Her Own Star Search

Illeana Douglas sat in the passenger seat of a reporter’s Isuzu Rodeo with a map of Hollywood in her lap and mischief in her smile. The 34-year-old actress had agreed to let a stranger in on one of her favorite pastimes--ogling celebrities’ houses--and she had come prepared: Two dog-eared guidebooks, marked with scribbles and yellow Post-it notes, were within easy reach.

But this stop on the tour, she said, wasn’t in any book. This was one of her own discoveries: the modest home of a contemporary movie star who could often be seen outside, watering her own garden.

“My friend found it first. He showed me the place and I said, ‘She does not live there.’ Then we drove by and I said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s her!’ ” Douglas said excitedly as she spotted the stuccoed bungalow of a famed actress (whose name Douglas asked to omit to protect the star’s privacy). “Now, I drive by all the time. It gives you a little adrenaline boost.”

Douglas paused for a moment, suddenly aware of how odd it must seem for one recognizable actress to be spying on another.

“ ‘Why do you like to drive by famous people when you are a famous person?’ That would be the obvious question,” said the veteran of more than 20 films. She had an answer: “I don’t consider myself to be a famous person, I guess.”

Douglas’ modest self-appraisal is part of what has made her best roles so memorable. Whether playing Robert De Niro’s most scarred victim (he bit her cheek) in Martin Scorsese’s “Cape Fear” (1991), Matt Dillon’s suspicious, figure-skating older sister in Gus Van Sant’s “To Die For” (1995), or her first leading role (as a songwriter) in Allison Anders’ “Grace of My Heart” (1996), the emerald-eyed, whippet-thin Douglas brings a frank vulnerability to the screen.

But with this month’s premiere of “Action,” Fox TV’s acidic comedy about Hollywood in which Douglas and Jay Mohr star, the self-effacing actress may have to update her self-image. If the measure of her fame to date has been, as she says, “a guy coming up who’s had eight beers and says, ‘You’re an actress, right?’ ” Douglas now seems poised to become a real star, the kind whose house she herself might want to visit.

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Pretty in an off-centered way, Douglas exudes both a shy elegance and a goofy charm (think Anjelica Huston crossed with Lucille Ball). Believable playing both losers and winners, sex sirens and down-and-outers, she looks familiar. And yet there’s a feeling that you can’t quite place her.

“There is a very off-kilter aspect to her--a sensuality but without an overt sexuality,” said Chris Thompson, the writer and executive producer of “Action,” who said he envisioned Douglas when he created the role of Wendy Ward, a former child star turned high-class prostitute turned movie executive. “She can be world-weary without being cynical. She manages to portray a character who has had a rugged road, but does not feel sorry for herself. She has a quirky sanity.”

Lately, she’s also had a lot of work. In addition to her role in “Action,” Douglas can be seen on the big screen playing a perpetually stoned hypnotist (opposite Kevin Bacon) in Artisan Entertainment’s spooky “Stir of Echoes.” Next month, Douglas appears as a Texas schoolmarm in Miramax’s “Happy, Texas.” Upcoming feature projects include “The Last Treasure,” a romantic comedy opposite Denis Leary and directed by Tom DiCillo.

In show business, this is what’s known as range. In “Action,” she’s a sleek, sexy, seen-it-all Hollywood casualty--the kind of woman who can be trusted to tell you the truth, even as she’s stealing your Rolex. In “Happy, Texas,” she’s a small-town, big-haired naif--the type who might actually fall for an escaped convict (Steve Zahn) who is passing himself off as a gay beauty pageant coordinator.

“Sometimes people will say to me, ‘Why do you seem so happy?’ But I can’t believe I’m getting to do this,” Douglas said during a two-hour, on-the-road interview that took place all over Hollywood. “I’m so consciously appreciative of the fact that I’ve managed to make a living in this business. When I talk to young actors, I say it’s about stamina. If you’re the last person standing, you will be successful.”

