Joanna Going first caught the public's attention during her stints on two popular NBC soap operas in the mid to late 1980s: on "Search for Tomorrow" she was ingenue Evie Stone and on "Another World", psychic Lisa Grady. The ravishing oval-faced brunette also appeared in a variety of stage productions in western MA and off-Broadway before landing her first primetime gig--a busted pilot for a sci-fi series in which she played a frontier sheriff trying to maintain peace while raising her two younger siblings. Going was seen to better effect as the governess with mysterious ties to her employers in the primetime remake of the Gothic horror soap opera "Dark Shadows" (NBC, 1991). On the ABC comedy-drama "Going to Extremes", shot on location in Jamaica, she was a serious medical student attending school in the Caribbean.
Going made an impressive film debut as Kevin Costner's second wife in the overproduced (and overlong) "Wyatt Earp" (1994). As Josephine (Josie) Marcus, a Jewish actress originally engaged to a rival of Earp's, Going displayed a gutsy adventuresome quality and more than held her own against her impressive co-star. She received critical acclaim for her portrayal of the youthful version of Jean Simmons' character in Jocelyn Moorhouse's "How to Make an American Quilt" and appeared briefly as an anti-war demonstrator in Oliver Stone's "Nixon" (both 1995). 1997 shaped up as a good year for the actress who had three roles that demonstrated her versality: she was the eldest "good" sister of Liv Tyler and Jennifer Connelly in Pat O'Connor's drama "Inventing the Abbotts", an unstable stripper in the comic thriller "Keys to Tulsa" and a con artist who is (literally) the woman of Brendan Fraser's dreams in the romantic comedy "Still Breathing".