PENN ULTIMATE

A decade after her debut in The Princess Bride, Robin Wright Penn has finally found herself some real movie roles. It wasn't easy.

Even though Robin Wright Penn is the "she" in the movie She's so lovely, playing the object of lust that two men would kill for, there are at least two important people who don't always think the actress is all that lovely: Robin herself, and her husband, Sean Penn.

Standing on a stage at the Seattle Film Festival after a screening of Loved her other new film the slender, ethereally beautiful actress and writer-director Erin Dignam are fielding questions from the audience. Someone asks Dignam about the many closeups of Wright Penn's character, a woman who's been abused by her boyfriend. "One great thing about Robin," Dignam says, "is that you never have to worry about what she looks like. Even when she's just climbed out of a pool. The woman can't look bad."

Wright Penn grimaces uncomfortably. Any reference at all to her appearance, complimentary or not, embarrasses her; now, she's squirming. Sean Penn, who's one of the producers of the low-budget Loved and has a cameo in the film, is standing next to her, smoking a cigarette, when he suddenly makes a barely audible crack. "It's not true," he laughs. "She can look like crap."

"Yep, Sean confirmed it," Wright Penn says a few days later in a Santa Monica cafe, where she has passed on lunch in favor of a cup of tea. "Looks are emotional, anyway," she says. "Everybody has good days and bad days. What's on my mind today, since I just did my first photo shoot in ages, is that I'm too thin. I've tried to put on weight, and it just won't happen. I'd like to gain 20 pounds. I'm really tired of everybody going, 'You look like a 10-year-old boy.' Yes, I know that! It gets old. I miss feeling like more of a woman. But the way I look is not my choice."

Still, she does have a choice about what to do with those bones, those eyes, that incredible hair (which she once chopped off in disgust an attempt at "liberation"). What she does is almost nothing. Wright Penn wears no makeup, except for a little mascara and gloss, and she dresses as inconspicuously as possible especially while she's promoting herself, which is her least favorite activity.

"At the shoot I did today, they let me wear my own n clothes," she says happily. Dressed in a shiny burgundy stretch T-shirt, a black velvet jacket and jeans, she's more petite punker than Princess Bride. Her hair is a split-level shag with a little bit of blond in it. "I was so relieved," she says. "The dressing-up stuff takes so much out of you, so much energy. And the upshot the summation of all that image making is nil."

Perhaps only a beautiful woman could come to that conclusion. A woman who is never taken seriously, because she's just too damn good-looking.

Born in Dallas in 1966, Robin Wright spent her childhood traveling around the country with her siblings and their mother, a sales director for a cosmetics company. Eventually they settled in La Jolla, California. After high school, Robin went to Europe for three months, which turned into seven when she found out she could work her way around the world as a model. Back home, she opted for a more "serious" job: a starring role in the daytime soap Santa Barbara. In 1987, she got her break in movies when Rob Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman decided she was the only woman who was Grace Kellyish enough to play Buttercup in The Princess Bride. Unfortunately, the film was such a big hit, Wright Penn had a tough time breaking out of the princess mode.

"It's too bad that Robin Wright is one of the prettiest women on the planet," says She¦s So Lovely director Nick Cassavetes. "I think she regrets it. And after a life of being pretty, it makes sense she'd pursue the 'anti' stuff."

After Princess Bride, Wright Penn never took another cutesy role again. She starred in Erin Dignam's first film, Loon, with Jason Patric, then met her future husband playing a Brooklyn gang moll in State of Grace. She did play beautiful girls in The Playboys, Toys. Forrest Gump, Moll Flanders and The Crossing Guard, but they were all bohemians, or fallen women or both. The usual complaint about Wright Penn's career is that she's great in not-so-great movies, or that she chooses the oddest projects imaginable. The one exception, of course, was Gump but instead of following that blockbuster with a string of big starring roles, Wright Penn chose to stay on the sidelines.

"I guess I turned down a lot of things that were so-called 'commercial,"' she admits, staring into her teacup, all the while keeping one eye on her baby blue convertible Porsche outside. "You're coming out of one film, and then they want you to be in the same one. It's the 'we- know-you-can-do-it' syndrome. I'd rather attempt something I'm not sure I can do." But the juiciest, most offbeat dramatic roles she sought were exactly the ones that nobody would give her. "I wanted the part of that retarded girl in A Dangerous Woman," she sighs. "I wanted it so bad. But they said, 'No, no, you can play the wife. We could never believe you could be retarded.' I also would have loved Emily Watson's role in Breaking the waves. That's why She's So Lovely was so great: That character affords the opportunity to do so many things."

