SPOTLIGHT

Say Say Sadie

though the buckskin fringed, om-chanting idealists of the 60s counterculture failed to realize their goal of a world united through Peace, Love, and Understanding, they did succeed in procreating the latest generation of beautiful, talented young actresses: Timothy Leary's goddaughter Winona Ryder, Dalai Lama chum Uma Thurman, Donovan's daughter lone Skye, Peter Fonda's child Bridget, and now Sadie Frost. Born in 1967 to a vagabondish actress mother and an artist father who painted Carnaby Street psychedelia, Frost had her destiny validated when, just a year after her birth, in a coincidence the hipsters of the time might have deemed "cosmic," John Lennon recorded the line "Sexy Sadie, how did you know the world was waiting just for you?"

The world waited until 1992, when Sadie had become sufficiently sexy to play Lucy Westenra, the libidinous society girl in Bram Stoker's Dracula whose bosomheaving, blood-vomiting histrionics move Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) to dub her "the Devil's concubine!" In less heated tones, Vincent Canby praised Frost as a "new and very bright-eyed actress," and the film catapulted her from obscurity to the front lines of hot-young-thingdom.

Frost next appears on-screen this spring, in Splitting Heirs, a screwball comedy written by and starring Monty Python's Eric Idle, who happens to be pally with George Harrison, who happened to be in a band with Mr. Lennon, the author of "Sexy Sadie." Cosmic, indeed.