Chandra West

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Chandra West

Chandra West (born December 31, 1970, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) is a Canadian actress. She is one of few Canadian actresses to have made the successful screen transition from television to film.

[edit] Career

The actresses' first big break came in 1991 when she played a small part in the television series True Confections, a 1950s conservative drama about a woman with an ahead-of-her-time awareness.

Rather surprisingly however, it wasn't until two years later that West followed-up her screen debut with a somewhat smaller role in the albeit more-recognised series The Secret of Lake Success.

She appeared in three consecutive films; the first as the female-lead in Puppet Master 4 (1993), then a smaller role as Miss Germany in the action-flick No Contest (1994) also starring Robert Davi and Roddy Piper, and in the same year, reprising her role as Susie in Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter (1994) (though many consider this addition to be the weakest of all the Puppet Master series of films).

The closing months of 1994 and most of 1995 saw West return to television with appearances in Madonna: Innocence Lost (1994), Catwalk (1994), Falling For You (1995) and the role of Muriel Hemingway in Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story (1995).

A whole host of other parts kept her busy throughout the late 1990s - including the role of Veronica Reynolds in both the back-to-back Universal Soldier sequels, Universal Soldier 2: Brothers in Arms (1998) and Universal Soldier 3: Unfinished Business (1998) - until her major breakthrough as Val Kilmer's on-screen wife in the 2002 D.J. Caruso crime thriller, The Salton Sea.

Following the moderate success of the latter, Chandra was exposed to a wider market, helping her grasp the part of Robin in The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest, which despite an all-star cast, including Steve Buscemi, Rosanna Dawson, Adam Garcia and of course, Chandra herself - as well a script penned by Jon Swingers Favreau - the film was panned critically and deemed a major disappointment.

The flop had little effect on Chandra's rise however, as she was soon learning the lines for her next role as Laura Chandler in the Emmy-nominated mini-series Mister Sterling (2003).

Two years of small films later, she was cast as the wife of Michael Keaton in the 2005 horror flick White Noise.

She also played novice agent Holly Gribbs in the pilot of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in 2000.

Chandra's most recent performance has been in the unheralded film Canes (The Covenant), a B-movie which also stars Edward Furlong and Michael Madsen.