Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

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Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle was a film released in 1994. It was written and directed by Alan Rudolph and starred Jennifer Jason Leigh as the writer Dorothy Parker.

The film was an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. Leigh won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival.

The film revolves around Dorothy Parker's life, career, and romances. Mrs. Parker (1893-1967) was a writer, critic, wit and champion for social justice.

Mrs. Parker was an original member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, actors and critics that met almost daily from 1919-1929 at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel.

Many respected actors appear in very brief roles in the film. Actress Jennifer Beals discussed this in her appearance on the Jon Favreau documentary program Dinner for Five; she stated that much dialogue was improvised in the style of the real-life characters actors were playing, but that many of those characters were not integral to the plot. As such many of the actors had much larger parts that were edited down to nearly nothing. The film was a critical but not a commercial success. Leigh duplicated Parker's clipped, ironic, boozy tone, but after complaints at the Cannes premiere that the dialogue was difficult to follow, some of her lines were redubbed.