THIS year's Oscar ceremony was a feast for lovers of Hollywood at its most tearjerkingly sentimental. Paralysed Superman star Christopher Reeve was (literally) wheeled on to a standing ovation, and Kirk Douglas - still recovering - from a serious stroke - battled with impaired speech to acknowledge his lifetime achievement award.
But the sweetest moment came when Mira Sorvino, accepting the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Woody Allen's comedy Mighty Aphrodite, thanked her father for teaching her everything she knew about acting. The TV cameras cut to Mira's dad, heavyweight character actor Paul Sorvino, bursting, into tears of pride.
In fact, Mira Sorvino reveals, her father - did everything possible to keep his daughter from following in his footsteps. "I always wanted to be an "actor," she says, "but my father constantly dissuaded me from it. He felt the actor's life was too full of rejection and uncertainty, and he definitely wanted his children to have a softer landing than that."
She is talking in a London hotel room, and it was in London that she first met Allen to discuss the role of Linda, the dim witted prostitute and porn film actress with whom. Allen's character becomes inextricably involved.
Allen plays Lenny, a neurotic New Yorker married to a much younger art dealer (British actor Helena Bonham Carter). When the couple find that they cannot have children, they adopt a little boy, Max, who develops into a very bright lad indeed. Convinced that Max's natural mother must have been an intellectual giant, Lenny sets about tracking her down only to discover, in Linda, the antithesis of everything he expected.
"The only advice Woody gave me, in terms of a key to the character, came when asked him if Linda was a nymphomaniac, and he said: `Oh, no, no, she's not the Happy Hooker, she's just a cheap little whore'. But he also stopped me making her too intelligent. That was why he wanted me to find a particular voice for the part because, as he said, `she's not only cheap, she's stupid'."
Sorvino herself is anything but stupid. She majored in Chinese studies at Harvard and spent a portion of her study time in China.
"If it hadn't been for Tiananmen Square might still be there, working in some Chinese venue in some way. I left there in February 1989, and what happened that spring really shocked me . . . well, it was not a complete shock but, once the demonstrations"'
started I was very worried because I'd studied the Chinese government for four years and I knew that they were more brittle than the young public suspected.
It was a horrible event and it made me feel that I did not want to go back to China anytime soon because I would not have been able to spend time with my Chinese acquaintances for fear of endangering them, and I wouldn't have the same freedom I'd had. It had been a remarkably open time when I was there.
Even in China, Sorvino could not resist the performing bug. She sang with a couple of jazz bands, and appeared as a "special" American guest" on a bizarre Chinese television show. "They would have popular Chinese singers come on and mime to their big hits, but they were wearing masks and the audience had to guess who they were. It's like having Madonna come on in a mask to sing Like A Virgin, and then asking people to guess who it is."
ON her return to America, Sorvino wrote a thesis on racial conflict in China and, after leaving college, worked in various creative capacities on a documentary about anti Semitism in the Soviet Union. That led to work as a script reader and story analyst at New York's Tribeca Productions. "During that whole period, I was doing a million things at once, including modelling, waitressing and freelance photography, but it became clear to me that the only thing I wanted to do was acting.
Featured roles in such films as Barcelona and Quiz Show, as well as her appearance in the BBC television adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers, helped establish Sorvino as an actress to watch but she freely acknowledges that the role of Linda is "a universe away" from anything else she has done.
Finding the strange, Mickey Mouse like voice for the character was her first challenge. "The voice had to reflect Linda's stupid quality and, when I read the script, I realised that it should be high, but it shouldn't be sexy high, it shouldn't be soft and voluptuous, it should be a little grating. It would give her, too much potential to be successful if she were beguilingly sex kittenish. I wanted her to be odd. What I hit on was a real inversion of some sort, like singing falsetto low."
To ensure that Linda's character was "a sea worthy vessel", Sorvino took her creation onto the street. "There was one New York coffee shop that I would only ever go to in character, ordering my coffee and my muffins in that voice, asking questions about the different bakery goods and chatting to people. I went to a diner and, as Linda, had a long conversation with the bartender, who ended up asking me out. I felt really bad because he was asking out a person who didn't exist.
Later, I took a train to Philadelphia and stayed in character to talk to people - and I found that she was likeable. On the train, a couple of guys got serious about what I did, and so I said I had done some extra work in movies like Quiz Show. Now, one of them had seen Quiz Show the night before and he didn't recognise me from it. So I got very comfortable with her and that meant that, when shooting started, I could walk on set with this crazy voice and this carriage without embarrassment in front of Woody Allen."
Sorvino is full of praise for Allen's "hands off" style of direction, but she accepts that actors have to be "super prepared" to work in his style. "He doesn't rehearse, not even a blocking rehearsal for moves. He just says to the cameraman: `Well, we'll probably move over there, and then cross over here - OK let's shoot it.' So the first rehearsal is the `take', he literally shoots the rehearsal. He's also very improvisational and the first thing he ever said to me was: `If you don't want to say any of the lines I've written, you don't have to, they're just a guideline. Do whatever makes you the most real and natural and funny.' And that was stunning to me because I have worked with other people whose text is of supreme importance and if you slightly diverge from it they will re shoot the take. And Woody's one of our greatest comedic writers."
Some actors, Sorvino admits, dislike Allen's style. "They say `My God, he doesn't direct', and it's true, shooting with Woody - who shoots very long takes without reverses and two shoots is like doing a stage performance where the director has already left, and he's there simply as your co actor. He never says `no, you're playing it wrong', but he did once say to me, `if you do it the way you're doing it, you're cheating yourself out of a good joke'. And I thought: `Woody Allen is telling me this I'm going to do it his way'."