Teri Hatcher: The Hunger

Is TV's Lois Lane, Teri Hatcher, poised to become a film star? If Old Hollywood style moxie has anything to do with it, she just might satisfy her appetite for a big-time career. Here, the Internet icon disses the tabloids that diss her, explains her new coiffure, and reveals her hitherto top-secret career plans.

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TERI HATCHER TURNS UP AT THE HIGH-END Beverly Hills restaurant where we're meeting right on time, though at first I don't recognize her. As she thrusts out her tiny hand, saying, "Hi, I'm Teri." I realize it's her new cinnamon-colored locks, shorn gamine-short, that throw me. When she slides her sleek, 106-pound figure across the banquette opposite me, she notices my attempt to adjust to her new Who's-that-girl? look. "It's all right." she reassures me. "I haven't decided whether I like it or not, either." Before I can weigh in with an opinion, her pal David Spade drops by our table and scans her hair and face for signs of Teri.

"You hate it, don't you?" she says, to preempt whatever he might say, then adds, "It's for the movie."

"Who do you play in it?" Spade jibes. "The Riddler?"

"It's a guy thing, isn't it?" she asks after Spade moves on. "Guys like long hair. It's for the movie, you guys."

Ah. yes, anything for the movies. Hatcher's got one feature coming out. 2 Days in the Valley, in which she stars with Jeff Daniels, Eric Stoltz and Glenne Headly, and another, Dogwater, in the works, but before we talk about her movies. I have to tell Hatcher that, from some angles, the new hairdo gives her face a Julia Roberts-ish cast. "I know," she says, laughing. "As Tinkerbell in Hook, right? Great! I have to emulate the worst movie she ever made."

Hatcher's behavior brings me to a key reason why I wanted to chat with this bona fide TV star ("Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," for you movies-only purists) who is inching her way into films after a few false starts. She's willing. See, one thing I'm very much over is those young, would-be stars who do all they can to act us if stardom means nothing lo them. The types who treat a premiere or interview like martyrs enduring the pains of hell. The ones who refuse to turn up the star wattage on screen. Who won't wash. Hatcher has none of these annoying affectations. She shows up for photo ops looking spectacular, she seems to enjoy being a celebrity, and, happily, she has a wild, unbridled side to her. She ably guest-hosted "Saturday Night Live," won kudos for her deft handling of copresenter Tom Arnold's meltdown at the Golden Globes, and instantly achieved a kind of immortality guest-starring on "Seinfeld" as the doll with the perfect breasts. On the movie screen, the few ticket buyers who caught her venal, Cajun femme fatale in Heaven's Prisoners saw the raw, in-your-face delight with which she played a nasty piece of work. In short, Hatcher strikes me as a woman who goes at her career hammer and tongs. Consider today: all in the last 15 hours she flew in from the Chicago set of her newest film, underwent a root canal, stopped in at a beauty spa, and turned up for our chat ready to boogie.

And now, back to Hatcher's justification for her red Tinkerbell 'do. "When you're on a series nine months of the year looking a certain way, it's really important to remind people there's more to you, you know? I didn't want audiences to walk into Dogwater and spend a half hour going, 'It's Lois Lane in a movie with a bunch of other people,' [Director] David [Schwimmer] and I felt that this look would be legitimate for someone who turns up for a class reunion in a Christian Lacroix gown, but who inside is a hard, hard person who in the end faces how lonely and insecure she is. It was exciting to go to the dailies [and] see a different person up there. Our French director of photography said, when he shot me, that the gown made me look sort of Audrey Hepburnish. Now, I, Teri, barely even know who Christian Lacroix is."

Uh-oh. Don't tell me she's going to try and pull one of those I'm just-a-simple-barefoot-girl-who-doesn't-give-a-hoot-about-haute lines. Last month she was on this magazine's list of the "Ten Best-Dressed Actresses in Hollywood." "I probably go to fewer parties and premieres than anyone else I know," she protests. Uh-huh. "OK," she concedes. "I do have a sense of style--I can look at some-thing simple and know that it's beautiful. I like to dress up in things that are simple and classic, but let's just say I'm fortunate enough to have access to great people who dress me. People are all the time telling me stuff about Gucci, Todd Oldham, Dolce & Gabbana or whatever. Half the time I've heard of them, half the time I haven't."

As our waitress asks if we care to order drinks, Hatcher tosses me a pointed look and says, "Well, if you won't now report that Teri Hatcher is a lush, it is the end of the week, so I'd like to order a glass of very nice red wine, which I love." She orders something impeccably French. Then, for dinner, she chooses a full-on meal, with sides of this and that, so our talk turns to how the tabloid papers and TV shows keep claiming she has an eating disorder. She looks me dead in the eye and says, "I have no idea where any of this garbage started, whether it's about an eating disorder, or that my husband and I are getting divorced, or that I'm a bitch. It's so not true, [but] all of my hometown has been on 'Hard Copy' with their 15 minutes of fame. The bitch and the divorce stuff is the least of it, though. I'm not anorexic. I'm naturally thin, I've always been thin, I'm always gonna be thin."

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