Too Beautiful for You?

I have a Movieline triple play for you today.  These three profiles come from the February 1998 issue.  First, supermodel Claudia Schiffer discusses her first major movie role in Abel Ferrara’s The Blackout.  Then Welsh newcomer, Catherine Zeta-Jones, takes no prisoners on the set of The Mask of Zorro.  Finally, Showgirls survivor Elizabeth Berkely tries desperately to tell herself and a Movieline reporter that everything will be all right when audiences see her in The Real Blonde.

Claudia Schiffer: Too Beautiful for You?

Models can’t act. We know this, right? It’s not just a cliché. Look at Cindy Crawford in Fair Game, Vendela as Mrs. Freeze in Batman & Robin, Naomi Campbell in Miami Rhapsody.

Even Elle Macpherson, who’s had some success on-screen, mostly just plays models. Proof, yes? Well, Claudia Schiffer, who has landed her first starring role in Abel Ferrara’s The Blackout, believes that a sweeping generalization like “models can’t act” is unfair: “Of course there are some models who are not good,” she says, “but it has been proven that some models can act. Look at Kim Basinger, Sharon Stone or Andie MacDowell, who were all models–they are really fantastic actresses.”

Yeah, but as models, these women were never in the same super-stratosphere as Claudia Schiffer, who has been on more than 500 magazine covers, who earns an estimated $14 million per year, who was described by GQ as the most beautiful woman in the world, who once wore a million-dollar diamond-encrusted bra on the cover of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and who is all over the tabloids with magician David Copperfield.

“Well, Andie MacDowell was very well known as a model,” argues Schiffer. “She had quite a name. So…” So why, I ask her, are there so many skeptics willing to pounce on a cover girl who makes the leap to movies? “Well,” says Schiffer patiently, “any actor, when they start out, is probably not so good, but no one knows who they are at first.” Meaning, if you’re already known as a rock, sports or modeling star, you don’t get that same blissful period of anonymity? “That’s right,” says Schiffer. “You’re not allowed to make a mistake.”

Abel Ferrara, Schiffer’s director on The Blackout, is a strange, nasty man who makes strange, nasty films full of violence, sex, drugs and death, many of which are intoxicatingly enjoyable. He’s best known for giving us anti-beauty–things you really don’t want to see, like Harvey Keitel’s wanger in Bad Lieutenant. How did he get the exceedingly beautiful Schiffer to star in his film? He sent her the script, she says, but after that it was all her doing. “I loved it immediately,” she recalls. “I said, I have to do this movie. The pushing came from my side.”

And what role does she play? “I’m the supportive girlfriend of Matty [Matthew Modine], who’s trying to get rid of his demons, which are connected to drugs and alcohol, and also a girl, played by Beatrice Dalle. I’m the one who helps him get it together.” So she’s the good girl? “Kind of the good girl, yeah, but Matty’s kind of not in love with me. He’s in love with Beatrice Dalle, who he can’t have.” In the story, substance abuser Matty is also a movie star, which reminds me of another Ferrara movie, Dangerous Game, in which James Russo plays a substance-abusing movie actor and Madonna plays an untalented movie actress whom Russo ends up shooting. Schiffer says she liked that film, and of Ferrara she says, “I always found him not like anyone else. He’s very interesting, very… deep.”

Schiffer has not acted since her debut in Macaulay Culkin’s Richie Rich, in which she played an aerobics instructor. Why did she wait three years to follow that disappointment up with a film by Abel Ferrara, of all people? “Everyone asks me that, Why Abel Ferrara, why this movie?” says Schiffer. “They say, ‘We thought you’d be in an action movie or a romantic movie.’ They didn’t think I’d ever want to be with such a dark and kind of strange director. But I didn’t want to do a commercial movie. I think you learn more from an artistic movie. I didn’t realize when I made it that so many people would be shocked.

Schiffer has no plans to quit modeling. On top of that, she’s dipping her hand into just about every pot she can reach–she’s part owner of The Fashion Café with fellow supermodels Naomi Campbell and Elle Macpherson, she puts out a swimsuit calendar every year, and she has four exercise videos on the market. Is acting just another adventure? “I’m not acting just to say I’m in a movie,” she insists. “I’m fortunate enough that I don’t have to accept every movie that comes along. I said no to a lot of money to do The Blackout. So a [movie has] to be something really great. Otherwise, what’s it gonna do for me?”

Schiffer wears no makeup in The Blackout. And her hair isn’t done, and her clothes are, as she puts it, “pretty low key.” In other words, no million-dollar bras. “We tried to get away from how people imagine me,” she says. “Somebody said they didn’t realize it was me in the movie. That’s the greatest compliment someone can give you.”

One of the most glamorously recognizable faces in the world not getting recognized–and liking it? Seems hard to believe, but Schiffer sounds as if she means it. Or maybe she’s just acting.

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Joshua Mooney interviewed Russell Crowe for the September issue of Movieline.

Catherine Zeta-Jones: Welsh Spitfire

The 28-year-old Welsh-born actress also has a mouth on her. She was at one time, for example, in the habit of referring to herself as “the original Princess of Wales, but without the bulimia.” She summarized America with these words: “Generally, people here seem to be on Prozac, and sometimes I wish I was.” Today she’s in first-rate verbal form, too. While wrapping her legs around her neck to prove her ease with tantric yoga, she gulps, “I’m still not wining, dining and 69-ing the stars.

