Zoë Lund

Zoë Lund (née Tamerlis) was an American writer, screenwriter, director, actress, and model, born in New York City in 1962. From a young age, she was a talented musician, composer, and a bright student with an inclination toward political activism. She dropped out of school at the age of 15. She made her acting debut in Abel Ferrara's cult Ms .45 (1981). From 1980 to 1985, she was the partner and collaborator of the filmmaker, critic, and activist Édouard de Laurot—best known for his film with Malcolm X, Black Liberation (1967). She appeared in several other feature films and television shows in the 1980s, including Larry Cohen's Special Effects and Miami Vice. She married Robert Lund in 1986. Lund wrote and starred in Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992), in which she addressed her addiction to heroin. Among her many film and television screenplays is the first draft of New Rose Hotel (1998). She wrote and directed the short film Hot Ticket (1996), in which her character's last line says: "That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which merely is." She died in Paris in 1999, at the age of 37, of heart failure due to cocaine use, leaving behind several unpublished novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays that remain unproduced.