Love Laughing It Up

One incredulous female journalist whispers to her colleagues that the latter bears a curious resemblance to the padded lining of a coat or dress. Additional bits of garnish are provided by enormous hoop earrings, a very wide studded leather bracelet, and blood-red nail polish. Hewitt's auburn hair is carelessly gathered back behind her head. The tiny perfect actress resembles an engagingly flamboyant pixie -- much like the character she portrays in her offbeat new movie, Heartbreaker.

She's always been something of an original. There's the Jennifer Love Hewitt who gave Playboy magazine a candid appraisal of the function of her breasts: "I just accepted them as a great accessory to every outfit"; the Jennifer Love Hewitt who wistfully commented on her girl-next-door image: "I would just love to be called sexy ... just because it would make me something other than cute"; the Jennifer Love Hewitt, who in a self-deprecating admission of her own foibles, once said: "I love that whole princess mentality, but I also like throwing my hair in a ponytail, and just wearing jeans, going on a hike and then eating a big chili-cheeseburger."

But there's also the poised and articulate 22-year-old whom we're encountering today, and once again she's reminding us that she's more than just a teenybopper's delight. For one thing, she's capable of putting a sentence together and assembling several of them into a coherent and interesting thought -- a feat beyond the capacity of many of her contemporaries. For example, listen to her on the subject of performing.

"The great thing about being an actress is that there are about a million different personalities all bottled up within one person," she muses. "I look at a part and say: I really want to play this, but this is so not me that I'm going to have to draw on something else for this."

She has learned to be patient when she gets a new script. She finds that the more she reads through it, the more the character she has to play takes shape. "You just have to sit with it long enough to bring it up to the surface, and then you go with it."

She has been performing since she was eight -- "It was in a pig barn at a livestock show in Waco, Texas," she grins -- but it was only when she was in her teens that she learned the importance of tapping her inner resources.

"I never knew it before and frankly it scared me that I had it in me to be -- whatever. At first I thought: Holy cow! This is weird ... but then I realized you kind of discover something about yourself with every part you play."

These qualities have not escaped Hollywood's notice. She had already established herself as a comer during her five years in the role of Sarah Reeves on Party of Five, Fox TV's heartwarming series about a group of siblings co-ping on their own. She also conquered two teenage genres -- the sex comedy, with her performance in Can't Hardly Wait as the most beautiful girl in the graduating class; and the horror flick, by demonstrating her ability to look terrorized in I Know What You Did Last Summer and its screaming sequel. More tellingly, she was entrusted with the role of film legend Audrey Hepburn in an ABC original movie on the late actress's life.

In chronicling Hepburn's life from her bleak childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland to her emergence as an international superstar, the project demanded some intensely dramatic acting from Hewitt. "Audrey was very hard because I wanted so badly to do a good job, yet the greatest thing Audrey Hepburn did in her life was to make herself impossible to duplicate."

She has just completed another risky project -- a contemporary version of the Stephen Vincent Benet classic, The Devil And Daniel Webster, portraying -- of all things -- the devil and matching wits with Anthony Hopkins.

But the main reason Hewitt is here today is to talk about Heartbreaker, in which she teams up with the formidable Sigourney Weaver. In the film, opening March 23, the two play a mother-daughter team of con artists whose specialty is to bamboozle rich tycoons out of their money.

The scam is basic. Max, the mother played by Weaver, plies her sexual charms into marriage with wealthy dupes; she then divorces them and wins a hefty settlement when she catches them with their pants down. The accomplice who manoeuvres the men into these compromising situations is her resourceful daughter Page, played by Hewitt. MGM thinks it will propel her into major stardom.

"I love comedy," Hewitt says. "I love to laugh. I love to make people laugh. I love to be laughed at. I feel good about that ... but I had no idea how hard comedy really was until I started this movie."

She discovered that the adolescent hijinks of an ensemble film like Can't Hardly Wait provided little groundwork for something like Heartbreaker, the first truly adult comedy in which she has been involved, and the first major theatrical movie in which she has above-the-title credits.

"I'd mainly been in drama, doing Party of Five for five years .... I really had to learn. It was difficult." She also had to hold her own, not just with Weaver but also with Gene Hackman and Ray Liotta, as two hapless targets of the con, and Jason Lee as the young man who enters her life and wins her heart.

Writer-director David Mirkin, who came to film after winning three Emmy Awards for The Simpsons, says Hewitt emerged with top marks. He also admits that when he assigned her the role of the rebellious, tough-as-nails Page, he was deliberately casting against type. "Jennifer has such a sweet background, I thought it would be really interesting to bitch it up," he chuckles.

Hewitt worked out a psychological profile of Page to help her with the role.

"She starts off as a person who's been conning since she was 10 years old. She wants to get out of it. She wants to be on her own, but she doesn't know anything about being on her own, and that makes her vulnerable. So I think she's very relatable to a lot of kids who arrive at 18 and think they're going to rule the world, yet have no clue."

Hewitt also enjoyed exploring the tense relationship between mother and daughter. "It's not the relationship I have with my mother. We're very close and rarely butt heads, and when we do, it's never really a big deal and we get over it quickly. But I know lots of people, girls in particular, who have tough relationships with their moms because both are trying to be women."

"Love" -- as her friends call her -- is a multi-faceted talent. She also has her own production company and is a talented vocalist with three albums to her credit and a fourth in the works.

"I'm in the midst of writing an album right now, and hope it will be out next year. I'm trying to figure out what kind of music it will be.

"I like so many styles that it's hard to settle on one thing."