Shatterproof Mira

Since winning an Oscar, she has been battered by the press and has soldiered through a slew of forgettable films. But as a long-suffering wife in Spike Lee's new movie, Mira Sorvino proves how mighty she can be.

You can basically break down Mira Sorvino's career by hair color. The 31-year old actress has tended to have more critical and commercial success with what she has called the "blond bimbolinas": her best-supporting-actress role as porn star Linda Ash (a.k.a. Judy Cum), which is all anyone really remembers from Woody Allen's 1995 comedy Mighty Aphrodite; one of title ditzes in 1997's Romy and Michele's High School Reunion; and the mega bimbolina, Marilyn Monroe, in the 1996 HBO movie Norma Jean and Marilyn. When she goes back to her natural color, brown, you get weightier but, paradoxically, more forgettable roles, like the Catalan translator in 1994's Barcelona, the bug-fighting scientist in the 1997 sci-fi thriller Mimic and the tracig blind guy's lover in this year's At First Sight.

So maybe, deep down, what attracted Sorvino to the month's Summer of Sam was the opportunity to combine brunette gravitas and blond bimbo appeal. "My character's hair is like my real," she says, "and the she wears blond wigs." Of course, there's a plot motivation for that: The movie takes place in New York City in 1977, when a maniac calling himself Son of Sam was in the midst of a series of random shootings of young brunettes and the daily tabloid stories titillated -- and frightened -- the populance. "Women were dyeing their hair or cutting it off," says director Spike Lee.

In Summer of Sam, Lee's first movie to have a predominantly white cast, Sorvino plays a fictional Italian-American Bronx housewife dealing with both the neighborhood hysteria over Son of Sam and a philandering husband (John Leguizamo). "She's a different character than any I've played," Sorvino says. "I think she has an interesting transformation, as the film goes on, from being just a total innocent - kind of an idiot, in a way because she doesn't understand what's going on around her. She's taking control of her life, but in sometimes very funny scenes."

The role sounds like it could be a breakthrough for Sorvino. Yet, truth be told, she is always volubly optimistic about her projects, even when she's chatting away about such recent low-budget movies as Lulu on the Bridge and Free Money, neither of which has been released in U.S. theaters. Her career since Mighty Aphrodite, in fact, has led some to wonder whether she suffers from the "curse" of the best supporting actress, which causes a promising actress (think Marisa Tomei or Geena Davis) to be pushed into starring vehicles she can't drive (think Untamed Heart or Cutthroat Island), whereupon Hollywood writes her off as a failure. But Sorvino rejects the suggestion that she should be bullding a recognizable star persona, a la Julia Roberts. "It's not really the kind of career that I wanted," she says.

"Mira was so unlike her reputation," says co-star John Leguizamo, "It was like, 'Is this the same person I've heard about?'"

"I don't know that I would enjoy having a persona that was just seen as me all the time." As for those movies that later make you wonder what you were thinking, she says, "Just like any other kind of mistake, you try to learn from it, and hopefully you had good reasons to do it. You can console yourself with 'It was a good intention.'"

If Sorvino sounds a little cautious, it's not surprising. Around the time of Mighty Aphrodite, her first wave of swoony cover stories (Meet the sexy, chinese-speaking Harvard grad with the supportive actor dad!) provoked a snarky backlash (Hangin' with the overintellectualizing co-star dating divette with the sucky movies!). One magazine photographer, against Sorvino's wishes, created an image in which she was morphed into Joan "Mommie Dearest" Crawford. And by the end of her two-year relationship with fellow backlash victim Quentin Tarantino, neither was being portrayed as terribly lovable.

Summer of Sam co-star Leguizamo admits that he'd heard stories about Sorvino, but says he was pleasantly surprised. "She was so unlike her reputation." he says." It was like, 'ls this the same person I've heard about?' We got close, and we had really good chemistry."

One highly anticipated scene in the film should prove it. Leguizamo's and Sorvino's disco-loving characters, after being turned away at the velvet rope of Studio 54, wind up at New York's infamous (and now defunct) sex club Plato's Retreat, where they participate in group sex. "She tried hard to cover up as much as she could," says Leguizamo, "but it was still a lot of Mira coming through. I put on a sock, too, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers."

During the real summer of Sam, Sorvino was 9 years old and living in suburban New Jersey with her actor father Paul, mother Lorraine (her parents would divorce in 1988, and Lorraine now works as a drama therapist) and two younger siblings. "I remember hear ing about [Son of Sam] on the news," she says. "I was frightened by it, but I didn't pay much attention, because we didn't think he was going to come over into New Jersey."

Though her father discouraged all three of his kids from becoming child actors, Mira began going to film auditions while in high school. She put that ambition aside to study East Asian languages and civilization at Harvard but, after graduating in 1989, found work reading scripts for Robert DeNiro's TriBeCa Productions. In 1992 she signed on to be an associate producer for the low-budget film Amongst Friends directed by pal Rob Weiss, who subsequently cast her as the female lead.

Nowadays, Sorvino, who shares a New York apartment with her mutt, Deer, is returning to behind-the-scenes work. She's helping to develop a script for a movie that she will produce herself. And this summer she will spend time in Paris with her new boyfriend, French actor Olivier Martinez (The Horseman on the Roof). Pressed for details of how they met, she laughs and says, "I wanna stop talking about my personal life. I just want more privacy than I've had before. That's all."

Maybe Sorvino is learning that sometimes less verbiage is more. But when she is asked how she thinks Summer of Sam will fare at the box office, she lets her inner bimbolina speak out. "God, I can't predict or presume what the audience is gonna think," she says. "I don't know, and I don't even wanna wager a guess. I just know it was, like, great to work on. I can't really say what people will think of it, because I don't know. I have to let them make up their own mind."