If you watched movies at the tail end of the ’90s, you probably remember Leelee Sobieski. She was the brave teenager on the back of the motorcycle in Deep Impact, the armor-clad heroine of the Joan of Arc miniseries, and one of the youngest faces in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Magazines kept calling her the next big thing. Then, gradually, she stopped showing up on screen at all. So whatever happened to Leelee Sobieski? Short answer: she’s a full-time abstract painter now, working under her married name. Here’s how that happened.

01Profile

Full name
Liliane Rudabet Gloria Elsveta Sobieski
Known today as
Leelee Kimmel (her name as an artist)
Born
June 10, 1983, New York City
Age
43
Parents
Elizabeth Sobieski (writer and producer) and Jean Sobieski (French-born painter and actor)
Best known for
Deep Impact, Joan of Arc, Eyes Wide Shut, Never Been Kissed, Joy Ride
Spouse
Fashion designer Adam Kimmel (married 2010); two children
Current work
Abstract painter based in New York City

That long string of first names is real, by the way, and it’s a nice hint of the artsy, bilingual household she grew up in. She speaks fluent French, a nod to her father’s side of the family.

02The Rise: A Teenage Star Is Born

A Manhattan kid with an old soul

Sobieski grew up in Manhattan in a family of writers and artists, and she started acting young. After a few early TV and film parts in the mid-’90s, she started getting noticed quickly. She had a calm, almost old-soul screen presence that made her look older than she was, and casting directors took note.

Deep Impact and Eyes Wide Shut

The breakout came in 1998 with Deep Impact, the comet-disaster blockbuster where she played Sarah Hotchner, the girlfriend of Elijah Wood’s teenage astronomer. It was a huge hit, and suddenly a lot of people wanted to know who she was.

A year later, 1999 turned into one of those improbable years. She appeared in the Drew Barrymore comedy Never Been Kissed, and in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, playing the costume-shop owner’s daughter in a small but unforgettable role opposite Tom Cruise. Working with Kubrick at that age is the kind of credit most actors never get.

Joan of Arc and the awards buzz

Also in 1999, she headlined the CBS miniseries Joan of Arc, and that performance earned her an Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe nomination. She picked up another Golden Globe nod for the 2001 NBC miniseries Uprising, about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. By the early 2000s, she was starring in films like Here on Earth (2000), Joy Ride, The Glass House and My First Mister (all 2001), and was widely described as one of the most promising young actresses of her generation.

03Stepping Away From Hollywood

The 2000s were busier than people remember. Sobieski kept working steadily, including The Wicker Man (2006), 88 Minutes (2008) and Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009). But the roles were getting smaller, and her priorities were shifting.

She married fashion designer Adam Kimmel in 2010, and the couple’s first child, a daughter, had arrived in late 2009. In 2012 she took the lead in the CBS police drama NYC 22, which ran for one season. Around that time, she made it clear she was done. In a 2012 interview with Vogue, she explained that most acting jobs no longer appealed to her, saying that “ninety percent of acting roles involve so much sexual stuff with other people, and I don’t want to do that.” Her family, she said, came first.

A few years later, speaking to Us Weekly in 2016, she described herself as simply a mom and an outsider to the movie world. Her last screen credit, The Last Film Festival, was released in 2016, but she’d effectively retired years before that.

  • 1998Breaks out in the blockbuster Deep Impact.
  • 1999Appears in Never Been Kissed and Eyes Wide Shut; earns Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for Joan of Arc.
  • 2001Second Golden Globe nomination for Uprising; stars in Joy Ride and My First Mister.
  • 2009Appears in Public Enemies; her daughter is born.
  • 2010Marries designer Adam Kimmel.
  • 2012Leads CBS drama NYC 22, then steps away from acting.
  • 2014Her son is born.
  • 2016Final screen credit, The Last Film Festival, is released.

04A Painter All Along

Growing up in a studio

Here’s the part that makes her story click. Leaving acting wasn’t really a leap into the unknown; it was a return to something older. Her father, Jean Sobieski, is a painter, and she has described growing up watching him turn the family’s New York living room into a studio. As a kid, she drew all over her own arms and legs with markers.

