy Warhol’s The Factory in the early ’60s. In 1964, she appeared in his film The 13 Most Beautiful Women, marking her first on-screen credit. In the years following, she would go on to appear in films like Blue, Cinderella Liberty, The Sting, The Way We Were, A Star Is Born, and The Georgia Peaches, as well as several TV shows including Hawaii Five-O, Kojak, Three’s Company, Starsky & Hutch, and Charlie’s Angels. It wasn’t until 1984, however, that she landed her first leading role in horror film Fatal Games, in which she played an athletic assistant named Diane.
Three years later, Kirkland starred in Yurek Bogayevicz’s Anna as the titular character, a fading actor who mentors a younger actor named Krystyna (Paulina Porizkova). Kirkland received critical acclaim for her performance, but still had to launch a grassroots campaign to get recognition from the Academy for the independent film, even calling in a favor from Andy Warhol, who Variety notes had a talk show at the time. “At the Oscars, there were all these movie stars emerging from their limos, and then there was me. I felt like Cinderella. The greatest part was the feeling to be in the same Oscar category of these women that I was a huge fan of—Meryl, Glenn, Holly Hunter and Cher, who I used to rollerskate with in the ’70s,” she said in a 2012 interview with The Huffington Post. “If you’re in independent films, and worked hard for years, and you don’t happen to be part of the mega-billion dollar system, and you’ve got the chutzpah to stand up and say this is who I am, it takes all the humanity out of Hollywood not to appreciate that.” Kirkland also received a Golden Globe and an Independent Spirit Award for the role.
Kirkland continued to act for many years after Anna. She starred in films and television series like JFK, Bruce Almighty, Hope For The Holidays, Roseanne, Valley Of The Dolls, and Felicity throughout the rest of her long career. She’d had projects premiere as recently as 2024, including independent film Sallywood, in which she played herself.
