Paris Hilton: Paris is Burning

By now, it should be apparent that Hilton is not merely dabbling at acting, anymore than she dabbles at anything else. For the past four years, she has studied as often as four times a week with sought-after acting coaches including Janet Alhanti and Howard Fine. "Right now, I'm giving people what they want to see, and the obvious thing people think of me for is the ditzy blonde. Later, I'd definitely like to surprise people, like Cameron Diaz did in Being John Malkovich. Doing something with brown hair, glasses, being a total nerd would be really fun. Or like Charlize Theron did with Monster. I've been training and I think I'm getting better and better."

Before giving Theron and Diaz a run for their money, though, Hilton is strategically building herself up in smaller roles, such as the boyfriend-stealing fashion-show guest in the new Garry Marshall comedy Raising Helen, starring Kate Hudson. She is filming a larger role in House of Wax, a Joel Silver-produced horror remake due out later this year. "Before there was a director or anything, Joel called up the head of my agency and said, 'I need Paris in my movie.' That was very cool."

Whether or not the Silver movie makes her a star, she promises the film will at least be scary. After that, "I want to do something great," she says. "I'm not going to do anything cheesy. I'd rather do something smart than just do a bunch of things."

Another project Hilton would like to do is a screen version of Gigi Levangie Grazer's satirical Hollywood novel Maneater. "I loved that book and if they make that a movie, I want to be in it. I love Jackie Collins, too, everything she does, and I love her, personally," says Hilton, who could easily be a character in one of Collins' racy novels.

Hilton's affection for girly books is perhaps part of her reason for doing a comedic as-told-to book, Confessions of an Heiress, due out in the fall from Simon & Schuster. But another reason is that today invariably, every celebrity must publish a book. She breezily describes it as "about my life, my friends, it has lots of pictures, and it's just kind of a book for girls about how to be an heiress. If people actually take it seriously, I'll be embarrassed. I mean, there's a chapter from my dog Tinkerbell, who has her own diary."

With that, her adored teacup Chihuahua Tinkerbell, who sometimes sports her own designer booties, goes prancing around the studio like the pampered princess she has every right to be. "Tinkerbell is my life," says Hilton, with genuine emotion. "I love her so much, I can't imagine losing her. I will die when she dies. I really won't know what to do."

But before she goes, there's a lot she wants to accomplish. If the Hilton Plan unfolds according to expectations over the next year or so, she will no longer be merely famous for being famous but internationally celebrated as a singer, movie star and author. Who needs notoriety when you can have that? She's way too young, clever and, yes, compulsively charismatic to be content being anybody's footnote or punchline. Like many before her, she will have parlayed her fame into the one thing only Hollywood can deliver--stardom.

_______________________________________

Stephen Rebello

Pages: 1 2 3