New Leading Ladies To Watch

Interview, Oct, 2000 by Diane Baroni

FRANCES O'CONNOR

AN ACTRESS WHO BEDAZZLES WITH HER QUIET CHARMS

Clearly, Frances O'Connor isn't driven by dreams of Hollywood glitz. The thirty-two-year-old Australian actress, who won acclaim for her sexy turn as Fanny Price in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and can be seen this month with Brendan Fraser in Bedazzled, has been known to turn down interviews, and she wouldn't think of working a room. That's partly because O'Connor was trained in the classic acting tradition in which character and script, not packaging, are what's important. She's also a rather shy person, who refuses to discuss her personal life. Though she doesn't play the game, Hollywood is high on her. After seeing Mansfield Park, Steven Spielberg signed her up for A.I., his sci-fi blockbuster-to-be costarring Jude Law and due out in 2001. O'Connor likes a lot about Hollywood too, but isn't considering a move from her home in London. It's nice to come to California for three months and work," she says, "and then go back to England, to my real life." Hollywood--a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there?

Diane Baroni is a novelist and freelance writer living in New York.

RACHAEL LEIGH COOK

SHE LOVES TO ACT ... BUT THOSE DAMNED PRESS JUNKETS

She's only twenty, but Rachael Leigh Cook already has a string of credits an actress twice her age would envy. Within the next few weeks, she has starring roles in Blow Dry, starring Josh Hartnett, and Get Carter, with Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine. At least four other big movies are coming up, including Josie and the Pussycats, based on the '70s cartoon. She was also in the hit TV series Dawson's Creek. Her acting schedule has been hectic, she admits, but those press junkets really grate on her nerves. After her scene-stealing performance in She's All That, with Freddie Prinze, Jr., she went on a "seven-city junket here in the States and to four or live cities abroad, and that took months of my time." Painfully shy as a little girl growing up in Minneapolis, she "snapped out of it" in third grade, when she decided she wanted to be a model. At fourteen she was cast in the short film 26 Summer Street, which got her noticed. "I'm not good at a ton of things," Cook says. "I love acting because it's something I feel I can do." And her growing cult of fans agrees.

TERI POLO

NOT FROM HOOTCHIEVILLE

When Teri Polo was called to come to New York to do a screen test for Meet the Parents, the new Robert De Niro-Ben Stiller comedy, she was in full witch costume in the kitchen. It was Halloween 1999, and Polo and her husband had turned their L.A. place into a haunted house. The whole neighborhood was there, hanging out. "The producers wanted me to fly out that same night. I was in complete and utter shock," the thirty-one-year-old recalls. Somehow she it onto the red-eye and read for the part, and soon was on set trading lines with two big-time players. Polo, whose first acting gig was on the ABC daytime soap Loving, moved from New York to Hollywood five years ago and says it took some getting used to. "You know, the big breasts, hot car thing--the kind of thing I fondly refer to as Hootchieville. When I first got out here I tried dressing like a hootchie, I tried acting like a hootchie, but it didn't work. I guess I'm just not a hootchie at heart." (But she graciously humored the photographer for the hot pho to above.)