While she was studying at Stanford University, Wes Craven cast her as teen heroine Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the first film in the series as he wanted someone very 'non-Hollywood' to play Nancy. He believed that Langenkamp met this quality. For the part, she beat out more than 200 actresses. The film, follows the story of a group of teenagers who are killed in their dreams one-by-one by a supernatural serial killer. The film was a slasher film.
The film introduced the iconic villain Freddy Krueger, played by Robert Englund. Johnny Depp, in his feature film debut, played Nancy Thompson's boyfriend, Glen Lantz. Veteran film actor John Saxon played Nancy's father, police lieutenant Donald Thompson. The film was both a critical and commercial success, earning a total of $25 million at the American box office. In 1985, she received the Best Actress Award at the Avoriaz Film Festival for this role. She also became one of the original scream queens.
She continued her role as Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), in which she co-starred alongside Patricia Arquette and Laurence Fishburne, and Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), in which she played herself, and through events in the narrative, she is compelled to reprise her role as Nancy Thompson. John Saxon also returned with Langenkamp in Dream Warriors and New Nightmare.
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Famous quotes containing the word elm:
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)