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Profile Gretchen Mol (MALL "like shopping mall," a Dutch variation) is an actor unlike no other. She was born 25 years ago in Deep River, Connecticut. She has done stage, television, and movies. Recently she was named as one of Vanity Fair's Hot Young Hollywood Stars. Thus this is why I write this profile on Glamourous Gretchen Connection Gretchen was educated in musical theater during high school in hopes of becoming an actor. She graduated from Valley Regional High School in 1991. Gretchen moved to New York and got into the American Musical and Dramatic Academy but began to dislike the whole corniess of musicals. Her stage work includes, at the Dorset Theatre Festival, the roles of Peggy in Godspell and Snookie in 110 in the Shade; and Bus Stop, No Exit. Being in the right place at the right time helps though. Not since the teenage Lana Turner skipped school and got discovered sipping a soda at Schwab's Drugstore on Sunset Boulevard 60 years ago has there been a starlet story to rival that of Gretchen's. Two years ago, Gretchen was a struggling New York actress working two jobs and living in a tiny apartment in Hell's Kitchen, one of New York's crowded, seamy inner-city areas. Gretchen worked as an usher at the trendy Angelika art house cinema complex in Soho and as a coat-check girl at Manhattan's Michael's Restaurant. Michael's is a favourite haunt of literary and talent agents and independent film-makers. The Angelika is where small independent films get their big New York opening. Coincidence and luck, or clever strategy on Mol's part -- but it worked. One of the regulars at Michael's noticed that the coat-check girl had been absent for a couple of months. When she returned he asked what had happened. "I told him I'd been off doing regional theatre. When he discovered I was an actress, he asked if I had representation and one thing led to another," recalls Gretchen. We're talking the old runaway-snowball-in-hell kind of momentum. Mol found herself cast in several national commercials and in the debut episode of ABC's Spin City. Thus she ended up working in Hollywood as somehow she caught someone's eye. It was Spike Lee who cast her as Girl 12 in his phone-sex comedy Girl 6 (1996). That joint exploded all over the place as it co-starred Madonna, Naomi Campbell, and Halle Berry. She was next featured in Abel Ferrara's The Funeral (1996), a gangster flick starring Christopher Walken and Chris Penn. All bit roles as she turned to TV miniseries, she starred in Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn (1996), a Hallmark Hall of Fame production; and Larry McMurtry's Dead Man's Walk (1996), which co-starred Edward James Olmos and David Arquette. She worked with Abel Ferrara again in HBO's Subway Stories. So it was just TV and little known indie flicks. Gretchen also worked on the half-hour NYU graduate film Bleach directed by Bill Platt. It went to "Sundance and won a couple of awards." (Source: "source") She then won the role of Judy in Donnie Brasco (1997) with Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. She played a gangster's wife yet again. Gretchen is also featured in Stephen Kay's The Last Time I Committed Suicide with Keanu Reeves, and in The Deli, a drama based on letters between Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac. In 1998, she followed up her bit roles with a role in Music From Another Room, a romantic comedy that follows the exploits of Danny (Jude Law), a young man who grew up believing he was destined to marry the girl he helped deliver as a five year old boy when his neighbor went into emergency labor. Twenty-five years later, Danny returns to his hometown and finds the irresistible Anna Swann (Gretchen Mol) but she finds it easy to resist him since she is already engaged to dreamboat Eric (Jon Tenney, a very practical match. In pursuit of Anna, Danny finds himself entangled with each of the eccentric Swanns including blind, sheltered Nina (Jennifer Tilly), cynical sister Karen (Martha Plimpton), big brother Bill (Jeremy Piven) and dramatic mother Grace (Brenda Blethyn) as he fights to prove that fate should never be messed with and passion should never be practical. Her career reached a new level as she quietly snagged the lead opposite Matt Damon in fall 1998's Rounders. The story follows the trials of a reformed gambling addict (Damon) who falls back into the world of high-stakes underground poker to help a recently paroled pal (Ed Norton) pay off debts to loan sharks. John Dahl directs from a script is by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. The film also co-stars John Malkovich (see the Uma connection?). Also in at the same time, she starred as Leonardo DiCaprio's boyfriend in the Woody Allen film Celebrity. The movie talked about the world of celebrities through the eye of a reknowned writer, played by Kenneth Branagh, who quits writing so he can improve his relationship with his wife. Co-starring are Irina Pantaeva, Winona Ryder, and Charlize Theron. A black and white feature, the special effects are by Industrial Light & Magic. "Nobody saw my movies but at least they got