That habit never went away. According to interviews she gave after leaving Hollywood, she even lined the inside of her movie trailers with plastic so she could paint between takes. Speaking to Interview magazine in 2017, she summed up her long-running feelings about acting in one line: she’d always told people she didn’t want to act, she painted.

Finding her voice in abstraction

When she began showing work publicly, she did it under her married name, Leelee Kimmel, which let the paintings be judged without the baggage of her filmography. Her first public showing came in the summer of 2017 at Marlborough Contemporary in New York, according to Interview. In January 2018 she opened her debut solo exhibition, Channels, at The Journal Gallery in Brooklyn, and she later showed at Simon Lee Gallery in London.

Her work is large-scale abstraction: dense, saturated color, overlapping shapes and squiggles, and surfaces that feel like they’re moving. Critics have compared her forms to surrealists like Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy and Roberto Matta. She’s also experimented with virtual reality painting and sculpture, curious about what happens when the canvas has no physical edges.

The biggest signal that this is no celebrity side project came in 2019, when she joined Almine Rech, a major international gallery with spaces in cities including Paris, New York and Shanghai. She had a solo show with the gallery in Paris, and in 2022 her exhibition Night Ride opened at Almine Rech Shanghai, her first solo show in China. Her paintings have also appeared at auction and in group shows abroad.

05What She Is Doing Now

The Wilds and the Shore

Her most recent major solo outing was The Wilds and the Shore, her third solo exhibition with Almine Rech. It ran at the gallery’s New York space in Tribeca from May 7 to June 15, 2024, with a presentation at Almine Rech Paris running in parallel that spring. The gallery described the paintings in terms of weather and upheaval rather than calm: surging waves of color, ruptures and storms of pigment. It placed her in conversation with contemporary painters like Julie Mehretu and Cecily Brown, and with the long history of women in Abstract Expressionism.

She hasn’t stopped there. Galleries that represent her continue to list her as living and working in New York, and she regularly shares new pieces and studio moments on Instagram under the name Leelee Kimmel. If you want to see what she’s painting right now, that’s the best place to look.

I always said, ‘I don’t want to act. I paint.’ — Leelee Kimmel, Interview magazine, December 2017

A rare sighting on her 43rd birthday

Sobieski keeps a deliberately low profile, which is why a simple walk around New York made headlines this summer. On June 10, 2026, her 43rd birthday, she was photographed out in Manhattan in a white shirt and a blue pleated skirt. Outlets including E! News and Hello! Magazine covered the sighting, noting it was a rare public appearance roughly a decade after her final film credit. There was no red carpet, no announcement, no comeback teaser. Just a painter out in her hometown.

Family life, kept private

She and Adam Kimmel have been married since 2010 and have two children. Beyond that, she has kept her family almost entirely out of the public eye, which seems to be exactly the point. By all public accounts, her days now revolve around her kids and her studio, not auditions.

Will she ever act again?

There’s no sign of it. She hasn’t announced any acting projects, and her public comments over the years have been consistent: acting was something she did, painting is who she is. Fans occasionally hope for a surprise cameo, but you’d be better off catching her at a gallery opening than on a streaming service.

06Summary

Leelee Sobieski had the kind of teenage résumé most actors would envy: a blockbuster, a Kubrick film, two Golden Globe nominations before she could legally drink. And then she chose something else. Not out of scandal or burnout, but because, by her own account, painting had always been the real goal. Today, as Leelee Kimmel, she’s built a genuine gallery career on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia.

Leelee Sobieski in 2026: Quick Facts

  • Now works as an abstract painter under the name Leelee Kimmel, based in New York City.
  • Represented by Almine Rech since 2019, with solo shows in Paris, Shanghai and New York.
  • Latest major solo show: The Wilds and the Shore (Almine Rech New York and Paris, 2024).
  • Stepped away from acting around 2012; her final screen credit was released in 2016.
  • Married to designer Adam Kimmel since 2010; they have two children.
  • Made a rare, widely covered public appearance in Manhattan on her 43rd birthday in June 2026.
  • Shares her artwork on Instagram as Leelee Kimmel.

So if you’ve been wondering where the girl from Deep Impact went, the answer is that she didn’t really disappear. She just moved from the screen to the canvas, and she seems genuinely happy there. Next time one of her shows opens, it might be worth stopping by.