SPOTLIGHT

Kelly's Rebel Heart

Her maverick edge hasn't kept Kelly Lynch off the Hollywood reservation. HENRY ALFORD finds her facing three of the hottest leading men—Denzel Washington, Alec Baldwin, and John Travolta— in three new movies

HENRY ALFORD

There is to all that Kelly Lynch undertakes a faint whiff of rebellion. Her performance as Matt Dillon's junkie wife in Drugstore Cowboy was a jewel of hardened impenitence; while shooting her role as a lesbian in the 1993 romantic comedy Three of Hearts, Lynch, endowed with the magical power of final script approval, reportedly shut down production because she felt that the script was becoming homophobic. Now this: "I'm Steve McQueen. In an amazing Richard Tyler suit. In four-inch heels." That is how Lynch describes her upcoming role in Virtuosity, which is not, as it turns out, a nightclub act celebrating the Bullitt star's predilection for mesh hose, but rather an action thriller that has Lynch, as a criminal-behavior specialist, teaming up with Denzel Washington to track down a computergenerated murderer in 1999. As a result of making the film, she spent copious amounts of time in the presence of sophisticated virtual-reality equipment; however, let the record show that the experience has not helped her in her personal dealings with advanced technology. "My daughter just got a computer," Lynch says. "The guy was here for about six hours showing me how to use it."

What else has the tall, toothsome 35-year-old iconoclast done since turning down the Sharon Stone part in Basic Instinct? When not plying her trade—she appears in two films this fall, Heaven's Prisoners, an erotic thriller with Alec Baldwin, and White Man's Burden, a drama about a world in which black culture dominates, with John Travolta—Lynch lives in Los Angeles with her nine-year-old daughter, Shane, and her husband, screenwriter Mitch Glazer (himself no stranger to a certain kind of edgy rebellion—John Belushi was his best friend and Michael O'Donoghue his writing partner).

The happy troika spend their weekends in a stunning 1959 glass pavilion that was designed by arch-modernist Richard Neutra and is nestled in a landscape of 100-foot-high rock formations in Lone Pine, California. In her purchase of a 1941 Jean Carlu poster to adorn Glazer's office in the house, Lynch decided to make a no-nonsense statement about the couple's dual film careers: the poster depicts a huge gloved hand with a wrench in it, and reads, AMERICA'S ANSWER! PRODUCTION. "The idea is that it would inspire, frighten, and spur me to get movies made," says Glazer, who co-wrote Scrooged. "Bless her heart."

Glazer isn't the only one she inspires. "The designers are nuts about her," he says of his former-Elite-model wife, to whom Dolce & Gabbana and Todd Oldham have been known to give clothes, and whom Versace sometimes flies in for shows. "She has great range as a person," he adds. "She can model in Versace clothes, but on the other hand she's the one who has the incredible tool kit in our house—one of those official ones with all the ratchets and screwdrivers."

In other words, Steve McQueen in four-inch heels.

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"I'm Steve McQueen. In an amazing Richard Tyler suit. In four-inch beels."