Eszter Balint

By the time Squat folded, Balint had already made her debut into more mainstream work, including a 1985 appearance on TV's "Miami Vice," as a wife fleeing both her abusive husband and the Mafia. Mainstream, however, hardly described her early film work, which were primarily feature versions of her stage work. "Stranger Than Paradise" perhaps remains as her best-known vehicle. In this independent black comedy, Balint portrayed the Hungarian cousin of hipster John Lurie; they and Lurie's pal Richard Edson drift aimlessly through Cleveland and Florida, encountering adventure despite themselves.Balint mostly concentrated on her theater work and music career thereafter, and her film appearances have been infrequent. She appeared in the French drama about Hungarian Jews, "Histoires d'Amerique" (1988), the short "Wonderland U.S.A." (1989) and co-starred in the low-budget comedy "Bail Jumper" (1989), as a newlywed who moves to Staten Island. In the crime comedy "The Linguini Incident" (1992), she played a designer of self-defense brassieres, who falls into a robbery plot. A small role followed in Woody Allen's "Shadows and Fog" (1992), then a supporting part as one of the habitues of Steve Buscemi's "Trees Lounge" (1996).