Patrick Stewart| The Next Generation

Posted November 19, 1994

The proper British actor who invented Captain Picard and is bringing him to the big screen talks about the agony of Star Trek costumes, the ecstasy of a certain country music songstress and the oddity of being mistaken for Ben Kingsley. When Stewart opens the door, I’m struck dumb by how handsome he is. He’s wearing faded jeans and a gray T-shirt. His feet are bare. He’s got a gray goatee. His posture is impeccable. “You’re so much taller than I pictured you to be,” I blurt out, standing in the doorway and not moving. “And I’m not even tall,” […]

Brad Pitt Is Afraid Of Sharks

Posted October 1, 1994

He’d love a Tiffany stained-glass window, and he’s been known to steal a sandwich right off a man’s plate. Confessions from the actor’s roof. It’s a shame that Brad Pitt is about to move into a new house, because, on the roof of his current place in the hills above Los Angeles, he had created a very cool bachelor pad. He’s got a sofa up here, a coffee table, a CD player, a lamp, and some candles. “What if it rains?” is the obvious question when you see this sort of setup. “It gets rained on,” he says. He’s brought […]

Jared Leto| 50 Most Beautiful People

Jared Leto| 50 Most Beautiful People

Posted May 1, 1994

Jared Leto. The 23-year-old Louisiana-born actor struck an adolescent nerve as the confused-but-intense Jordan Catalano on ABC’s highly praised My So-Called Life. Claire Danes, 16, the show’s star, speaks for thousands of Leto-heads when she says, “Those eyes have a magnetic effect on women. He really looks at people. I don’t want to say he stares, but he really cuts to the chase. He’s a mystery man in every sense of the word.” The extremely shy Leto, who spent most of his set time in his trailer, sometimes comes across like his character, whom he has described as “a man […]

River, with love and anger

Posted March 24, 1994

His friends and family have tried to turn River Phoenix into a martyr for a fallen earth. But as they struggle to craft meaning out of a squalid drug death, they’ve begun to wonder how well they ever really knew him. Heart Phoenix sat on the edge of the stage and beckoned everyone near. The 50 people in Paramount Studios’ screening room gathered around her. Heart has a way of soothing fears. The mourners needed her now; her son River’s memorial service had been wrenching.  They had recalled Phoenix’s mercurial abandon, his peculiar combination of heart-stopping innocence and ageless wisdom, […]

Winona Ryder Opens Her Diary

Posted March 10, 1994

Winona Ryder thinks reading me her diaries is a dreadful idea. I beg her in the name of science, medicine and anything else I can think of. We talk it over. And over. I tell her she would be giving a gift to the readers – something pure, unfiltered, straight from the mountain spring. She tells me that hauling out those spiral notebooks would be “the cheesiest, tackiest thing in the world.” Still, she mulls it over. On New Year’s Day, Ryder calls from her place in New York. The 22-year-old actress lives in a gorgeous, stately apartment building in […]

Fallen Angel

Posted January 19, 1994

Many believed River Phoenix was a Hollywood rarity: a gifted young actor who shunned the spotlight as well as the temptations that destroyed so many before him. Then, on a fateful Halloween morning, Phoenix’s life shuddered to a pitiful end. Martha Frankel looks back on the first fallen idol of his generation. “It’s really designed, I think, to strip you and blend you. It’s like feeling like the invisible man. You just stand there, and you start disintegrating, and you can’t see yourself, and you feel like you’re being absorbed into this big blob of glitter. I just can’t hang.”– […]

Chris O’Donnell| Innocent Abroad

Posted November 19, 1993

Chris O’Donnell, the fair-haired star of Scent of a Woman, spent months working with Kiefer Sutherland and Charlie Sheen and still seems like a sweet kid from the Midwest. O’Donnell has just returned from four months in Vienna and England filming The Three Musketeers. If, as all his press says, O’Donnell is “nice, nice, very nice,” a small-town boy from a big, supportive family who has shown no outward tendencies toward being seduced by booze or wild women, then I can only imagine that this might have been a trial by fire. At The Regency Hotel in New York City […]

Clean Slater

Posted July 1, 1993

Still beloved by teens, but yet to carry a major hit, the reformed Christian Slater makes his bid for breathing room with Tony Scott’s True Romance. Slater’s sexiness on-screen is a given. Now that he’s 23, though, one has to be increasingly suspicious about where he can take his Nicholsonisms and the hipster’s cockiness. It’s now-or-never time for vaulting the chasm between teen idoldom and grown-up stardom. STEPHEN REBELLO: I’m thinking about how everybody used to like movie rebels who tangled with the law. What’s a rebel to do in the safe and sober era?CHRISTIAN SLATER: Lie. [Laughing] No, I […]

Johnny Depp Lets Down His Hair

Posted April 1, 1993

It’s the second time around for our roving reporter and Hollywood’s best-looking bad boy. I mean, I’ve interviewed this guy before and one of the things I know about him is that he loves a good goof. After all, isn’t his “Are-they-or-are-they-not-a-couple?” status with Ryder one of those need-to-know Depp essentials? These days, the former 21 Jump Street rave has a thing or two to feel cool about. By the time he’s finished up a new flick in Texas, a total of three Depp movies will be theater-ready, his first since Cry-Baby and Edward Scissorhands. First up is the oddball […]

Born to be Brad

Posted March 1, 1993

Perfumy Sade music engulfs the Pitt household. In fact, the volume is notched up so loud that no one can hear me knocking. As the minutes pass, Brad Pitt and his live-in companion, Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee Juliette Lewis don’t answer. A sandwich delivery man joins me now, and his knuckles prove golden. Two short raps and Brad Pitt, the guy who knocked everyone’s socks off as the glorious Paul Maclean in A River Runs Through It, appears at the door, waving us in like a matador who once played for the Fighting Irish. “I was taking a shower,” […]