There's Something About Mira - 1998

And it's not just her brainy background, her brilliant bimbo roles-of her bodacious bod.

"Brainy beauty" is not an oxymoron. Mademoiselle meets Mira Sorvino, a long-legged Harvard-grad-turned-actress now pursuing a continuing education in Hollywood. What has Mira learned in Tinseltown? To experience life guilt-free, not unlike Linda Ash, the character she played in "Mighty Aphrodite." Although the young actress was brought up in a strict home, she now eagerly embraces edgy, sensual roles. We give Mira an A+.

WHEN MIRA SORVINO ARRIVES FOR Madamoiselle's Los Angeles phot shoot, you can't help noticing her fingernails are bitten to the quick. "I rip them off when I'm nervous," she says-which is a surprise, considering how carefully turned-out this Academy Award-winning actress always is. Moments later, she's eyeing the food table. Perhaps she can't decide between the kiwi or the oatmeal cookies? Nope. It's more like she's trying to decide if the plates are serving up treats or bombs. "I was raised in a house where eating was an obsession. I almost have a fear of food," she admits. And then she smiles her trademark smile, a mix of self-assurance and self-doubt, moxie and ruefulness.

Sorvino's vacillating quality makes you want to protect her. You sense, somewhere , a whole lot of quaking going on. But cut to the photo shoot: Sorvino has had a personality transplant. She's fearless, full of sunshine. With delicious abandon, she's doing her own style of ecstatic flamenco dancing, barefoot, in the parking lot, in a tight red dress, while the photographer clicks the shutter at a hundred hits per minute.

"I don't like the attention," Sorvino explains. "I like perfoming. In the safety of a role I can be free."

The Many Faces of Mira

It's Sorvino's ability to convey several emotions simultaneously-nervy and nervous, sensual and uptight-that makes her such a compelling actress. She graduated from Harvard magna cum laude (where she later made a documentary about anti-Semitism in the Soviet Unoin), which helps explain why she's often cast by such brainy directors as Whit Stillman (Barcelona), Woody Allen (Mighty Aphrodite) and Spike Lee (Sorvino's new project, Summer of Sam). But she's at her best when playing women who rely on their sexuality. Consider her portrayals of a hooker (in Mighty Aphrodite, for which earned her Oscar); Lisa Kudrow's delightfully dim-witted pal (in Romy & Michele's High School Reunion); and the ultimate sex object, Marilyn Monroe (in HBO's Norma Jean and Marilyn). Sorvino proves it takes a smart actress to play dumb--brilliantly.

Yet even with the résumé, Sorvino doesn't feel comfortable resting on her laurels. Her father, the actor Paul Sorvino (he does great mobster in Good fellas and a mean Henry Kissinger in Nixon), is "very bombastic, with a larger-than-life personality," says Mira. "He's a perfectionist. You have to do a good job; you can't fall down. That's a blessing and a curse. It pushes you to do good things but you're always beating yourself up." Having a strict religious mother didn't make things easier. "I find myself feeling guilty simply because I'm in the habit of it."

MADAMOISELLE: Tell me more about this guilt.

MIRA SORVINO: I was raised very religiously, in the sense that there was an absolute right and wrong. When it came to what people considered vices, everything was black and white. Especially sexuality. And something like smoking or having a glass of wine--was that evil, a bad idea, an unhealthy choice or was even a choice a person should be allowed to make? My parents were very strict, so I grappled with these decisions later than most. All through high school, I was a Goody Two-shoes. Guilt is a potent tool. Like a virus in a computer, it operates all the time, wheter or not it's appropriate.

MLLE: Do you think acting was a way to stay out of reach of criticism?

MS: Maybe. I loved playing Linda Ash [in Mighty Aphrodite] because she didn't live in a moral universe where sex was wrong. She sleeps with men for money, but so what? She talks about working in a porno film and she has no idea that what she's saying will blow people's minds. I loved it that she was so unfettered by guilt.

MLLE: It sounds like acting lets you experiment without suffering consequences.

