Cameron Diaz was a model with no acting experience when she was cast in The Mask, and turned out to have genuine comic timing that the subsequent decade of romantic comedies used heavily.
There’s Something About Mary is the commercial and comic peak, and she is entirely willing to look ridiculous in it, which is the reason it works.
Being John Malkovich and Vanilla Sky show the other register, and she is unrecognisable in the first.
She retired from acting in 2014 to focus on other businesses, which she has described as a deliberate choice and not a decline in offers, and returned only recently.