Things like playing a nasty drunk for half the movie, getting beaten up and nearly raped, talking in an Upstate New York white-trash accent, and walking and falling in six-inch stilettos.

She's So Lovely is nothing if not dark, but it's such a perfect actor's vehicle that it became the toast of this year's Cannes' Film Festival, where Sean Penn nailed the Best Actor award. Written by Nick's late father, John Cassavetes, the movie is a modern version of The Days of Wine and Roses, with Penn as drunken roughneck Eddie and Robin as Maureen, his equally messed-up wife. High on booze and mutual love, they inhabit a trashy hotel in a Bukowski- esque underworld, until Eddie, in a worse stupor than usual, seeks revenge on a guy who's beaten up Maureen, then winds up doing 10 years in solitary. The day he gets out of the slammer, he heads straight for his lost love, who has now straightened up, married John Travolta and had three daughters. Some early reviewers called the movie depressing and amoral, since it doesn't offer any answers to the questions it raises: When opportunity knocks, should you do what you want or what's right? And who's to say what's right?

"Sean knew John Cassavetes when he was alive, and John going to direct it, with Sean starring", Wright Penn says of the film's long genealogy. "After John died, Hal Ashby was going to direct it. Then he got sick and died. Then later, Sean and I were gonna do it together, in black and white. But nobody would give us the money. It's too scary."

Eventually, Nick Cassavetes, who made a promising directorial debut with Unhook the Stars, called up Penn, who agreed to star with Nick directing as long as Robin could play Maureen.

"We don't make a conscious effort to act together," Penn says in a phone interview. "We don't seek out projects to act together in. She's looking for what's right for her, I'm looking for what's right for me. This was right for both of us. There's nothing different about me working with Robin than any other actress except she's better. I wish John had been able to see her performance. He would have gone crazy for it."

The first time Wright acted with Penn, seven years ago in State of Grace, she was somewhat awed by him, even after they started dating. She still seems to revere his talent, but living with him and raising their two kids daughter Dylan, six, and son Hopper, three and a half has made Wright Penn less intimidated. "It's a given that he's one of the greatest, she says. "So talented. And too smart for his own good, you know? But there's a great security in that. He goes it. He definitely goes for it." Indeed, Wright Penn says she really needs a supportive, familial on-set environment in order to do her job well. "The ultimate working experience is trust," she says. "If you have that, you can look ugly, you can try anything, you can do your worst, and you're still loved. And that's rare. A lot of the time, you work with directors and actors you don't really know. Filmmaking should be more familial, like it was with John Cassavetes. Because you put too much out your heart and soul, literally. You gotta be comfortable. It's like goin' under the knife: You better know the doctor."

Nick Cassavetes, who spent some of his youth on film sets with his father and mother, Gena Rowlands, is well aware that there's also a downside to working with loved ones. "The Penns have as much talent as any acting family in America " he says. "But they are also combustible, which goes with the territory. I asked Sean what would happen if they started fighting. He said it wouldn't happen. And they were very well behaved. But l was prepared. My parents fought on the set, so I'm used to it."

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Before they got married last year, the Penns' relationship was known to be volatile and intermittent. In 1995, during one of their periods of separation, Sean declared in a Vogue profile that the couple had broken up four years earlier. So how did he explain the existence of their baby boy? "Oh, I went to borrow some sugar a few times," he said.

Today, the Penns may not argue as much as Sean did with his first wife, Madonna, but they still have their darker moments. "When we do fight," Robin admits, "nobody u ants to come back into the house for three days. Luckily, it doesn't happen that much anymore."

Penn's only comment about the marriage is, "You're writing about my favorite subject: my wife."

On the set of She's So Lovely, the first thing Cassavetes did was to get Robin to bleach her sandy hair platinum white, with black roots. For the first half of the movie, Wright is almost unrecognizable, looking like something out of a Seventies trailer trash fashion shoot. She does an accent reminiscent of Joe Pesci's in Goodfellas, and a walk that's graceless and off-balance. It's almost as though a character actor has taken over the lead role.