What is most fun about Douglas in person is exactly what seems to make her perfect for her role in “Action,” which depicts movie industry players as nothing short of ruthless. Though she has Hollywood roots (she is the granddaughter of Helen Gahagan, star of “She,” and the late Melvyn Douglas, who won an Oscar for his supporting role in “Hud”), she has an outsider’s take on the movie business that mixes genuine enthusiasm for its magic with a clear-eyed comprehension of its brutal customs.

This is a woman who drives by the former Stanley Avenue home of Orson Welles as “a good-luck thing,” who, just for fun, has finagled her way inside a Formosa Avenue apartment complex built by Charlie Chaplin and who can’t go to work at Culver Studios each day without thinking “Jennifer Jones walked these streets!”

But this is also a woman who has witnessed how mean modern Hollywood can be, particularly to female actresses above the age of 22. (“I call it the ‘Logan’s Run’ theory: When you’re 30, they try to kill you.”) This is a woman who has auditioned in vain for a peanut butter commercial (“I asked them, ‘How can I say, “Mmm-mmm, peanutty!” if my mouth is full?’ ”) and who has, on occasion, had trouble paying her bills.

“I auditioned once for a [TV series] pilot called ‘Incredi-girl’--the story of a girl who plays a superhero, yet her life is not all it’s cracked up to be. And for whatever bizarre reason, I made it to the finals,” Douglas said, launching lightheartedly into a story so devastating it could easily be an “Action” subplot. “They’d flown me out from New York, and afterwards, they drove me back to the hotel and there was a message waiting for me: ‘So-and-so from Universal called. Sorry, it’s not going to work out.’ They didn’t even tell me directly! The operator delivered the news.

“The next thing I knew I got a call saying, ‘You’re going to have to check out of the hotel within the hour.’ I remember being so crushed that I didn’t get the worst pilot ever written. Like, ‘What do you mean they don’t want me for Incredi-girl? I am Incredi-girl!’ ” she said, her eyes huge with mock outrage. “Your standards get lower and lower, from a high of ‘I’ll never do TV’ to a low point where you’re auditioning for one scene on ‘Blossom’ and saying, ‘Please! I have to pay my rent!’ ”

Which helps explain, in a roundabout way, how Douglas came to be an expert in Hollywood landmarks. Although until recently her permanent residence was in New York (she moved to L.A. a year ago after marrying producer Jonathan Axelrod), she has lived here off and on in a series of what she calls “horrible studio apartments with no bedding and a large TV and a bottle of Absolut Kurant vodka and a phone I’m desperately holding onto, hoping it will ring.”

During these L.A. stints, she took solace in Hollywood history.

“So often I think Los Angeles feels like a very lonely, isolated place,” she explained during a brief stop at the Knickerbocker apartment building, at 1714 Ivar Ave., a onetime hotel that actors Errol Flynn and Frances Farmer called home. “In New York, the city is the star and you’re just a part of the city. Here, if you’re not a star, you’re nobody. I find that if you can find something to connect you to the history, psychologically it helps. You see that, ‘Oh, real people were here. They struggled and they managed to make it.’ Whenever things go bad, you’ll find yourself doing a [celebrity home] drive-by to feel better.”

Douglas feels it only fair to warn you--this hobby can be habit-forming, not to mention dangerous. She’s been unceremoniously thrown off properties and, as she’s become more successful, has had the unusual experience of meeting some movie stars whose homes she has previously scoped.

“I got to know Don Rickles a little bit [at one point] and I started telling him, ‘Your house and garden is so beautiful.’ Then I suddenly remembered that I couldn’t explain: I stalked your house when I was a nobody,” she said with a laugh. “Luckily, he just assumed I’d somehow been to a party there.”

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Born in Massachusetts, Douglas grew up in Connecticut in a “kind of hippie-esque family. Very ‘Free to Be, You and Me,’ ” she says. The youngest of three kids, Douglas says she saw movies as the glue that bound her family together, even after her parents divorced.

