Rebecca De Mornay: The Mini-Star with Many Faces

"Not even Guilty as Sin?" I say, referring to the movie she did with Don Johnson, which is about a lawyer who defends a man she knows is guilty of pushing his wife out a window.

"No, not at all. I liked working with Don, and we had chemistry together on-screen."

"That's true," I admit grudgingly.

"I think that's such an interesting thing, chemistry on-screen. Because you never know what's going to make that happen. I have chemistry with Antonio Banderas in Never Talk to Strangers. All the people who have seen it so far have said so. When I directed this 'Outer Limits' thing, it was basically a two-hander between Frank Whaley and John Savage. I had these two actors talking to each other for an hour, basically that was the whole story. They sit together, they talk. As I was watching them I was thinking, these two have chemistry! And I realized for the first time as a director what it is. It's when the body or the face really wants to look at the other person, and you can see that as a spectator when the other person actually wants to listen. It's an involuntary thing. If people don't have chemistry, you can sense that they're going through the motions."

"In Risky Business, you and Tom Cruise certainly had chemistry."

"We had it on and off the screen," she adds with a smile.

"I wrote this story about kissing, about who can kiss on-screen. And I said that Tom proved in Risky Business that he could, and then spent the rest of his career proving us wrong."

"Oh, good," she says with apparent glee.

"Because he never had chemistry like that on-screen again ever. The two movies he did with Nicole are a joke."

"Wow, I'm very flattered."

"Maybe it was because he was your boyfriend at the time..."

"No, it started after," she says. "I don't think it's good to sleep with anyone you're working with ... in movies, in schools or anywhere. I don't think it's good to sleep with anyone that you're in a professional relationship with. Certainly not if you're a psychotherapist. Or if you're a doctor or if you're a priest. Definitely not then! But I hold to that rule."

Pages: 1 2 3 4