"I based the walk on an old Carol Burnett skit, where the character walks with her butt sticking out." she says. "But when I watch the movie, I can see where the accent fell out, or where I didn't do the walk. It's really irritating. 'Cause you know those were the days you were lazy. And I feel like if it's lacking a little, it jeopardizes the whole mission.

Cassavetes laughs when he hears this. "Robin always hates everything she does," he says. "But she's played the hardest part in the history of mankind; this woman is a bitch who is considering abandoning her children, and you still have sympathy for her. I think she'd better clear a little spot on her mantle this year. Robin's never been as great - she left her body. Her performance is almost disconcerting. If the world doesn't recognize Robin's talent after this movie, I'm gonna blow something up! I'm gonna shoot somebody!"

Wright Penn had virtually no acting training and a fairly normal childhood so it's hard to say where all this newfound intensity comes from. Even Penn isn't sure. "It's amazing to me, too," he says. "She's a good sponge of human nature. And she underestimates her own intelligence a lot. Yet, when she's acting, it comes out."

As good as she is in She's So Lovely, Wright Penn almost outdoes that performance in Loved, an even less politically correct film that earned her the Best Actress award at the Seattle Film Festival. It also deals with obsessive love, but Wright Penn's character, Hedda, written specifically for her by Erin Dignam, is the opposite of Maureen: She's a complete innocent, and an unwitting masochist. After her pathological ex-boyfriend cripples one woman and kills another, Hedda is called to testify against him by lawyer William Hurt. When she takes the stand, she maintains that her boyfriend abused her because she didn't love him enough. Even with its all-star cast, Loved has yet to find a distributor.

"I've known Erin for 10 years," says Wright Penn. "This is a project we'd always intended to do. We shot this movie two years ago and it just had a final mix a few days before the Seattle festival. Kinda ridiculous stuff. One of the producers was a relentless pig, and he really tried to f--- with the movie. They took an ad out in variety trying to make it seem like a thriller! They even had blood dripping off the 'd' in 'Loved.' They played up the abuse angle, and tried to make it about a damsel in distress."

When it's suggested that obsessive love seems a subject close to her heart, Wright Penn winces.

"I understand it," she says quietly. "We've all had that feeling of loving that someone [makes us feel], but hating when they do it. It's that love/hate thing. The problem is, once you feel that, everything else can seem superficial. It's like Hedda says in Loved: 'I know he only hit me because he was trying to get to the real me.' Well, that's what happens when you're truly loved. You're really . . . [understood], you know? That's so complete. That unspoken knowingness of another person. But is that romantic fantasy real? Um, after kids, no. Take the kids away, I don't know. Depends."

If there's one thing that's clear about the Penns' current relationship, it's that Sean's influence on Robin's career has been growing much stronger. She recently ditched her old agency, CAA, to join Penn at William Morris. The couple plans to make another movie together after Penn wraps Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line in August. They've also decided to move away from Los Angeles forever, Wright Penn hopes.

"We're moving to Marin County this weekend," she says without remorse. The move was prompted by frustration with Hollywood's skewed values, and a carjacking Wright Penn endured last year with her children (no was one seriously hurt, just scared). "I've gotten to hate L.A., even though it's home," she says. "It'll be weird going, since we have family and friends here. But Erin is going with us. None of us likes what L A does to people. It's a nice place to live, but the energy screws you up."

So just as Wright Penn is on the verge of a breakthrough, she's taking herself a little bit further out of the game. That's more or less consistent with how she's always done everything. Like cutting off her waist-length hair when she was the hottest ingenue in town.

"When I came back after shooting Moll Flanders," she says, "it was black and permed. I just buzzed it. And it was great, chopping that hair off. Ever done it? You don't have a security blanket, which you're not conscious of when it's there."

Right now, however, Wright Penn's famous hair is growing back again. And as she finishes her tea and gets ready to bolt to pick up her kids from school she admits that she actually likes it that way. "I'm starting to feel more feminine, with it kind of falling on my face," she says. Last month, she even put in blond highlights. Not for a film or for a photo shoot just for herself. Of course, the move did please a few other people as well. "My kids were used to me being blond, so they didn't know where Mommy was." she says. "Now, they feel a lot better."

By Merle Ginsberg

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