me an audition for Rounders. I got to read with Matt Damon and director John Dahl and I got to meet (Miramax head honcho) Harvey Weinstein," Gretchen said of her experience. "It was such an exciting moment for me. I felt I'd finally had my chance at the big time." It was a memorable meeting for Gretchen, but not for Weinstein. A few days later, he announced to the trade papers that the studio's Scream girl, Neve Campbell, would be playing Damon's girlfriend in Rounders. Undaunted, Mol went to the Miramax premier of Jackie Brown. When she saw Weinstein, she felt she had to speak to him. "I thanked him for letting me audition and said there were no hard feelings that I didn't get the role. I was shattered. He didn't remember me and he didn't even remember what movie I had auditioned for. I had to remind him of everything." That's where things take a Lana Turneresque spin. The next day, Campbell phoned Weistein to say she was going to pass on Rounders. As the legend now goes, Weinstein pounded his fists on his desk and yelled "get me that blonde who talked to me at the premier last night" -- and a starlet was born. "I got the Rounders role. Harvey insisted I go to the Vanity Fair Oscar party to represent Miramax and he sat me at Michael Douglas' table," Gretchen recalls. "Everybody in the business you can imagine came up to talk to Michael and his dad (Kirk Douglas). Michael was so gracious. He joked and introduced me to everyone as Miramax's hot new actress." Enter DA HYPE. Due to the fact she was co-starring with Hollywood's top actors, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, Vanity Fair declared Gretchen Hollwood's next "It Girl." The unknown actress was suddenly thrusted to the spotlight. Her "provocative" photos grace the September issue. "Opportunities like I've been given get you in the door in this business, but you still have to prove yourself, says Gretchen, playing down the hype. "Right now I'm just trying to enjoy the exposure I'm getting from the Vanity Fair cover and trying to forget the pressure it puts on me. People expect you to live up to all the hype. That's a huge responsibility." On that cover picture, Gretchen is wearing a thin, slinky dress cut down to Ecuador, leaving very little to the imagination. "It's pretty provocative and I know that," said Gretchen. "I'm not sure what the different reactions are. I know when I saw it, I thought about my family. But everyone's been positive. The response has been really encouraging. I didn't really know [on whether the cover would be that racy]. Of course, I saw the dress, and we were at the beach and everything. I was pretty sure it was going to be the cover. It was really a collaborative effort. Annie [Leibovitz] was really aware of making me comfortable." The magazine pondered whether Gretchen is the next "it" girl, then helped the cause by showing a lot of Mol's "it" inside with an Annie Leibovitz-shot photo spread that also included, of all things, a picture of Gretchen in a sexy pose in an old outhouse. "When we came upon that, it wasn't part of the shoot. We were in this terrific place in Martha's Vineyard, and here in the middle of this beautiful foliage was this old, old wooden outhouse that was really so terrific. I'm fascinated, when driving around, of seeing broken-down old barns and things like that. When Annie had me sit in it, she took the Polaroid. It was so beautiful. It didn't seem like this was an outhouse. I didn't conjure up those thoughts." "When the magazine hit the stands I was living in New York and people were pretty blase about it. Then I came to Los Angeles. From the moment I arrived in the airport, I was hounded by photographers and autograph-seekers," Gretchen remembers. "It was a whole different reality. I was so relieved to get back to New York." "Some doors were opened after the Vanity Fair publicity," she reports. "To be working is what I wanted it to be about." Her name was tossed around everywhere, including rumors to be in the running for the film Million Dollar Hotel, a film written by U2 lead vocalist Bono. Return of Da Mol! In late May of 1999, The Thirteenth Floor, a sci-fi thriller co-starring Vincent D'Onofrio, opened. With the aid of their computers, programmers have been able to create mind-boggling virtual reality worlds. Will there come a day when the characters within these computer programs become so sophisticated that they will be able to create their own virtual realities? And exactly what will happen when these worlds within worlds collide? That is the premise behind this thriller, which like Dark City, The Matrix, and eXistenZ, this film takes great pains to blur the lines between reality and imagination until the viewer is as bewildered as the characters. In it, Gretchen, was required to play as many as three different characters as the worlds of fantasy and reality entered each other's orbits. "I could definitely relate. I had my own personal brush with reality and fantasy last year," recalls Gretchen, who was a virtual unknown until she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in the September of 1998. During the filming of The Thirteenth Floor, Gretchen experienced