ROLLINGSTONE
Hot Actress
Christina Ricci
Christina Ricci has made a career out of being fed up. "I don't think I look like an actress," the eighteen-year-old explains.
"When I was little, I looked like a fucking alien. I wasn't cheerful or cute; I was annoyed a lot." Ricci's acting breakthrough
came at age ten, when she played Wednesday Addams, the morbid, prickly daughter in 'The Addams Family'. "I loved doing
that part," Ricci remembers. "I wasn't as unhappy most of the time, because I got to be annoyed on camera." After spending
much of her New Jersey childhood naked ("I'd walk around the house nude, and my mom would be like, 'Poopsie, we're
going into town, you've gotta put on clothes' "), Ricci stayed dressed long enough to be discovered in a second-grade school
pageant. Soon after, she made her film debut alongside Cher and Winona Ryder in the drama 'Mermaids'. A string of roles
followed, including 'The Cemetary Club' ("It was some movie about old people"), 'Casper' ("All I did was run around and yell,
'Casper! Casper, no!' ") and the Disney remake of 'That Darn Cat' ("I couldn't sit through that one"). Ricci's work generated
lots of on-set fans along the way: "When I made 'The Hard Way', I remember James Woods and [director] John Badham
saying, 'People go to school for years to do what you do.' And I was like, 'Why?' " Ricci stands five foot three, with wide eyes
and a tiny mouth that's all curdled, wicked disappointment. Since turning critics' heads with last year's 'The Ice Storm', she has
pulled off an acting trifecta: playing a Barbra Streisand-obsessed runaway beside Johnny Depp in 'Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas', a plush sex kitten in 'Buffalo 66' and a manipulative femme fatale in 'The Opposite of Sex'. With roles in John Water's
upcoming 'Pecker' (playing a "laundromat Nazi") and the MTV Films generational saga '200 Cigarettes' (co-starring
everybody), Ricci seems poised to make the rarest of Hollywood leaps: from child star to star. "I think the main reason a lot of
people don't make it is that it's hard to see someone as cute and then to all of a sudden see them as having more depth," she
says. "I guess I was just lucky that when I was little, nobody thought I was that cute."