What Zeta Jones is doing is working her romantic just-off-the-moors wiles on Hollywood. In case you can’t quite place her, Zeta Jones was the femme fatale pilot who slunk around The Phantom in a catsuit making good use of her Welsh brogue. She also played the witchy temptress in Hallmark Hall of Fame’s The Return of the Native. Her highest-profile appearance, though, will surely be her starring turn opposite Antonio Banderas in the upcoming The Mask of Zorro, in which she plies her seductive powers in a sword-fighting scene that leaves Antonio Banderas’s costume in shreds.

Being as how Banderas is precious goods–not only to the studio but to his wife, Melanie Griffith–did Zeta Jones worry about cutting too close to the bare essentials? “I told Melanie she had to buy me a lot of Gucci clothes so that I wouldn’t do any serious harm to Antonio with my sword. And she said, OK,” the actress laughs.

Zeta Jones apparently won over Banderas himself at her audition, in which she exclaimed to director Martin Campbell, “Can you please direct me better? For God’s sake, man, get it together! You got a lot of money to make this movie–direct, direct.” What was Banderas’s reaction to this? “Antonio said, ‘That’s my girl. We’re going to get on fine.'” Zeta Jones’s spiritedness took a different approach on the set–patience and tough perseverance. She didn’t balk at the daily horseback lessons or the sword-fighting trials; she tolerated the endless hairstyling that gave her migraines; and she endured the corset that suffocated her (“You can’t even loosen it to have another tamale for lunch”).

In case you hadn’t surmised this, Zeta Jones–who at one time was engaged to Braveheart‘s Angus McFadyen–has definite opinions about what she wants in a romantic partner. She prefers dating rituals here to those in Wales: “Where I come from, it’s like, ‘Would you like a pint of Guinness and pack of crisps?'” Here, she appreciated her outing on a Learjet (“We just flew around”). She’s certainly accessible, in her fashion, to such invitations; she drives a Range Rover with a cell phone, and availed herself generously of the perks that doing Zorro for a Japanese-owned studio afforded her. “I got Sony everything,” she says. “It’s like, you can beep me, page me, fax me, e-mail me. You can do all these things and then I’ll decide whether I’m going to get back.”

If a guy is her type, she says she’s likely to love him up by calling him “angel chops”–and if he’s not, he’ll know he’s getting the shaft when she informs him, “I’m really not interested in listening to the bollocks that’s coming out of your mouth.” She does not care for men “with egos the size of their whatevers.” Oh, and don’t try to smooth talk her, either: “I don’t like liars. I don’t like duplicitous little shits. The thing that really gets me going is duplicity. I can’t bear it.” You have to wonder who Zeta Jones will date in Hollywood when she sums up her kind of guy: “I like a real man–not stupid, crazy, or trying to be hip.”

One last question. What was Banderas’s sexiest accessory as Zorro–his whip, his cape, his mask, or his stallion? “His mask,” answers Zeta Jones, “because that hides a multitude of sins.”

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Wolf Schneider

Elizabeth Berkley: Starlet Fever

Consider the Tinseltown lookers who have this birth year in common: Jenny McCarthy, Cameron Diaz, Nicole Eggert, Antonio Sabato Jr., Carmen Electra, Ben Affleck, Jennie Garth, David Charvet, Alyssa Milano, Amy Locane and the London twins, Jeremy and Jason. Plus Elizabeth Berkley. But then, Berkley, despite her lap-dancing, pole-licking turn as a sequined sociopath in Showgirls, chafes at the term “starlet.”

“There are a lot of people who view me as a great actress,” she says, “or I wouldn’t be put in their films.” Whether or not the world comes to see things her way when her new movies, The Real Blonde and Taxman, are released is a matter of indifference to Berkley. “Some people may never get it,” she concedes. “But I’m not concerned with how people perceive me.”

This line of defense had to have come in handy when Berkley was going through the career crash-and-burn that was Showgirls. I cite two other actresses who also got disastrous reviews for their first big Hollywood films and lived to tell the tale–Jean Seberg and Tippi Hedren–but Berkley has other role models in mind. “It happened to Jessica Lange,” she states. “In the beginning she was ridiculed [because of King Kong]. Look at Susan Sarandon–The Rocky Horror Picture Show was one of her first forays into film. Look at Vanessa Williams. It took these women a long time to get that respect. But what is time? I’m young, and I’m a fighter.”

Berkley says that the directors who asked to meet her in the wake of Showgirls meant a lot to her. “I got very close to getting cast on The Fifth Element, and Luc Besson couldn’t have been more supportive. The same goes for Milos Forman when I auditioned for The People Vs. Larry Flynt. I’m sure when I was cast in The Real Blonde, Tom DiCillo got shit from people who didn’t yet know what I have to offer.”

Happily, Berkley’s role in The Real Blonde–as the temptress who encourages Matthew Modine to stray from his marriage–is longer than her cameo appearance as a trophy girlfriend in The First Wives Club (“That movie didn’t give me much screen time, but it’s gotten me other roles”). Getting beyond being a Showgirls starlet may have more to do with longevity than anything else, Berkley has come to realize. “I didn’t have 10 movies for people to compare, so they thought I was that girl, Nomi Malone. Well, I’m not.”

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Edward Margulies

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