Winslet, 20, hugs everyone. Feels everything ferociously. Speaks so heatedly her cheeks turn red. And drinks cappuccinos back to back – decaffeinated, fortunately. She grew up near London, and apprenticed on British TV. Last year she appeared in the riveting true story “Heavenly Creatures,” playing a New Zealand girl who helped beat her friend’s mother to death with a brick. You’d think it was impossible to get all the way into the minds of girls like that. “Well, we were pretty bloody far in and it was frightening,” says Winslet, blinking back tears. “We couldn’t just put the brick down and have a cup of tea.”
“Sense” threw Winslet in with accomplished company. But she felt at home on the set – in Thompson’s published diaries, Winslet blurts, “Oh God, my knickers have gone up my arse!”–and she’s snagged a Golden Globe nomination. This year there will be more high passions and more irksome old undies. Winslet will play Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh’s film of “Hamlet,” as well as taking on Sue from Thomas Hardy’s colossal downer “Jude the Obscure.” Fame is just one door down. Let her in, and give her a bloody cigarette.
WHAT COULD BE WORSE FOR a budding postmodernist than “boring humanities classes” and actually learning something about history? “It’s like, who gives a f–k about the French Revolution?. . . It doesn’t apply to me or my life or my work,” says the slacker art student played by performance artist Alex Bag on videotape. Thank heaven this vacuous chick is in only her “fourth semester.” And thank heaven Bag is only 26: more hilarious skewering of the art world is on its way. Next will be a February gig at Manhattan’s The Knitting Factory.
In the tape, recently shown at New York’s 303 Gallery, Bag also uncannily inhabits the personae of two cockney shopgirls and a couple of woebegone Beavis-y boys. And in a career barely a year old, she has already changed her name three times. She says, “Who I really am will never stop changing. Why should who I appear to be?” Bag is the daughter of a former children’s TV-show host and an art director. Dad also once wrote some comedy material for Lily Tomlin. Think of Bag as a young Tomlin with a pierced tongue. And know that, under whatever name, she’ll be around for a while.
SOMETIMES BEING A STAR means giving the shirt off your back. Johnathon Schaech (rhymes with pets) emerged dripping from a pool in last fall’s “How to Make an American Quilt.” He romanced Winona Ryder with enough good-natured lasciviousness to seduce Hollywood, now hunting for the next Brad Pitt.
Schaech, 26, grew up outside Baltimore and ditched college after nearly three years of Econ. He did time on TV, appearing on Aaron Spelling’s cut-and-blow-dried soap “Models, Inc.” But last year, Schaech beat the beefcake rap by playing a murderous drifter in Gregg Araki’s droll and degenerate road movie “Doom Generation.” Better still, he’s now filming the lead in Tom Hanks’s directorial debut, “That Thing You Do,” due out later this year. Schaech plays the singer in a one-hit-wonder band from 1964. He and his fellow castmates have been drinking up the ’60s–“We sit in the trailer trashing the Dave Clark Five” – and basking in the aura of Tom. So did Hanks like the kinky “Doom Generation”? Schaech laughs. “He wasn’t allowed to see it.” Did Schaech’s parents like it? “They weren’t allowed to see it either. Hopefully, I won’t be a one-hit wonder and there’ll be plenty of movies for them to watch.”
Not to worry. This Schaech will be riding high on the charts.
AT THE SECOND-CHANCE prom, when grown-up lonely hearts and couples who’ve learned to hate each other take another stab at romance, Dan Zanes will be the house band. The scruffy former leader of the Del Fuegos, a ga-rage-soul band that partied itself into oblivion in 1989, Zanes, 34, is starting over with “Cool Down Time” (Private Music), his remarkable solo debut. Produced with bluesy minimalism by Mitchell Froom and written by Zanes with an astute eye for detail, “Cool Down Time” filters fuzzed-out riffs and slow-dance sentiments into a collection of songs about redemption. It opens with an AIDS test that turns out negative, and cautiously gathers hope from there. “I figured I had a little story to tell, so I was telling it as best I could,” Zanes says. “I went from feeling horrible to feeling good.” Zanes and his wife live in New York with their daughter, Anna, 1. “I woke up yesterday morning, and she started tugging at my hair,” he says. “I rolled over and she pointed at the stereo and said, ‘Tunes’.” At that moment, he felt great.
WHEN TAMIA WANTS SOMEthing, she doesn’t have to say please. “I want you right here, right now,” she commands in “You Put a Move on My Heart,” from Quincy Jones’s album “Q’s Jook Joint.” “Lay by my side, sugar! Thrill me tonight.” So what if she doesn’t play nice? Tamia, 19, is getting everything she wants. “You Put a Move,” her first single, hit the R&B top 20. Her voice carries traces of Aretha’s authority and Mariah’s flexibility. And now she’s signed a deal with Quincy’s label, Qwest, and started work on her own album. “19 years old y’all, she’s got it all,” he writes in the “Jook Joint” liner notes. “The range, the sound, the identification, the soul.”
