Mirabella - 1999

True enough, but as she's explained in the past, the only way to remain a working actor, at least at the heady plateau she reached with her Oscar (for 1995's Mighty Aphrodite), is to stay in the game. She has issued the standard actor's disclaimers depicting celebrity as a necessary evil of her trade; she may truly be shy enough to be that rare one who actually means it. And yet there's clearly a hunger in her to make a long, ascendant run. You don't graduate magna cum laude from Harvard without showing a teeth-gritted determination to achieve. Mixed in with her formidable will, however, is an unsureness her body language betrays. She is given to pointing out that there are plenty of starlets in Hollywood more gorgeous than she is, and while there are several Web sites that find her girl-next-door attractiveness well worth cataloging, she does seem to feel at touch gawdy amidst the flock of absurdly beautiful women with whom she competes for roles.

They will shed few tears for her, resplendent in red (and, sometimes, a platinum-blonde wig that reminds us of the bubblier, box-office-friendly Mira of earlier films) in her latest movie, Spike Lee's Summer of Sam. She happily lived at home in her New York apartment for location shooting in the Bronx during the film's last months-and she's ready to invest some time to discuss her work as the initially clueless, long-suffering wife of adulterous hairdresser John Leguizamo in the sprawling ensemble piece.

We're here on neutral ground, her amiable expression hints as she walks up to a table in a beach-adjacent Santa Monica restaurant, but the stakes are much higher for me. When a canvas bag holding a tape recorder is laid on the table, she wonders, "Is that thing on now?" (no, not yet), which causes just the faintest additional temperature drop in wha'ts already an unseasonably cool late afternoon. Movie stars appear on our horizon with first and last names intact (and character actors, like William H. Macy and F. Murray Abraham, get to add an honorific initial), but as their careers get more complicated and interesting, we come to call some familiarly by just their first. Mira would seem to have achieved such status.

For starters, she is indelibly somebody's beloved child. Though she gamely did all she could to avoid entering the business as Paul Sorvino's daughter, she took her Best Supporting Actress Oscar in hand and said, "When you give me this award, you honor my father, Paul Sorvino, who taught me everything I know about acting." Sorvino pere, who has been in more than seventy-five films without a nomination, spontaneously (though with operatic grandeur and force) burst into tears.

So the thirty-one-year-old who has been getting on a first-name basis with her public will always remain a daughter in our eyes, and also be associated with that splendidly goofy performance in Mighty Aphrodite. Her bimbo call girl/porn actress with the heart of gold, a squeaky, sandpapery voice, and blithely salcious mouth dominated Woody Allen's twenty-seventh film. It was only her fifth, and getting cast was no cakewalk. She was frustrated to read-with the usual mystery surrounding an Allen project-a part for which she knew little of the context: "I barely knew she was a prostitute." Then Whit Stillman's Barcelona came out, and Allen screened the film, in which Sorvino played a Catalan-bred girl with leftist politics (she scolds an American naval attache about his country's nefarious "AFL-CIA"). "And (Allen) said, 'This girl has nothing to do with the girl I met last year-let's give her a try.'" Wearing a black spandex dress and mules with plastic flowers, she visited Allen and his brain trust in London: "I came into the Dorchester Hotel dressed like a hooker-May I have Mr. Allen's room, please?'" She was offered the part three days later and had a great time working with Allen, despite remaining, as a committed Method actress, in her character's voice and stance for the greater part of the shoot. "I think Wooky found that a little off-putting at first. He's say, 'Mira, could you come over here?' And I'd say, 'Yes Mr. Allen,' in the voice. He would be a little shocked. but then I kind of realized that he's a shy person like I'm a shy person, and I just started approaching him, asking him how he was, and even if I stayed in the voice, we had really good conversations."

Mira Sorvino was born in New York City in 1967 to a father who hadn't yet begun to make it as an actor and mother Lorraine Davis, a devoutly Catholic woman who also studied drama. The family moved to the suburban New Jersey town of Tenafly when she was three, and she grew up staging kids' basement theatricals. Mira was a head taller than her classmates and already feeling somewhat alienated from them when she saw Jessica Lange's corrosive performance in Frances and, also during her sixteenth year, read Donald Spoto's biography of Marilyn Monroe: "I was captivated by her, that dreamlike persona she has coming out of her eyes-a sort of hopeful innocence combined with sexuality, which for me was really a revelation."

After graduating from high school in 1984, Mira headed for Harvard. "They don't let just anyone into that Harvard," says her friend Lisa Kudrow (Vassar,'85) in a "check out the big brain on Mira" tone, but even there she excelled, graduating with honors largely on the strength of her thesis on "Anti-Africanism in China." Her insights weren't culled merely from the library, but from a prolonged stay in Beijing-longer than she'd planned. She had spent the summer before her junior year living with her dad in Los Angeles, auditioning for movies against his advice: "He felt you should be an actor only if there's nothing else you could do with equal enthusiasm. Otherwise it will not be worth it." Why? "The rejection. Elia Kazan said it's a career of comebacks, and that's what it is." But comebacks demand the first leap forward, and though she got one offer for a horror movie, Mira headed back east without having gotten a job. Meanwhile her parents, after more than twenty years of marriage, broke up: she was devastated. Partly as a reaction to the divorce, but also to gain academic credits as an East Asian studies major, she headed for Beijing. She took a room with a local family, emerging eight months later with her thesis researched and a fluent command of the Putonghua dialect. She might have returned to teach or make a documentary if the Tiananmen Square massacre hadn't occurred in 1989.

