[Ellen] Barkin graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, even though her teachers advised her parents to take her out of school because she wasn’t “pretty enough” and had “very little talent and no spark.” It took her years to recover from that assessment, but once she did, she was cast in Barry Levinson’s “Diner” and found enough spark to burn up the screen with Dennis Quaid in “The Big Easy” and Al Pacino in “Sea of Love.”
–From a profile of Ms. Barkin in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine (my emphasis)