Kari Wuhrer broke into acting with a role in the movie Fire With Fire, starring Virginia Madsen. While still attending high school in Brookfield, Connecticut, she modeled and did several foreign commercials. She then had a two-year gig in New York City on MTV's Remote Control before paying her own way out to Hollywood for a role in the Andrew Dice Clay flick The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.
Vanessa Marcil Now starring in Beverly Hills, 90210, Marcil never set out to be an actor. Her fluky, fateful discovery: The Palm Springs, California, native accompanied a friend to an audition in Los Angeles just for moral support, wound up being asked by the director to try out for the role in question and landed it. Once cast in the play, she was immediately signed by a talent manager and quickly cast as Brenda on General Hospital - a part she played for five years.
Kelly Rutherford, who has been playing the ex-prostitute Megan on Melrose Place for the last three seasons, launched her acting career in a Mother's Cookie Ice Cream commercial with Matt LeBlane, followed by a bit part in the soap opera Loving opposite an as-yet-unknown Luke Perry and a role on NBC's short-lived daytime drama Generations.
Is the casting couch
still up and running?
While the starlets insist they've never been offered or promised a role in exchange for a roll in the hay, one admits - off the record, please - "the casting couch isn't entirely a myth - it really does go on." But don't pity the poor aspiring actress who's actually putting out. "It's really a two-way street, you know," she says. "It has never ever been a bad thing in Hollywood to be sleeping with a director who's just won an Oscar or the hot new movie star whose face is on the cover of Time magazine."
Do starlets sleep with a
lot of Hollywood studs?
The short answer: Yes. Long days on the set, sometimes doing love scenes, breed intimacy - and keeps you from meeting guys elsewhere, say the starlets. Plus, industry parties are the place to be and operate as Hollywood's unoffiial singles-bar scene.
Let's name names: Wuhrer confesses to getting cozy briefly with her Crossing Guard director Sean Penn and dating Jason Patric, now Christy Turlington's main man. Marcil is no stranger to star-crossing either. She's currently dating her former General Hospital costar Tyler Christopher, was married for a few minutes to actor Corey Feldman back in the early '9Os, and was reported to be romantically linked to her famous friend, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.
Do starlets have a lot
of famous friends too?
At least a few but often a whole flock. A demure Rutherford only named former Melrose Place star Marcia Cross as an in-the-biz buddy. Wuhrer says she pals around with underwear model-turned-actor Michael Bergin, Lara Flynn Boyle, Superman Dean Cain, and Robin Tunney. She also hangs with the edgy rockers from Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson. Marcil's celebrated friends are former 90210 resident Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, Oprah Winfrey - "the most brilliant, talented woman I've ever met" - and The Artist, who cast her in his "Most Beautiful Girl in the Wor1d" video. "He's actually very normal," she insists.
Do Tinseltown parties totally rock,
or do they tend to be really boring?
While there are the ocassional clunkers, most big fetes make even Hollywood's hot properties starry-eyed. Marcil, for instance, was among the chosen 150 at an intimate concert Elton John gave at the premiere of the film 54 in Las Vegas. "He was so close, I could have sat on his lap," says Marcil, who ended up next to k.d. lang. "I was a total geek, calling everybody I know on my cell phone, leaving Elton on their answering machines just to prove that I was there."
Sometimes the parties go out-of-bounds. Wuhrer says her spin through the MTV Video Music Awards party got ugly when an unnamed big star shoved her against a wall. "This woman had a major problem with me over one of the Smashing Pumpkins guys," says Wuhrer.
Do outrageously sexy things go on
all the time at Hollywood parties?
It definitely seems as if it's hard to keep one's clothes on at a private fete in Tinseltown. Wuhrer confesses to climbing onstage at a Paper magazine party, singing the blues, and then stripping down to her underwear before jumping in a pool. She also boasts, "Last week I played Truth or Dare at the
Château Marmont [hotel] with Jim Sheridan and Timothy Hutton and stuck my naked butt out the window." Adds another starlet: "I've been to parties with topless girls serving hors d'oeuvres, tons of them where there has been skinny-dipping, and usually anytime you walk into the bedroom of a Hollywood player during a party, there's a naked girl waiting for him under the covers."