Instead, she rented a cheap apartment with the bathroom down the hall in Manhattan, and began waitressing. She also worked in classes on the Stanislavski method that would become her artistic template, and she went on auditions without great success, until the TV soap The Guiding Light offered her the chance to try out for a likely gig-if she'd sign on for three years. "I found myself getting closer and closer to the test and feeling like I was marching towards prison or the army. And then I said, 'Wait a second, whoever is doing this should love it.' I finally decided, 'If within three years I can't do as much for my career as the soap will do, then I don't belong in this business.'"

In three years, she'd have her Oscar. First came a short-term stint on another soap, then a small part in the indie film Amongst Friends, and then Robert Redford's Quiz Show, as the wife who goads a government investigator played by Rob Morrow into action ("You are like the Uncle Tom of the Jews"). In those early days, she was terrified of failure: "The night after my first day, I went home and thought, "They're going to fire me, I know it."

Her vault was something to behold - "She was a cocktail waitress just a year before winning the Academy Award," her father has marveled - and with subsequent outings in HBO's Norma Jean and Marilyn (with Ashley Judd playing the first half of the title character) in 1996, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (with Lisa Kudrow) in 1997, and At First Sight (opposite Val Kilmer), she has stayed visible as an actress who is said to command $3 million per picture. She has worked hard to avoid the kind of career trough that captured her fellow neo-phyte Oscar winner, Marisa Tomei.

Her survival is largely thanks to meticulous performances in smaller films such as Beautiful Girls and Free Money (opposite a hero, Marlon Brando), and not the riskier genre pictures (Replacement Killers and Mimic), which, she has insisted, were not misteps to be chalked up to the influence of Tarantino. When they met at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1995, he was still the brilliant upstart, boldly taking her hand in his, though they were merely aquantices, as they sat in the audience. The romance played out publicly until March 1998, when, while shooting At First Sight, she and Tarantino issued an annoucement that "we still love each other very much" but "at this point in our lives, we should not be together." She said later that "we were eitehr going to get married or break up."

In the meantime, she felt ambushed by a journalist who had met her in college and described her in GQ profile as "mercilessly intelligent, profoundly unrelaxed." She got in a public spat with a magazine that she said deceived her into a photo shoot where she was depicted as Joan Crawford, and continued to be dogged by stories of being trouble on the set. "Mira is extremly commited to whatever she is doing," says Kudrow. "She defenitly has something to say about what's happening, has good suggestions to make it better, and she's not very 'girly' about it, either. A lot of people don't like that."

And thus Mira arrives in 1999 as part of Summer of Sam, brought to the project by hyphenate Michael Imperioli (best known as Christopher Multisanti in HBO's The Sopranos), who cowrote the screenplay. Imperioli had already worked with her on two indie films and told Lee to ignore rumors that she was difficult: "If she has that stigma," Imperioli says, "it's from speaking her mind about something serious involving the betterment of the project - not 'My trailer's too cold.'"

Lee became a believer: "I'm not going to lie," he says. "I heard some Mira stories, too, but I did not want to be poisoned. So I made a concious effort to not call up anybody. And I found them not to be true when I was working with her. She was always thinking about her character, where she fits in this marriage, and how can we make it better?"

In Lee's controversial look at the crazy summer of 1977, when the Son of Sam killer terrorized New York, Sorvino and Lequizamo act out a private drama. It's what Lee calls "that whole Madonna and whore thing where husbands put their wives on pedestals, but when they want to get their freak on, they go outside their marriage, because to do that type of stuff with their wife would be sinful." If Lequizamo runs the show early on, Sorvino's Dionna is defenitly heard from in a third-act verbal brawl that's part Pinter, part Jerry Springer, as she spits out such endearments as "linguine dick" and "faggot hairdresser."

"My character undergoes a real transformation," says Sorvino, "He's abusive, he's been so patently unfair with her, and she just explodes. It's interesting because as a woman, you don't usually play anger as much as you play sadness. I think I cry in every single movie I've ever done. The real fight scenes are far fewer, and this one was like one of those martial fights when people just unleash whatever they've been holding back for a long time."

When it comes to her current relationship with with Oliver Martinez, things are far more placid. Sorvino admits that one of the reasons she made New York her home base was the quicker flight to Paris and Martinez. And though she would consider a peid-a-terre in L.A., right now she's enjoying New York for its anchoring blood ties: "I'm Italian American, and we're pretty family-oriented, so it's nice for me to just across the park from my dad, or fifteen blocks away from my sister, with my mom and brother still in New Jersey."

The resturant where we've been sitting is just a brief, nostaglic walk around the corner from the Venice Beach building where Romy and Michele took off for their reunion - and as she pulls her leather jacket back on to visit it a stranger hollers out, "Hey Mira!" from fifty yards away. She waves, just before a small, reflexive head-ducking gesture. Such greetings are rare in her Manhatten neighborhood, she says. "I've been trying this whole year to get away from the buisness, about what's happening in Hollywood, and to get back to being a person who reads and sees their friends - and my family who are all back there. The more I can get back to like my old sort of college self, the happier I am."

Still, she's confident she'll approach the next acting job without the fears that once hamstrung her. "I'm not nervous like that anymore," she says, as the gray afternoon brightens a tad. "My work doesn't terrify me the way it used to. You know, that insecurity of being a beginner is gone."