“If my father was visiting, he’d say, ‘Oh, “The Spiral Staircase” is on. You want to watch it?’ Talking about movies was the one thing we all agreed on that brought us together,” she recalled. She dreamed of being a comedy writer, sending sketches to “Saturday Night Live” on spec.

Then in 1976, she saw “Network,” Paddy Chayefsky’s satire about a fourth-place TV network that will air anything to improve its ratings. “That was the transition: ‘Oh, movies can be art,’ ” she recalled. “I started seeking that out and becoming obsessive about it.”

She used a little tape recorder to record movies off TV. “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Third Man,” “Catch-22,” “Chinatown”--all were in her audiotape collection, which she would listen to relentlessly and try to mimic.

“It was like a drug,” she said. “I wanted to constantly re-create that emotional experience.”

She moved to New York at 18 to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and the Neighborhood Playhouse. Five years later, in 1988, a tongue-in-cheek list of her attributes on her resume--”Great legs, bloodcurdling screams”--prompted a phone call from Scorsese, who needed someone to shriek in “The Last Temptation of Christ.” The next year, she had her first on-screen acting role in Scorsese’s segment of “New York Stories” and began what would be an eight-year romance with the director.

“I can’t look at [“New York Stories”] now because I was so excited to actually be in a movie that I just smiled throughout my entire performance,” she said as the car veered down Franklin Avenue (not far from the apartment house where Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Harvey Keitel lived in the 1970s).

Next came small parts in Scorsese’s “GoodFellas” (1990) and a few other films. But it was 1991’s “Cape Fear,” she says, that first won her notice--a fact made sweeter because she was permitted to improve her role, changing it from merely the “office tramp” (as she was defined in the original script) to a vulnerable woman trying to recover from rejection.

“It took me a couple of years to catch on, but ‘Cape Fear’ taught me: When I’m able to infuse myself in a part, it ends up turning out better,” she said. Which is why she is so thrilled, she says, to be in “Action.”

“You’d be an idiot not to see that it could potentially be one of the great women’s roles of all time: a former child star turned prostitute turned Hollywood executive. What a pitch!” she said gleefully, adding that she and writer-producer Thompson worked together to make her character the right mix of beaten-down and resilient.

“ ‘Action’ breaks the form of studio movies that says the two leads have to be likable. Was everybody in ‘All About Eve’ likable? Was Humphrey Bogart likable? I don’t think so. What if they said, ‘Bogie, can you do that again and this time maybe smile more?’ It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “ ‘Action’ plays with a genre of two people who are highly unlikable but redeemable. I like the theme--though it may never happen--that they can redeem each other.”

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Another plus is that these days, if Douglas finds herself being treated reprehensibly, she can at least threaten to get even: “I’ll remember that,” she imagines telling whoever has offended her. “You’ll be in episode six.”

Lately, she’s begun sounding a lot like her TV character--or maybe she always sounded this way. Those who have seen “Boy Crazy, Girl Crazier,” a short film she wrote and directed in 1995, say it echoes “Action” in its depiction of two aspiring actors who are willing to sell each other out (and far worse) in order to snare a part in a film.

“[When you’re working], acting is the easiest thing in the world. How hard can it be? You have 100 people looking at you. You’re totally the center of attention. You ask for a latte and someone hands it to you,” she said as the SUV idled in front of 1842 N. Cherokee Ave.--a shabby-looking apartment building that was briefly the residence of Elizabeth Short, nicknamed the “Black Dahlia.” Douglas looked up at a banner draped over the building’s entrance--”Move-In Special: $300!”--and wondered how many aspiring actors had lived there.

“I remember my grandfather saying he’d be quite happy to die on a film set,” she said fondly of the elder Douglas, who died in 1981. Then, “Action”-like, her voice caught an edge. “And if you die on a film set, at least some A.D. [assistant director] will take your body away. Then they’ll say over the walkie, ‘The star is down. The star is down. She will no longer need a breakfast burrito.’ ” *