Rock 'n' Ruehl

'There's a modest celebrity fallout that is new to my life," says Mercedes Ruehl in the wake of her Tony Award for Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers. "It's exhausting and bewildering and delightful." Ruehl won acclaim as a crazed Mafia wife in Married to the Mob, but decided not to make a career of playing "naturalism to a maniac pitch." Offered many goofy best-friend roles, she admits thinking to herself, "Eve Arden already had this career." It was after Off Broadway's Other People's Money that worthwhile opportunities finally turned up, including the part of Anne, a video-store owner who helps nurture a fallen D.J. back to sanity, in The Fisher King (opposite Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges). Explains the actress, "[Anne] is sexy, businesslike, funny, and has a great deal of compassion beneath a practical exterior." In other words, she Ruehls.

MICHAEL MUSTO