10 MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN

Talented, successful, adventurous: On these pages, meet 10 extraordinary women whose confidence - in their abilities, their looks, their careers - expresses todayÕs best new slant on modern ÒbeautyÒ.

by Robert Masello

Were there any justice in the world, Robin Wright would be having one of what she calls her ÒJoe Namath mornings." Out with Sean Penn at a raucous U2 concert the night before, she might be expected to wake "with those big, dark circles under my eyes." But there's no sign of wear and tear; indeed, she looks as fresh as The Princess Bride she played. In a white T-shirt and beltless blue jeans, she appears to have successfully absorbed all that rock 'n' roll energy and transmuted it into something like granola and sunshine.

But maybe it's just being 26 years old.

Still, Wright has managed to pack a lot of work into those years. After graduating from high school in San Diego, she took off for Europe, where she supported her travels, however reluctantly, with modeling assignments. Looking back, she describes the experience as "nightmarish. When you're only 17, and alone in a foreign country, it can be very destructive to have that sort of focus put on you. I think what saved me was that I never aspired to do that for life. All it's about is who's the prettiest girl in the room," a contest she sees as "very demeaning."

Back in the States, she took to acting like a duck to water, capturing the role of one Kelly Capwell on the popular NBC soap opera Santa Barbara. In between being kidnapped, raped and immersed in torrid extramarital affairs, her character ot "sort of ran an ad agency on the side." She remembers the role now with some amusement, but it gave her training.

When picking out the parts sheÕll play, "I like movies that make you think." State of Grace, which she made with Sean Penn and Gary Oldman, did just that, but it also made people cringe. In a movie that was harrowingly graphic, she played with ferocious conviction the sister of two New York gangsters, torn between love and loyalty, selflessness and survival. And in her latest, The Playboys, she's an unwed mother in a provincial Irish town in the late '50s. This time it's Albert Finney, the town constable, and Aidan Quinn, a traveling actor, she's caught between.

But Wright is one of those interesting creatures who never looks quite the same way twice. She has that talent for sinking into a role and subsuming herself entirely (much like Jessica Lang, whom she admires for her "quirkiness'); she also happens to sufficiently adept at accents that she can sound virginally English, toughly Irish or flirtily Texan. If there's a single, consistent difference in her off-screen appearance, it's that she seems so much less formidable and less obdurate than might have been expected.

Not that there s a lack of flint beneath the porcelain skin. Ask anything that vaguely touches on her relationship with Sean Penn, father of her one-year-old daughter Dylan and with whom she shares a sprawling Mediterranean-style house high above Malibu, and her gray-blue eyes gaze out through the picture window, out to the vast expanse of the Pacific . . . and don't come back until the subject changes. On how she feels about the California fitness mania, she says, with a smile, "Everybody here says 'I run 10 miles each day.' I detest running. I couldn't run 10 miles in 10 fricking years without dying." Still. she does admit to shorter jaunts, down the steep hill she lives on top of: "That's a killer." And to occasional laps in the pool. But her health regimen is as direct and undoctrinaire as she is: ' If you get enough sleep, and cut back on cigarettes and red meat, you look better the next day. If you're happy, if you're feeling good, then nothing else matters."

Wright buys her skincare products at the health-food store, and even those she uses only sparingly. A lot of her shopping she does from catalogs. "Hey, man, when you have a baby, you don't have time to go out and shop from store to store." J. Crew is one of her standbys. "My favorite designers,' says Wright, ''are Levi Strauss and Fruit of the Loom."

JUNE 1992

last updated August 29th 1997