MS: Marlon Brando told me that some people act to escape who they are. He said, "But that's not the case with you. You act because you're not allowed in life to be all that you are. You act to become more of who you are."

MLLE: What did he mean by that, you're not allowed to be who you are?

MS: There are social restaints. If you're superlibidinous, or a baby-doll figure like Marilyn Monroe, your life is full of tragedy. But as I get older, I'm more able to be who I am. The real me used to stay on the inside, and on the outside was a very frightened person.

MLLE: If you could have only one, would you pick beauty or brains?

MS: Brains--because you could always get plastic surgery. But it's a matter of degree isn't it? How ugly or how stupid? A moron or disfigured?

Educating Mira

Four weeks later, wearing a black skirt with a net hem, a pink scoopneck top and flats, Sorvino slinks up the curving staircase to the restuarant in New York's Paramount Hotel. While it's common for a non-cerebrally gifted actress to want to appear smart, Sorvino is a clever actress who likes to show a lot of cleavage.

Today, she's delirously happy, the result of having taken an extended vacation in Paris: "I go around thinking, Oh my God. I actually sent myself to Paris and I'm walking along the Seine felling the sun and getting to sit in little cafés."

Raised quite a distance from the Seine, in Tenafly, New Jersey, Sorvino was a natural-born actress, but her parents felt she should pursue a career with more stability. She picked sinology. An Eastern studies major, she spent eight months in Beijing, studied Mandarin and wrote a thesis entitled "Anti-Africanism in the People's Republic of China."

After Harvard, she chose Hollywood over Academia. She started by analyzing scripts for Robert De Niro's production company--and running her long legs off as a waitress. By 1995, she was acting the adorable bubblehead (and starting a three-year long relationship with her now-former boyfriend, Quentin Tarantino). In this month's At First Sight, directed by Irwin Winkler, she plays a character closer to type--Amy Benic, a logical architect whow falls in love with Val Kilmer's intuitive earth father, a blind masseur.

MLLE: Why did you pick this movie?

MS: It reminded me of my first love. After I read the script, my mind was racing through all the relationships I've had that worked and didn't. The film is about people dealing with their flaws and growing in a relationship.

MLLE: When did you first fall in love.

MS: Oh, I've liked boys since I was conscious. When I was four I was engaged to a little boy named Rusty. When he moved away, I cried for two days and told my parents, "I'm going to go live with him and cook for him."

MLLE: Would you live with a man befor marriage?

MS: Well, up to this point, I've never lived with anyone--I didn't want to upset my parents. But I'd want to be pre-engaged to someone I lived with; it would be a trial to see if we could get married, rather than, "Let's move in together and see how it goes."

MLLE: What made you become so interested in China?

MS: I read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. And one of my best friends was Chinese. I went with her to Chinatown, the Peking Opera. It was a exotic world I wished I was in.

MLLE: Your thesis on prejudice seems to indicate that you relate to the underdog. Yet you haven't had an underdog's life.

MS: [long pause] You could say, yeah, outwardly I had a lot of advantages. But we lived the actor's lifestyle of feast or famine. When I was born, my parents didn't have money for a crib and I was stuck in a drawer. We were not the Brady Bunch. I mean, my parents broke when I was 21--things were not perfect in our little Land of Oz. But a lot of my guilt and worrying about everthing is in the past. I'm learning about life. I'm happy. I have a better sense of humor now.

Then she flashes her wonderful, courageous, tentative smile.

MIRA ON MEN

What have you learned about love?

You can love someone to the skies but it doesn't mean you should be with him. Love doesn't conquer all.

What was your worst date?

I was 16 and very inexperienced and this guy took me to a ski movie called Hot Dog. A very graphic scene began, in which a woman was giving a guy a blow job in a gondolo. I started turning beet-red. Finally I said, "You know what? I'm not enjoying this. I think I'll step outside."

If you could talk to a well-known dead guy, who would you choose?

Well, there are three: James Dean, Martin Luther King and Jesus.

What would you say to Dean?

I'd try to save him so he wouldn't die. And I'd become his girlfriend.