That's Wright

SPOTLIGHT

She didn't recognize screenwriter William Goldman at her audition for the title role in The Princess Bride, so when he asked about the script, Robin Wright bristled: "It's just beauty, poetry, and love. How hard can that be to act?" Not what anyone expected from a model whose most significant thespian experience had been a role on the soap Santa Barbara—but just what everyone wanted to hear.

Two years later, along came State of Grace, a drama drawn from the real-life seventies saga of the Westies, an Irish gang that roamed Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. Director Phil Joanou had already cast Sean Penn, Ed Harris, and Gary Oldman as gang members, and now all he needed was an actress who could project equal parts beauty, courage, and emotional abuse as a gangster's sister. The twenty-three-year-old actress walked in to audition, stared at the twenty-seven-yearold Joanou, and said, "You're the director?" He practically hired her on the spot.

Her second film role brought Wright a nude scene, and that in turn brought a 1987 People interview back to haunt her. Had she really pledged, "No nude scenes for five years"? "I blurted that out when I was on my mission," she explains. "I'm not pleased with feeling like I've been invaded on my own turf. I'd like all women in films to stand up and say, 'I don't want anyone to expose her breasts.'" Will she? "I'm battling with that," Wright admits— appropriately enough for the actress Joanou cast as his film's "moral and ethical force."

JESSE KORNBLUTH