An alumnus of London's Central School of Speech and Drama, English actress Amanda Donohoe's first film role was a supporting one in the door-slamming sex farce Foreign Body (1986). She then starred in a handful of British TV movies, usually cast as the slinky femme fatale. Briefly a member of director Ken Russell's informal stock company, Donohoe was stunning as the wicked snake woman in Russell's Lair of the White Worm (1988); in the same director's The Rainbow (1989), she played the worldly seductress to whom sexual naif Judy Davis turns to for advice. Donohoe was also starred as the alluring desert-island companion of Oliver Reed in director Nicholas Roeg's Castaway (1987), and was seen in a rare sympathetic role in 1990's Paper Mask. It was back to "black widows" again in 1993's made-for-cable The Substitute—one of several recent TV appearances for Donohoe, the most well-publicized of which was her weekly assignment as attorney C. J. Lamb on the popular TV series LA Law.