In her hometown of Windsor, Ont., soul had to be imported across the border. “Quincy always jokes with me about my morn going over and getting chitlins in Detroit,” Ta-mia says. She was raised on Motown and gospel: “I was always singing, in the kitchen, in the bed – it got so bad my brothers would complain.” “You Put a Move” has a slinky, nightclub feel, but Tamia wants to get playful. “I love slow jams–they’re my favorite,” she says. “But I want to do something funky. I’m still 19 and can be real silly sometimes. Just ask my brothers.” Give her time–she’ll prove it on her own.
THINK OF SINGER KEVIN MAhogany as a saxophone. Specifically, a baritone sax. He’s a barrel-chested horn player without the horn. Mahogany studied sax until his mid-20s, when chasing Kansas City club gigs became a career, with office temping to fill out the rent. Mahogany tried singing, and the warm response soon persuaded him to put the horn down. Covering R&B tunes won him a local following. But since he returned to jazz four years ago, his fluid improvisations have made him the stand-out jazz vocalist of his generation. Mahogany, 37, is just as much of a musician as the other members of his topnotch bands. A Warner Brothers release this year would probably have secured his national reputation even if Robert Alt-man hadn’t east him in his forthcoming film “Kansas City.” Playing Big Joe Turner, Mahogany holds his own with some of the best young horn players of the day–Joshua Redman, James Carter and Craig Handy among them. The setting is one of the celebrated all-night jam sessions of the city’s bust-out Prohibition era under Boss Pendergast. It’s a perfect fit for a Kansas City traditionalist who never left home.
NOAH BAUMBACH HAS suffered from separation anxiety ever since the womb. “I was a late baby,” says the 26-year-old director of “Kicking and Screaming.” “And I didn’t like leaving school. Or leaving New York to make this movie. Or leaving the movie.” For the hypercerebral slackers in his film, leaving college means hanging around campus and seducing freshman girls. But Baumbach catapulted into the real world by making a movie about postcollege inertia instead of wallowing in it. He wrote “Kicking” as soon as he graduated from Vassar in 1991. Since the film debuted at the New York Film Festival last fall, Baumbach’s been inundated by directing offers, but for now he’ll make only movies he’s written himself. Soon he’ll start shooting “Mr. Jealousy,” about confused post-postcollege grads undergoing mid-20s crises. What would he know about a mid-20s crisis? “Outside of filmmaking, I’m completely scattered,” he insists. “But a movie is something I can organize. It’s my perfect, indulgent little world.” No wonder he has trouble leaving it behind.
THE ONLY THING WRONG with the movie “Usual Suspects” was that Benicio Del Toro’s character died too soon–couldn’t the bad guys have whacked Stephen Baldwin instead? Del Toro played Fred Fenster, a con man with cool threads and the most marvelously slurry voice anyone had heard (or misheard) in years. Reviewers were enchanted, but Del Toro makes no grand claims: “I’m not Jack Nicholson. I’m not Brando. But I do mumble.”
Del Toro grew up in Puerto Rico and later in Pennsylvania, on a farm. He was a business major at the University of California, San Diego, and was planning to be a lawyer when a freshman acting class made him rethink a few things. Del Toro played a slew of small TV and movie roles, but it was after “Usual Suspects” that Holly-wood really started dialing his number. “The phone, the phone,” he moans. “I need to get a portable.” This year, he’ll appear in the off-kilter baseball movie “The Fan,” with Robert De Niro, as well as in films by bad boys Abel Ferrara and Julian Schnabel. Says the actor, “I like anything that’s three-dimensional, anything I can believe in – even if it’s fantastic, surreal or from another planet.” Del Toro himself appears to be all of the above.
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, TO BE a rising star in a European ballet company. Good pay, important roles in the classics – “There was a lot of security and comfort,” says Frederic Garner, 26, who grew up in Switzerland and joined the Stuttgart Ballet at 18. “But while I was dancing those ballets, I was listening to experimental music and going to see modern art. It didn’t make sense to stay with ballet. I was curious about my own time.” So he moved to New York and began taking classes at the Merce Cunningham studio. “I was attracted to his ideas,” says Gafner. “Separating the music from the dance, exploring movement for its own sake. I had to relearn everything.” Today he’s a much praised member of the Cunningham company and looking forward to his role in “Ocean,” Cunningham’s last collaboration with the late composer John Cage.
“Ocean” will have its American premiere in Berkeley in April. And the first person audiences will see onstage, dancing alone, will be a former ballet dancer, reborn in the New World.
JUNOT DIAZ’S SIX-FIGURE ADvance for a book of stories and an unfinished first novel looks like the literary equivalent of winning the lottery. After all, before the news broke last November, Diaz was just another 27-year-old fiction writer with an MFA, a stack of stories and a day job slaving over a copy machine. Now he’s the latest overnight literary sensation. But luck had nothing to do with Diaz’s success. He earned it with his talent. The 11 stories that Riverhead Books will publish next fall in “In the City of Boys” vividly evoke Diaz’s hardscrabble youth in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, where “our community was separated from all the other communities by a six-lane highway and the dump.” Diaz has the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet, and when he sheepishly wishes aloud that his debut had been “way quieter,” he’s just wasting his breath. Talent this big will always make noise.
