Miller Time

SPOTLIGHT

Penelope Ann Miller has blown her cover. For years, this young actress hid out in a motley array of accessory parts—nerdy teen, squeaky airhead, winsome widow—that made it difficult to track her from one film to the next. You could always tell she was good, but who was she? The mystery began to crack last year after she won a Tony nomination for an astonishingly fresh Broadway performance as Emily Webb in Our Town. Hollywood jumped, and soon she was playing Marlon Brando's daughter in The Freshman. Now Miller has substantial roles in two of this season's most highly touted—and dissimilar— films. In Awakenings she's the tender object of Robert De Niro's postcatatonic passion, and in Kindergarten Cop she warms the muscles of kiddie teacher Arnold Schwarzenegger. The days of sitting through her own premieres unrecognized—as she claims she used to—are over.

Until now, Miller's work has shared one constant: a bygone innocence. You see it when she is screwballing around, as in Big Top Pee-wee, and you see it when she is doing both, as in Dead Bang. In The Freshman, her wily seduction of poor Matthew Broderick seemed the most wholesome of enterprises, a delicious munch on a crispy apple. That film showed Miller in a new light— tougher, wittier, sexier. But neither it nor anything she has done since will prepare audiences for what lies ahead in Other People's Money. Recently wrapped, the film pairs Miller with Danny DeVito in a sharp comedy about greed, chutzpah, and duplicity on Wall Street. DeVito plays a ruthless liquidator; Miller is his ironfisted nemesis in her spiciest role to date. Bid farewell to peekaboo. Or, as Miller herself puts it, "I'm starting to look more and more like myself." —JIM RASENBERGER