another type of reality check. One of the women she plays is a mysterious, sophisticated debutante. The other is a brash, gum-chewing check-out girl. "There were people on the crew who responded to me differently depending on which makeup I was wearing. That was pretty disturbing, to say the least." For her role in The Thirteenth Floor, she portrays a vamp from the past is just about right, for she is often compared to the starlets of the '40s and '50s. "Probably because I don't slump and I don't have a lot of hipness going on," says Gretchen, smirking at her self-deprecating wit. "I get told these things, when they say I am a cross between this and that. Ultimately, you are who you are." And they would be? "Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe get tossed around," she says casually. Neither Kelly nor Monroe did pop and fast food commercials. T But as we step into the millenium, Gretchen's resume continues to build. There's the Jason Alexander (Seinfeld's George Castanza) film Just Looking - a coming-of-age period comedy set in the 1950s. She will be featured in Tim Robbins' upcoming take on the young Orson Welles, in the The Cradle Will Rock where she does a cameo as Marion Davies, the vivacious blonde actress. Gretchen plays a Thirties dancehall sweetheart of jazz pianist Sean Penn in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (which also stars Uma Thurman). Yet the most interesting role is for Forever Mine directed by Paul Schrader, which also stars Joseph Fiennes and Ray Liotta. In it she plays the wife of Ray Liotta's wife. They travel to Miami, where she meets Shakespeare in Love's (and younger brother of Ralph) Joseph Fiennes's cabana boy. Gretchen's character falls for him and that stretches for the next fifteen years. For once, a major role that leaves her room to be more than just a girlfriend. Eight months later, Gretchen still lives in her cramped two-room Manhattan apartment, "not a penthouse suite by any stretch." She's also working, and mostly hoping that decent roles, not fame, come her way. She has no delusions. "The movie industry is all about packaging," says Gretchen at a Beverly Hills hotel. She's not saying that like a good thing. Her predicted starburst was to arrive last year with the release of Rounders, Celebrity, ironically enough, and The Thirteenth Floor. Both pictures failed to inspire moviegoers and critics, so Gretchen almost went unnoticed. Keeping it real is what really matters. One of doing that is by not moving to Hollywood. "In L.A.," maintains Gretchen, "I am bombarded by movie posters and movie billboards. It's sort of celebrity overload. I see everything while I'm driving around, and I say, 'Oh, that's coming out. I remember I auditioned for that and I didn't get it.' And it's so hard to figure out if something's happening to me for real or just because of some celebrity bull. I guess I'm very skeptical." So Manhattan is where she lives, where even a beautiful blonde Vanity Fair cover girl actress can live in relative obscurity. "It's okay there," admits Gretchen. "I'm not hounded that much. And believe me," she adds chuckling. "I don't look like that Vanity Fair cover when I'm shopping in the supermarket." Fame has not gone to her head. As long as she gets good roles, fame can take a back seat. Gretchen does "miss all the great people I've gotten to know in the old neighbourhood [Hell's Kitchen]." A promising career lies ahead for Gretchen as she continues to make waves by doing bit roles in smart small films and gradually moving the way up the ladder called SUPASTAR. But for now, she keeps it real doing the low-budget independent films of the love of acting, not the cheddar. And so she has...into the 2000 and beyond, Gretchen has piled on the roles. These include: Attraction - Formerly known as Stalk. Opens February 2001 (possibly limited release). This thriller co-stars Samantha Mathis, Tom Everett Scott, and Matthew Settle. It's about a young man who starts dating a new girl, his ex-girlfriend gets... jealous. Gretchen plays the ex-girlfriend. Directed by Russell DeGrazier. Distributed by Trimark Pictures. Gretchen will be doing a miniseries for A&E based on Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" and aired on A&E. Finally, she hit the stage in London and Broadway in Neil LaBute's "The Shape of Things" (co-starring starring Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, and Fred Weller). Smashing reviews all around, a film adaptation is in the works. In 2000 to 2002, she appeared on TV in movies ("Picnic" and "Freshening Up" - which was directed by her brother Jim) to short films ("Zoe Loses It") on HBO and Cinemax. Directed by MTV veteran Amie ("HERB") - who wrote, directed and produced this short film and also stars Amanda Peet and Amy Poehler. MTV Executive Produced and funded the production and upon completion, ZOE LOSES IT was sold to HBO. It is current airing on HBO and CINEMAX. Wait there's more...our girl Gretchen might have landed the role of a lifetime - as Lynne Camden, one third of the lawyer trio in David E. Kelley's ("Ally McBeal") "girls club" coming to TV's Fall 2002. We know it. We still believe.