Beauty in Films Is Not Always a Pretty Picture

I’m still not entirely sure what Peter Rainer was trying to say in his commentary/love letter to Michelle Pfeiffer (“Beauty a Burden for Actresses?” Calendar, Nov. 4).

But having been in the trenches the last few years establishing an acting career, I’ve drawn my own conclusions about the role of beauty in film and society.

In some ways, it’s not a pretty picture.

Beauty is a strange thing. The more famous a person becomes in this celebrity-driven world, the more beautiful he or she seems to be. It’s just amazing what a magazine cover will do for your sex appeal.

Because she’s rich, famous and funny, Roseanne Arnold is probably dream girl to a lot more men than if she were still a Utah housewife shopping at K mart.

Rainer decries Hollywood’s narrow view of beauty, but I don’t agree it’s been all that narrow.

Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world. Put her next to Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn would probably come in a distant second. Yet she had a charisma that transcended the physical.

Or take Madonna. Some people don’t know what the big deal over her is all about, but if she can walk around in sunglasses and three-inch roots in her hair and leave so many men screaming, that’s got to say something.

As actors, we spend years refining the inner self. I studied with great teachers like Nina Foch, Vincent Chase, Stella Adler and at the Lee Strasberg Institute, and though my past roles in adult films may have caused some tongues to wag at first, they stopped after other students saw my determination and ability.

Despite my past, in which looks were the only thing that mattered, these days I refuse to allow myself to be typecast or to play the token bimbette in a bustier, although some producers still think that way.

Recently I was up for the role of a pregnant girl, and the producers hesitated in even seeing me because they thought I was “too glamorous.” That’s such an insult to me as an actress.

I could easily strip the paint off my face, dye my hair brown and put on a maternity dress, but to have someone dismiss me by saying, “Well, she’s a blond,” is extremely frustrating. Fortunately for me, that kind of typecasting doesn’t happen often.

In my new film, “A Time to Die,” for example, I play a very unglamorous mother.

However, I’m disturbed by the other form of typecasting: people confusing the character on the screen with the person in real life. Actress Christina Applegate, whom I got to know after guest-starring on “Married . . . With Children,” may play an airhead on TV, but she is nothing like her character on the show. She wears ankle-length dresses and floppy hats and is one of the most intelligent women I’ve met.

As for me, because of my past, I’ve had to contend with all kinds of unfair preconceptions. What I did as an exploited, addicted teen-ager has nothing to do with the straight, determined, happily married woman I am today.

I have never cared what people said about me, preferring to let my work speak for itself. Experience has taught me that I have ultimate control of my life, as do we all.

If some actresses feel they’re unfairly typecast because of their looks, they have the power to say “no” to offending roles.

In the end, a person’s outer gift-wrapping should be no measure of his or her worth; that’s even true for us actors as well.