Almost 30 years since Leaving Las Vegas was released, I finally got around to seeing the film. I was nine years old when the movie came out but I can still remember the hoo-ha at the time over Nicolas Cage’s Oscar-winning turn as Ben, an alcoholic who heads to Vegas to drink himself to death. What I don’t recall hearing much about is Elisabeth Shue’s performance as Sera, a hooker and Ben’s unlikely love interest in the movie.

Cage is terrific in the film, displaying all the emotional volatility and physical tics you’d expect from someone whose soul and liver are curdling in unison. But Shue is equally formidable as Sera. Without her vulnerable, compassionate presence, there’d be no sympathy for Cage’s character, and she beautifully conveys a tortured soul of her own.

Abused by her pimp, shunned by her neighbours and brutally assaulted in one harrowing scene, she’s as desperately lonely as Ben, and in each other they recognise a kindred spirit. Shue was rightly Oscar-nominated for her performance, but while Cage went on to become a box-office superstar, Shue’s career would never reach the same heights. It’s one of Hollywood’s most baffling trajectories.

A decade earlier, Shue had starring roles in The Karate Kid (1984) with Ralph Macchio, Adventures in Babysitting (1987) and Cocktail (1988), that last one opposite Tom Cruise as the bartending lothario who knocks up her character, Jordan. Three hit movies in five years should’ve been enough to drive anyone to the top of Hollywood, but Shue had been typecast as the ingenue girlfriend, a demure sidekick to the male lead. Babysitting, Christopher Columbus’ directing debut and a cult classic, is one of the few films in which Shue played the main character. After Cocktail she starred in another ’80s blockbuster, Back to the Future II (1989), and its follow-up, once again playing a girlfriend (to Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly).

Even after she shattered her girl-next-door image in Leaving Las Vegas, meaty roles were not in her future. Shue’s filmography in the three decades since has been festooned with misfires and flops – Piranha 3D; Behaving Badly, playing a cougar – with a few exceptions. The Saint, with Val Kilmer, was a moderate hit; she was memorable as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s mother in the excellent Mysterious Skin; had the dubious honour of starring in a Woody Allen movie, Deconstructing Harry; and was in a couple of episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Still, marvelling at her performance in Leaving Las Vegas, I felt a pang of injustice on Shue’s part. As a keen athlete (check out those soccer skills in The Karate Kid) there’s no doubt she’d have made a fine action star (we saw flashes of this in Hollow Man, with Kevin Bacon) and who knows what else she might have been capable of – maybe a truly profound transformation, a la Charlize Theron in Monster or Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry? There’s a whiff of sexism around her career trajectory; she was 32 when Leaving Las Vegas came out – perhaps too old by Hollywood standards to land many more leading roles after that.

Recently, Shue reprised her Karate Kid role of Ali in Cobra Kai, the film’s TV spinoff. Ralph Macchio apologised offscreen to Shue for her character being uncharitably written out of the franchise in under a minute of dialogue in the second movie (she crashed his character’s car and started dating a footballer!) and fans embraced Ali’s return.