What's the best perk
of being a starlet?
Free clothes and loaner gems. The starlets say designers are constantly besieging them with free wares, hoping they'll wear their clothes to major events or mention them in an interview like Rutherford slyly did with scarf designer Hermès. Marcil's personal best: She was dripping with $1 million-plus worth of diamonds for the Emmys. "Harry Winston [Jewelers] gave me a magnificent choker, solitaire ring, and earrings," she says.
Need more to drool over? In addition to having a publicist who can swing dinner reservations at any of the hip Hollywood hangouts and tickets to all the cool concerts, another major perk is that they don't have to put themselves together. They have "people" to do their hair and makeup for them. "It's fun to roll out of bed every morning and not have to worry about it," says Rutherford. Adds Marcil, "I truly don't remember the last time I had to do my own hair."
Is life on a hit show as
glamorous as it seems?
Despite the lavish clothes and hair-fluffing, the starlets make a case for martyrdom. "Actually, it can be downright ugly," says Marcil, voted one of People Weekly's 50 Most Beautiful People in the World in 1995. She says, "I work much harder than my friends with 'normal jobs' - waking up at 5:00 A.M. and working 15 or more hours a day." The actress, who hasn't taken a vacation in five years, says that even after an exhausting day on the set, she still has to stay up late to learn her lines for the next day's shoot.
Once a starlet lands a
regular gig, is she golden?
Not necessarily; she still has to keep her name out there. After Marcil became a regular on General Hospital, she still spent years going on cattle calls for commercials - and not landing a single one. After an audition for a shampoo ad, "I called my agent, crying hysterically," remembers Marcil. "All the girls were 9-foot-tall supermodels, and the casting director came up to me and said, 'Honey, I think you're at the wrong audition.'"
According to another up-and-comer, the inner circle can be hard to crack for some very unexpected reasons. "Sometimes there's no point in even going for roles. The producer already has a friend in mind for the part, or he thinks you're too pretty to the the lead's best friend - it can be a real catch-22."
Do all the endless rounds of
auditions ever become boring?
Not really - because the possibility of major mortification in front of Hollywood's high-powered players is always in the air, which keeps the starlets on their toes. Marcil says her first audition, several years ago, for Beverly Hills, 90210 was one of those moments gone wrong. Somehow, while emoting for the director and casting director, her pants, which zipped up the back, came unclosed and she unknowingly exposed her thong underwear. "I turned around in the middle of this very emotional scene and basically showed them my whole butt."
Wuhrer says when she tried out for a part opposite Jack Nicholson in The Crossing Guard, she took it upon herself to bring her guitar along. "I decided to sing a song for [director] Sean Penn that I had written specifically for the film - I thought it would be cool." Penn called her later that night to tell her "that song sucked" but offered her a role and even let her play the keyboard in her scene.
What do starlets do
during a dry spell?
While auditioning like crazy, they get the same working-stiff jobs as the rest of us... which can be hard on their egos. Exhibit A: To pay for her bills after Ford Fairlane, Wuhrer did salesgirl duty at Melrose Avenue's trendy Fred Segal store, selling luggage. Wuhrer remembers: "One day around Christmas, Renny Harlin, who directed me in [Ford Fairlane] came into Segal's - I was so embarrassed that I locked myself in the store room and wouldn't come out!"
What does it take to go from
starlet to leading lady?
Hard work, determination, the luck to land good movie roles, like Rutherford did when she worked with Julia Roberts in I love Trouble and Marcil did when she played Nicolas Cage's fiancé in The Rock. It also takes the smarts to stop accepting parts in "films that are crap," says Wuhrer. "I don't know if having serious fame would suck, but I know that I'm definitely ready to give it a try!"
