Alicia Silverstone: The Crown Princess of Young Hollywood

And how did they take to meeting a brand-new Hollywood princess? "Princess," she repeats, laughing. "My boyfriend calls me 'princess,' but I think of myself more along the lines of 'monkey' and 'retard.' I don't think of myself as a princess, just a really normal, really weird Jewish girl. I am the farthest thing from being a Jewish-American princess. There was no JAP in my mother, an amazing woman from whom I got my heart and warmth. She hated people who were princesses, and in temple she would point out, 'she's a princess,' or 'there goes a princess.' Because I was always giggling and didn't study at all in Hebrew school, nobody thought I'd be able to handle my bat mitzvah. But the cantor said to me, you're the one young Jewish girl who definitely, with all the success and things you have, is nut a little princess.'"

Silverstone certainly could have acted the princess had she wanted to--the poor little rich girl variety. "I've been on my own, basically, since I was born," she says, trying hard to sound matter-of-fact about her well-to-do, peripatetic parents. "My mom and dad would either be working, traveling together for months or, because they're both English, they'd go home. So I grew up on nannies." She quit high school in her sophomore year and, after taking acting classes in San Francisco. Silverstone did a couple of commercials, got gigs on shows like "The Wonder Years," shot an unsold NBC pilot, did a play here, a TV movie with Tyne Daly there. With regard to the TV flick Torch Song, in which she co-starred with Raquel Welch--who portrayed an Elizabeth Taylor-styled movie queen who marries a blue-collar stud she meets in drug rehab--it strikes me that Silverstone's plaints about not being taken seriously sound not unlike Welch's plaints about how there was more to her than curves and cheek¬bones. "But there isn't" Silverstone declares about Welch. "Everybody warned me. 'She's going to be a tyrant because you're young and beauti¬ful and she's just going to go crazy,' She was nice to me, but it must be just horrible, you know. I mean, when the movie aired, people said it should have been about my character. So I sympathize with her."

As for The Crush, which disappeared pronto from theaters, but has lived on as a popular video rental. Silverstone says, about playing a psychotic 14-year-old who terrorizes her parents' renter. "I didn't have a clue what I was doing. When I showed up in Vancouver to meet the director, I couldn't even talk. [Co-star] Cary Elwes was supportive and kept saying, over and over. 'You're going to be okay, you're going to be okay.'" Silverstone proved okay enough, anyway, to land such follow-up films like one of those Showtime drive-in knockoffs. The Cool and the Crazy, as well as playing the sprig of Jeff Goldblum and Christine Lahti in Hideaway, which, she says is "like Cape Fear. There's good, great scenes, it's not just an action movie." On the other hand, the upcoming True Crime with Kevin Dillon, was, she says, "an awful, miserable shooting experience; I had to be the producer, the assistant director, the personal assistant. Kevin and I were the only ones who knew what we were doing. I wanted to leave every day, I was so miserable." Coming soon, too, is The Babysitter, which Silverstone says she "kept turning down because it was objectifying a woman. Yet, I knew that if it got in the hands of any other young girl, it could be this bimbo movie. They let me; literally, go through the script with a red pen crossing out all the sex and nudity. After it was shot and edited, the producers said, 'Now will you add a nude scene?" And I went. 'After all I told you, are you crazy?' But it's a really good movie, much better than The Crush."

Silverstone says she's looking forward these days to Clueless, playing "someone totally unlike me who is so materialistic that she lives, breathes, eats Armani," even if she calls her casting process for the movie "very, very strange. My agent and I sat down with the producer and the director, Amy Heckerling, who was, like, the weirdest person in the world. She just sat there like this dark being, with such an angelic face. Afterwards, I'm telling my agent, 'She haled me and I don't even know what the point of that meeting was," but my agent says. 'She meets all the girls that way, but you're the one she wants.' When I got the role, I told Amy how weird I thought she was. I'm not sure how she feels about me. I mean, you never know, I may be very disappointed in Amy when I'm working with her, but she's got a great mind and every page of the script is hilarious."

One last question before we part and go our separate ways down Sunset. What, if anything, is missing from Silverstone's young life? "I wanna get married and have a baby so badly," she says, "because I want the unconditional love of a child and to grow up with that child. But maybe that's selfish. I'm gonna wait a long time.'" she decides, "until I'm, like, 25 or 30."

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Stephen Rebello co-wrote "Future Sex" for the Jan./Feb. issue of Movieline.

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