Courtney Thorne-Smith walks through a Brentwood courtyard just downstairs from her favorite yoga studio, sporting stylish workout clothes rather than the sharply tailored urban-lawyer suits she wears on Ally McBeal. "I got my hair cut today," she says, laughing when I confess I didn't recognize her. This is no small thing for a woman whose haircuts have made news before. When her character, Georgia, traded in her long California-girl locks for a shorter, more professional 'do, Thorne-Smith says, "I couldn't go anywhere without people talking to me about it, as if it were an earth-shattering event." She shakes her head. "One of the strangest things about being an actor is that people you don't know feel that they are allowed to comment on your hair, body, clothes, relationships."
     After spending years in the skewed world of celebrity, first as one of the troubled inhabitants of Melrose Place and now on Ally McBeal, Thorne-Smith, 31, has learned to keep things in perspective. People focus on her haircut? She laughs it off. The tabloids love to write about her show? She refuses to worry. The movies she makes outside of Melrose and Ally (such as last year's Chairman of the Board) haven't been successful? She mocks her own great expectations. "I had thoughts like Revenge of the Nerds 2 is really going to make my career," she says, laughing. "My career has had some ups and downs but you can look at it and say, 'There's a working actor.' I like that."
     At the moment, as she settles into a chair in front of a Starbucks and greets yoga buddies as they walk by, Thorne-Smith is a working actor on vacation, happily spending her six-week hiatus not working. "I understand that it would be smart, career-wise, to line up something," she says, "but it wouldn't be smart for my personal life or my sanity. Some people thrive when they're working. I thrive when I'm hanging out with my friends and doing yoga."
     This kind of perspective did not come easily. Thorne-Smith grew up in northern California, an area known for its free expression and experimentation: She tells affectionate stories about her parents' experiences with est and a nude bodywork weekend. They divorced when she was seven, and later she went to live with her dad, where she didn't fit in with the "jocks and cheerleaders" at her new school.
     For Thorne-Smith's last two years of high school, she lived with her mother in arty Mill Valley, where she immersed herself in theater. She started winning moovie roles at 17; her first two films included what she describes as her greatest movie experience ever (the sensitive high school film Lucas) and her worst (the low-budget coming-of-age saga Welcome to 18).
     Acting was a way to get attention, which Thorne-Smith, painfully shy, craved but never dared to ask for. By the time she was 19 she was in therapy, fighting to deal with shattered expectations. "What happened," she says, "is that all of my dreams came true, and it didn't fix anything. I was still scared, and still sad. You need the same things to make you truly happy and fulfilled when you're famous as you do when you're not, but they're more difficult to find, because you forget to look."
     "Growing up, I wanted so desperately to be popular, and I wasn't. I had all these fantasies about the 'in' crowd. I thought, I'll get famous, and then those people will want to be my friends. Part of the pain is that you get famous, those people do want to be your friends because that is what they value, and you realize that you don't like them."
     As Thorne-Smith's ideals of friendship and fame have changed, so have her thoughts on her physical well-being. "It's incredibly difficult to keep a healthy body image in this business," she says. "At the end of last season, I was so tired that I got the flu. I lost 10 pounds. On my body, that's a ton of weight. It was scary for me, because I could see that I was sick. I looked gaunt. But there were some people who came up to me and said, 'How did you do it?' People thought it was good, and that was terrifying."
     Thorne-Smith decided it was time to become a role model for sanity. "I think about little girls," she says, "and how they grow up believing in these crazy diets. You need to eat normally and healthfully, and you need to exercise. I'm so passionate about this because I think people spend their lives not happy in their bodies. We look at women who are successful and smart, who have done incredible things, and we talk about their bodies. That infuriates me. I made a decision to be healthy. When I get insecure and think I should be thinner, I remember that it's not about me and my little neuroses, it's about setting an example."
     Now she eats more, runs every other day instead of every day and alternates that activity with yoga, Pilates and meditation. She also visits a nutritionist regularly. "I used to run eight miles, go to lunch and order my salad dressing on the side," she says. "I was always tired and hungry."
     These days, Thorne-Smith would rather spend time relaxing with her fiance, Andrew Conrad, a genetic scientist who lives in Malibu with the couple's four dogs. They met after her sister arranged a dinner party to introduce the two. Conrad got rained out in Malibu and couldn't make it, but his best friend raved about him for hours. The couple talked on the phone for two weeks before actually meeting. By that time, Thorne-Smith was smitten.
     "It was the most pressure-filled blind date ever," she says, "because I was totally in love. I thought, 'What monster could open the door that would make this fall apart?' But he opened the door and he was Andy." Her face makes it clear that this was a good thing. "The only problem with him is that he looks too much like me. I've always dated my physical opposite, and I prided myself on that - of course, my physical opposite looks like my father, which raises all sorts of issues that we don't want to talk about. But Andy looks like me. We're just going to have big white-haired kids with great big jaws." She breaks into laughter.
     "You know," she says quietly, "true love really matters, friends really matter, family really matters. Being responsible and disciplined and healthy really matters. There's too much din about stuff that doesn't matter. One of the great blessings I've received is that I became successful so young I learned that lesson early."

Steve Pond writes for InStyle, Playboy, Premiere and The New York Times.