Most of us are likely to recognize Jenette Goldstein as the badass PFC known as Vasquez in Aliens since it’s where she was seen to be the most effective and was also the most memorable throughout her career. She’s managed to show up in more than one area be it on TV or in movies throughout the years, but one thing at a lot of people might have been rightfully confused by is the fact that Jenette is Jewish, and Vasquez was distinctly Latina in Aliens. In a lot of her other roles she takes on the persona that she needs to, which makes her a very capable chameleon when it comes to acting since she has no issue with doing what needs to be done in order to make people believe in her character. Perhaps two of the closest movie roles were the cop she played in Lethal Weapon 2 and the foster mother in Terminator 2, as they were more or less similar despite their very societal differences. In Titanic she played an Irish immigrant sailing across the Atlantic on the doomed ship with her children, and she did it well enough that many people didn’t really see any issue with it. So to be fair and to be honest she’s an impressive actress that’s managed to get a lot of people thinking when it comes to just what culture she’s really from. Of course if you have to wonder then it means that the actor in question is doing something right given that only some of the best can really pull off the looks and the accents that come with each role. We’ve all seen horrible accents such as Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and we’ve seen passable to very on point accents such as Brad Pitt in Snatch, and Jenette’s attempt at creating a character definitely fits on the high end of the spectrum.
As of 2012 she took to managing her own lingerie boutique where the catchy slogan “the alphabet starts with D” highlights the kind of stuff they sell and a quirky sense of humor that a lot of people are bound to appreciate. When she was still in the movies she played a hard as nails individual, but in real life it would appear that she’s one of the nicest people around. Her net worth isn’t anything to write home about but it’s definitely nothing to downplay either since it’s been earned from a career spent impressing people with her on screen talents and is more than enough to afford her a comfortably lifestyle from which she can continue to make the occasional appearance while maintaining her boutique. It sounds like quite the life really when you think of it, especially for a woman that isn’t nearly as remembered as she should be sometimes. To be fair her part in Lethal Weapon 2 was kind of peripheral. Basically she was there along with a lot of the other actors to round out the squad and make sure that it didn’t appear to be just Riggs and Murtaugh that were taking on the bad guys on their own. Plus, the death scenes of the other officers gave the movie a huge emotional impact since it made it clear that the bad guys were making the war against the police a personal matter by taking out everyone that had had something to do with their illegal movements. Her death scene though, being flung off of a diving board after it exploded behind her, that was kind of brutal.
Her role in Terminator 2 was about as white trash as it got for the movie since she and her on screen hubby weren’t exactly hanging out in a trailer park, but they didn’t exactly look like members of high society and they definitely had the look of the working class. On top of that they had a foster kid that they didn’t fully understand and as a result didn’t really get along with. We were spared her death scene in the movie but her husband’s was arguably one of the best in the franchise since being impaled while drinking from a carton of milk was something that a lot of people didn’t really expect. But oh, her scenes in Aliens will likely go down in history as some of the best since Vasquez was undeniably one of the best parts of the entire movie, not just because she was a woman and not just because she was one of the toughest on the crew, but because she was a survivor and she knew when to ‘stay frosty’ and take one for the team. One of the best lines in the movie came when she and her CO were facing down multiple xenomorphs and had only option left, to blow themselves up and take a few of them with them. Come on, tell me that “You always were an a**hole Gorman,” isn’t one of the best final words EVER in cinematic history.
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