NEWS

Agust 4, 2002 Shining among stars

Rosario Dawson sparkled in ""Men in Black II"", even next to Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Next up: more sci-fi, this time with Eddie Murphy. By Joe Neumaier

Rosario Dawson can turn heads, but she can't turn a phrase. "I'm horrible with sayings!" the actress admits with a laugh, rolling her gorgeous brown eyes to mock herself. "I get them all backwards. Which one did I just screw up ... 'What's prologue is the past'? Yesterday I said, 'I'm not the black kettle calling the pot.' It's so sad!"

That malaprop problem might be sad if she weren't such a fast-rising starlet, no matter how you say it. In last month's money-in-the-bank sequel "Men in Black II", Dawson played a pizza-joint waitress who required protection after witnessing an alien attack on agents Jay and Kay (Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones). And this month, she stars opposite Eddie Murphy as a lounge singer on the run in the sci-fi comedy "The Adventures of Pluto Nash"."This summer is my coming-out party," Dawson says.

A tough, earthy 23-year-old who appeared seven years ago in Kids, a small, bare-knuckled movie about aimless American youth, and then in Spike Lee's "He Got Game", Dawson may seem like an unlikely candidate for a movie set on the moon. But "Pluto" director Ron Underwood says Dawson is cut out for comedy, which is evident in conversation: Serious-minded but possessing a mischievous sense of humor, Dawson mimics everything from a hungry velociraptor to a hyper child.

"I wasn't counting on Rosario being funny," Underwood says. "But she has a real knack for it." In one scene, when they're visiting the "Nu-U Body Clinic," Murphy ad-libs about enhancing Dawson's butt, and she gives it back to him with, "Can you do something about his big mouth?"

It is midafternoon, and Dawson, dressed in a vanilla-colored dress and cowboy boots, sits near an open window at a cozy, antique-filled coffeehouse in Alphabet City, an edgy section of downtown Manhattan favored by artists, musicians and funky fringe-dwellers. The neighborhood has changed a lot since Dawson's childhood there. "It's gentrified now," she says. "But growing up in New York was awesome. You could just walk down any block and all of a sudden there was a block party. The street would be closed off and people would be milling around selling things and laughing and dancing. It was so great."

In those days, Dawson was a tomboy with "a big imagination." An empty cardboard box would occupy her and her younger brother for days. "I loved performing. I'd put on my "Sesame Street" records and do shows for my family," says Dawson, who still lives a few blocks away in an extensively refurbished apartment in the same tenement building where "Kids" director Larry Clark discovered her, at 15, sitting on her stoop. "My mom would crack up at me. Or I'd put [scarves] together and be a little belly dancer."

Her parents separated years ago, but both stayed in the building; Dawson remains close with each of them. Her mother is a Bronx-born singer of Puerto Rican, Cuban and African-American descent; her father, who is in construction, is Irish and Native American. The trouble between her parents hasn't always been easy to witness, Dawson says, but some good has come of it: "My family's the most dramatic bunch. I don't need to watch television -- I got free drama right there. That's where I learned everything I know."

In high school, Dawson considered marine biology as a career but chose to pursue acting when Kids became a controversial hit. She opted out of college and entered the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where she was shocked to learn that most actors don't get discovered outside their apartment. While other students stampeded into open calls, Dawson, without even trying, already had an agent and a movie in theaters. "I was like, What do you mean, 'hit my mark'? I was totally clueless."

Now, she's a veteran of more than 15 indie and Hollywood movies -- and one aspect directors like to utilize is Dawson's New York-ness. "I'm multicultural, and that's how you think of New York -- as a melting pot. Which is perhaps why I've been able to fit into lots of genres," she says. Last year, Dawson played a relationship-wary schoolteacher in "Sidewalks of New York" and a sexy rock star in the big-screen adaptation of "Josie and the Pussycats". She's now shooting Spike Lee's new thriller, "The 25th Hour", based on the novel, with Edward Norton.

"She has a quality that reminds me of my wife [actress Uma Thurman]," says Ethan Hawke, who after just one meeting cast Dawson in his directorial debut, the 2001 art-house drama "Chelsea Walls". "When Uma was young, she was so luminous but looked very wise. She had a worldliness in her eyes, and Rosario has the same thing."

While she enjoys hopscotching from dramas to comedies to blockbusters, when the subject turns to her Latin role models, it isn't J.Lo she names, but rather early trailblazers like Desi Arnaz and Rita Moreno. She also looks up to Halle Berry (whom she replaced in "Pluto Nash" early on).

"I'm very lucky to have started out in indie films and cross over into big-budget stuff," Dawson says, strolling out of the cafe and blending easily into the Manhattan street life. "I feel like every film has helped me handle the next thing."

Joe Neumaier last wrote for USA WEEKEND Magazine about dialect coach Sam Chwat.