Movies

Selma chameleon

Demure in pearls, bawdy in leather: Who's the real Selma Blair?

By Alanna Nash

Blair in 1999 as Zoe from the WB's "Zoe, Duncan, Jack and Jane."

"She could easily break out in something really big, because she's one of the great comediennes of her generation." -- Reese Witherspoon

After years of playing teens, confused coeds and dimwitted young adults, Selma Blair, 30, finally grows up in her new film, "A Guy Thing", a comedy of errors with Jason Lee and Julia Stiles.

"I really liked playing someone who wasn't a child," Blair says over pancakes and sausage in a Soho coffee shop. "I've never worn high heels in a movie, so that's a big departure."

Then she reconsiders: Maybe her details-obsessed bride isn't that far from Cecile, the naive prep school student in the 1999 teen blockbuster "Cruel Intentions".

"Actually, my character might be immature, because she has this one kind of focus -- to get married -- which to me is also kind of childish, but everything I do is childish. Look at me," she adds, gesturing to her outfit: black sweater, white shirt, black cashmere tights ("very, very indulgent, but on sale") and a black corduroy skirt. "My skirt's a little too big, so I look a bit like a schoolgirl. And I've had this shirt since seventh grade. My mother bought it for me in Royal Oak, Mich."

With 24 films under her belt, Blair is an "it" girl in waiting, one of a handful of young ac-tresses who seem poised for major stardom. Her role as Reese Witherspoon's Harvard Law nemesis in 2001's "Legally Blonde", and her stint as sidekick to Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate in last spring's raunchy girl-power movie, "The Sweetest Thing", landed her on "Vanity Fair's 2002 Hollywood cover along with other actresses anointed Next Big Things. Furthermore, her lessons in lip-locking with "Cruel Intentions" co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar sent male fantasies into hyperdrive while earning both actresses the Best Kiss prize at the 2000 MTV Movie Awards.

Still, Blair is enough of a newcomer that not everyone is clear on exactly who she is. Some confuse her with Salma Hayek or Sela Ward. Others can't believe the pink-haired writing student who was sexually brutalized in the Todd Solondz film "Storytelling" could possibly be the fresh-faced Zoe of the WB's "Zoe, Duncan, Jack & Jane". Even friends find Blair a tangle of contradictions. Her former boyfriend, actor-musician Jason Schwartzman, declares her "just really weird. She's a brat meets an angel."

Blair has heard this description before but insists it mystifies her.

"I really have no idea why people think I'm weird, unless it's because I carry a hanky and like fine writing papers -- little things out of time. Or because I'll swear like a truck driver, but then I make sure I always blot my lips after I eat. But I cannot really [speculate] why people think I'm weird, other than I can't make up my mind about a single thing, so everything is a contradiction, so maybe it is weird."

"She's a little wacky," echoes Witherspoon. "But wacky in that great way, [like] a Mary Tyler Moore sort of personality. She's got that Everywoman quality, someone who's willing to fall on her face to make you laugh. She could easily break out in something really big, because she's just one of the great comediennes of her generation. She just steals your heart."

The youngest of four girls, the actress was born Selma Blair Beitner in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Mich. When her mother would introduce her daughters, it was with a bit of flip history: One was the brain, one the athlete, another the klutz, "and then there was Selma, the manic-depressive," Blair recalls with a laugh. "I'm not truly. But one of my first gifts from my mom was a necklace with a smile on one side and a frown on the other, so I could switch it as quickly as my mood changed."

Childhood friend Fran Lee Carlson, who attended the tony Cranbrook Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills with Blair, likens her to an old soul: "She definitely doesn't act like she's 30. But inside, she could be a 75-year-old woman, on the beach in Florida, wrinkled and tanned and smoking a cigarette. She has always had an underlying sadness in her."

Another Cranbrook friend, Kelly Spence Wandoff, sees a different side to Blair: "She was always the silly, goofy one, and definitely a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants gal. If the party is boring, she'll do a handstand."

After graduating from the University of Michigan (magna cum laude with a degree in photography and a minor in English), Blair headed to New York to pursue fashion photography but instead ended up studying at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. Eventually she caught the eye of a talent scout who beckoned her to California, where she now lives in a cottage once owned by Groucho Marx.

Her parents divorced when she was 23, and she legally changed her name to reflect that "I have nothing to do with my father. He is out of my life."

Her mother and sisters admire her fearlessness as an actress. Says sister Katherine Beitner, a New York book publicist, "She has the range and the chameleon-like quality where she can really become somebody else."

And that's the best part of being an actor, Blair says.

But just who is Selma Blair? "Oh, I don't know," she laughs. "Let's ask a complete stranger." With that, she turns to a fellow coffee-shop customer. "Who is anybody?" the man replies existentially. "I know," Blair sighs. "But apparently I'm a girl who is obnoxious enough to ask a stranger in a coffee shop who she is."