Who Was Steve Buscemi's First Wife, Jo Andres? What To Know About The Late Filmmaker

The life of the modern artist is a dichotomy: Monetizing your work can kill the passion behind it, but you need money to have enough independence and freedom to continue creating art. While putting yourself out there won't always guarantee success, sometimes people are at the right place at the right time. That was certainly the case for "Ghost World" actor Steve Buscemi and his late wife, Jo Andres, who managed to succeed in the arts and love alike.

The art scene in New York's East Village is the stuff of legend, so Andres naturally fit in. The visual artist, director, and choreographer blossomed among creative contemporaries like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. After receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from Ohio University in 1980, Andres made a name for herself through "film/dance/light performances" at venues such as The Performing Garage, St. Mark's Danspace, the Collective for Living Cinema, and more, according to her now defunct website.

In 1983, her future husband was working as a New York City fireman in the exact same neighborhood, moonlighting as a comedian, and plastering his face on posters advertising his act. Andres reportedly fell in love with his likeness (including his endearing, head-turning teeth) from the posters alone, reportedly telling a friend (per GQ), "I'm going to snag that guy." Buscemi was also smitten with Andres, walking his dog exactly at the time when he knew she would be coming home from work. While Andres didn't recognize him at first, everything clicked when she visited his apartment for the first time and saw the posters from the streets. What followed was more than 30 years of marriage, one son, and a lifetime's worth of creative inspiration.

While you may recognize Steve Buscemi from cult classic films such as "The Big Lebowski" and hit series like "The Sopranos," it was his late wife, Jo Andres, who actually inspired his career pivot from a firefighter to an actor. By the time the couple wed in 1987, Andres was already being revered as "the high-priestess of day-glo" by Interview Magazine, solidifying her title a year later as a "New York quasi-cult figure" by the LA Times.

Indeed, her avant-garde work wasn't just limited to performances. In her 1988 interview with the LA Times, Andres explained, "For me it is more interesting to change the flatness of film — to make it kind of 3-D and to make light dance..." She and Buscemi collaborated on a short film called "What Happened to Pete" in 1992 – the same year he would find a mainstream audience through Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," which was influenced by "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." Andres' 1996 film, "Black Kites," was one of her most acclaimed works, screening at Sundance, Berlin, and Toronto and winning awards at Chicago and Atlanta's film festivals. The pair collaborated again for her 2012 short, "When the Curtain Comes Down."

It's no surprise that, following Andres' sudden death in 2019 after a painful battle with ovarian cancer, that Buscemi would immortalize her in an acceptance speech at CinemaCon. He said in the 2019 speech (per People), "She was my biggest supporter and, also, audience and my biggest inspiration."