Robin Wright: The Wright Stuff?

The problem, of course, is that following one's heart isn't always the best career strategy. Witness Wright's turn opposite Jason Patric in the faux artsy Denial, a film she made after The Princess Bride. Filmed in 1987 under the possibly more appropriate title Loon, this offering (which finally surfaced, on video shelves, in 1991) has Wright, backgrounded by a doleful Harold Budd soundtrack, ruminating on an old amour fou while she scrubs porch floors, tends flowers, tosses salads, stares out windows, hurls herself across the railroad tracks, and, finally, freaks out on the kitchen floor of a rich artist and his teen daughter for whom she works. Here, clearly, was a project to avoid. (Sample dialogue? He: "I'm sick. I need help." She: "I'll help you." He: "You're the sickness.") But Wright, who talks worshipfully of such independent-minded movies as Wings of Desire, The Last Picture Show, and Scarecrow, remains fiercely, touchingly loyal to Denial's writer-director Erin Dignam, who, she enthuses, "freed me up, taught me how to build a character without the tools" and who, she predicts, "will profoundly affect this business if people recognize her."

Obviously, Wright hasn't gotten where she is by spouting the conventional wisdom or by listening to anybody else. Of German and English ancestry, she was reared, until age seven, in Dallas, Texas, after which she and her brother were constantly on the move with their mother, a three-times-married sales director for Mary Kay Cosmetics. At 17, when she went broke while tooling around Europe, she did three months as a Paris model, a stint she calls "demeaning, chauvinistic, emotionally damaging," but one that "prepared me emotionally for men and taught me how destructive it can be if you live with your innocence." She found better luck landing TV commercials and a role in the short-lived nighttime TV soap, "The Yellow Rose," starring Cybill Shepherd.

After four years of being--alternately--raped, kidnapped and remarried on "Santa Barbara" (a gig she now calls "heart-wrenching"), she made the movies that eventually propelled her into Penn's orbit. "I knew him as a friend a couple of years before we made State of Grace," Wright says quietly of the person she earlier swore she would not speak of. "I think we both always felt this unspoken familiarity and the fact that it was unspoken was so nice. It was a sort of feeling like, 'God, there you are. Where have you been?' No need to catch up on the trivia, you know?"

Now that they have been together going on three years, does she recognize in the man she loves the bellicose loose cannon the press portrays him as? "It makes me wary of the press," she says, her gaze direct. "You just feel like crossing your arms and saying, 'I don't owe you anything.' We're all human, so there are certain days when you're moody or you look and feel like shit--you know, you're in your human state. And suddenly you're approached by people who yell and scream at you. On the back end, you think, 'I can't be this way to my fans.' Then, you think, I can't? Why not? I'm just like they are.'

"You have one bad day and, whoops, there goes your reputation. That's who you become. You have a bad period in your life, an angry period, and you never get to live it down." But surely Penn's had more than the odd bad day? "Yeah, if you want to get specific," she allows. "But what [the press] tends to do is generalize and label a person. We're all fucking angry. We're all selfish and arrogant in our own ways. But it doesn't make up a whole person and it doesn't make up Sean's whole person. He's protecting himself. He's been hurt. I wouldn't take off my Band-Aids, either."

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