At 23, British actress Patsy Kensit has fronted a rock band, performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and rolled around topless with Mel Gibson in "Lethal Weapon II."
But those crazy days are behind her now, and all she wants to do is act - something she's getting plenty of offers to do thanks to a $1.2 million production with no big names and little in the way of glitz.As Katie, the temporary typist who tells all in "Twenty-One," which opens Friday, Kensit was the toast of January's Sun-dance Film Festival, and the phone has been ringing off the hook ever since.
The film is already a hit in France, and local cinephiles will now get to see for themselves what all the shouting - not to mention the stories in GQ, Premiere, Vanity Fair, Interview and American Film - is about. Kensit herself still can't get over the hoopla.
"I'm surprised even now," she said, still game if somewhat weary looking after yet another day of interviews to promote the U.S. opening. "I never thought anyone would see this film. It was just a little movie that would be good for me to do and I would learn something from it."
Little, maybe - but the role of Katie, on screen almost constantly as she describes and relives a year's worth of tangled relationships with three men, her best friend and her parents, was a plum for which many actresses competed. Just to be considered by director Don Boyd, Kensit had to live down a glamour-girl image that had been almost two decades in the making.
"I think he met me and realized that I wasn't that great - I'm kind of very plain-faced, anyways," Kensit said.
Plain-faced? Please. Slim, tan and blonde, with enormous blue eyes, Kensit has been adorning films since she was 4 years old and a casting director friend of her mother's was looking for a little girl with no acting experience to play the daughter of Mia Farrow and Bruce Dern in "The Great Gatsby."
"My mom took me along to help out a friend, and I got it and did it," Kensit said. But her computer-expert mom and antiques-dealer dad didn't want to raise a stage child, and so while she was growing up Kensit only acted when her convent school vacation schedule would permit.
There was one exception: When she was 6, her mother took her to Russia to star alongside Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner and Jane Fonda in "The Blue Bird," under the direction of George Cukor.
"The nuns thought it would be educational," Kensit said, and to her recollection it was: As the six weeks the shoot was supposed to last turned into nine months, she and her mother became regulars at museums, the ballet and the opera. "It was the best," she said.
Even as a part-time actress, Ken-sit continued to attract attention and work; by age 13, she had been signed by the William Morris agency, and her pre- and early teen credits included "Hanover Street," "Richard III" with the Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC productions of "Great Expectations" and "Silas Marner."
When she was 14, Kensit turned her attention to rock music, becoming lead singer in her brother's band, Eighth Wonder. That lead to her casting as Crepe Suzette, the overnight singing sensation in Ju-lien Temple's much ballyhooed 1986 film musical, "Absolute Beginners," which starred David Bowie.
The film, combined with Ken-sit's youth and beauty, made her the object of a media feeding frenzy that she did little to calm down. But the headlines she made with statements like "I want to be more famous than anything or anyone" came back to haunt her when the film flopped.
"I wanted to be a star, which was a really kind of daft idea," she said of that time. "I think I'm allowed the room to have said some goofy things."
Kensit found some escape from the "Absolute Beginners" fiasco in her marriage, at 18, to Dan Donovan, keyboard player for the band Big Audio Dynamite. Newly serious about acting, she took a few steps backward and began playing supporting roles again - the woman Kiefer Sutherland leaves behind in "Chicago Joe and the Showgirl" and Gibson's doomed South African love interest in "Lethal Weapon II."
"That's a good story," Kensit says of her casting in "Lethal Weapon II." The way she remembers it, she was visiting Los Angeles when a Warner Bros. casting director who had suggested her to Tim Burton for the role of the Joker's wife in "Batman" (Jerry Hall got the part) invited her to the studio for what Kensit thought was going to be a friendly chat.
"I went out there in my jeans and T-shirt, looking as scruffy as I possibly ever could, and (the casting director) said, `Listen, I've got some people here that would like to meet you - it's for this movie, "Lethal Weapon II.' "
"I didn't know anything about `Lethal Weapon' - I hadn't seen the first one, so she took me to a room, and there was Mel Gibson sitting there, and (director) Dick Donner, and (producer) Joel Silver. This is a true story. And I sat down, and I could not believe it, because I looked so scruffy, and I thought, `Well, there's no way I'm going to get this part, so I got to see Mel Gibson and that will impress my girlfriends.' "
She read for the role anyway, and was immediately sent to wardrobe for fittings. "I almost fell off my chair," she said.
Donner's recollection is somewhat different. "If that was a cold reading, then she's even better than I thought she was," he said, reached by telephone on the set of "Lethal Weapon III."
As for Kensit's appearance that day, "I think Mel was even more flustered than she was because she was so pretty. I thought she looked magical."
The role, which included some steamy scenes with Gibson, called for a career woman, and Donner admits he was astonished when he learned Kensit's age - she was 19 or 20 at the time. He added that working with her was a pleasure. "Making a picture with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover is a day at the beach - add Patsy Kensit to that and you've got the best sunshine ever."
"It was great fun," Kensit said of "Lethal Weapon II." But as an acting credential, it left something to be desired - "it was a really very decorative role and one-dimensional" - and it wasn't until Boyd had seen tapes of her earlier BBC work that he agreed to audition her for "Twenty-One."
Although Kensit was a discreet and worldly wise 22 by the time she made "Twenty-One," she found at least some common ground with the candid-to-a-fault Katie.
"I think that the one thing that really is universal in that is a broken heart. I split up with my husband directly as I was making the movie. . . . and when you have your heart broken the first time, it takes a long time to heal. The scars go deep.
"I mean, my father died four years ago and that was really difficult for me to get over. So it was paralleling the movie, with her losing her boyfriend in dying, although his problem was drugs. But that whole desperation, and knowing that someone isn't right for you, and you're not right for them, and you want to change them, and they want to change you, it's very painful.
"And once you do let go, and you do accept that it's finished . . . you grow up a lot. . . . And I think that her story, really, if there's any message in it for me, it's that at the end she's OK."
Kensit also seems to have recovered, from both her failed marriage and her career slump. Since Sundance she has made four movies - two foreign films, a BBC production of George Elliot's "Adam Bede" and "Blame It on the Bellboy," a comedy with Dudley Moore and Bryan Brown that is the first of three pictures in a post-Sundance deal with Disney.
In November, she begins work on "The Turn of the Screw," the Henry James work that was adapted in the 1961 film "The Innocents." Then in January comes a long overdue vacation in Australia with an unnamed boyfriend.
Despite all this activity, Kensit insists she'll never again yearn for the stardom she so openly coveted as a teenager. In fact, she's even uncomfortable with the expression "acting career," particularly the "career" part.
"I hate that word because it sounds so planned to me, and I think it's just about the work. I'm not trying to go further up the ladder," she said. "All I want to do is act."
- SPOTLIGHT ON PATSY KENSIT:
Born: March 4, 1968, in London's Fulham district.
Marital status: Divorced from rock musician Dan Donovan.
First film: "The Great Gatsby." Other credits: "The Blue Bird," "Great Expectations," "Richard III," "Silas Marner," "Absolute Beginners," "Chicago Joe and the Showgirl," "Twenty-One."
Childhood ambition: "I don't eat meat or anything - I'm a vegetarian - so I was into becoming a vet and saving all the animals."
On being a child actress: "My parents never let me do interviews. I never talked to journalists, I never went on TV and did chat shows. . . . They just felt that it (acting) was something they let me do, because I kept up with my school-work."
On her character's relationships with men: "She only has one sexual relationship in this film (with a married man she despises). She doesn't sleep with the man she loves because he's too strung out on drugs to ever have sex with her . . . so she's not a promiscuous girl . . . I'm not like her. I could never sleep with someone I didn't love."