In photographs, Kimberley Simms of GUIDING LIGHT comes across as a glamorous and uncomplicated blonde with a big, carefree grin. In person, Simms makes it clear she's a lot more complex than that and, furthermore, she's a little tired of overcoming people's snap judgments.

"I don't think of myself as glamorous, and I hate having to prove myself because I look a certain way," says the actress, who replaced Krista Tesreau as Mindy Lewis last June. "When someone compliments my acting and then says I'm beautiful, that sort of negates the compliment. I was never a cheerleader, I was never in a sorority or in a beauty contest-I never did any of that stuff-and the fact that I'm judged that way bothers me. I'm grateful for the gifts God gave me, but I don't like for that to be the focus."

Kimberley delivers this outburst with good humor and immediately apologizes for going on about it, but it's obviously a subject she's given some thought to. In fact, at age eighteen, she was forced to think about it when her face was badly cut in an automobile accident. At the time, the doctors predicted that extensive plastic surgery would be necessary. "When I took off the bandages, I thought, 'Okay, my face is gone-now what?'" Simms recalls. Miraculously, however, she was left with no visible scars.

Over a pasta lunch near the GL studios, Simms speaks frankly about a variety of topics while managing to maintain an air of mystery. Several times she refers to "personal problems" she had to work through and at one point says, "Things have happened in my life that caused me to grow up quickly," but she refuses to be more specific. "Let's just say I've experienced a lot at a young age, and we'll leave it at that."

Dressed in a black blazer adorned with a handful of metal lapel pins and buttons, her blond locks casually pulled up, Simms looks every bit the successful twenty-something actress, though she laughingly pleads, "Please don't tell my age." Told she's much too young to be worried about such things, Kimberley replies, "On a rational level, I know that, but for the past couple of years I kept hearing 'You're too old' to play parts in an age range that was very popular, the eighteen-year-old category. I'm starting to feel old, like I've lived through a lot."

The GL producers may have picked up on Simms's conflicting feelings when they cast her as the spoiled heiress of the Lewis clan. "They originally said, 'We want to see a new maturity and sophistication; we want to believe that this person could run a company.' I felt confident going in, and I approached Mindy as a new character, which maybe was a mistake."

Though she'd never seen Krista Tesreau's work, Simms soon felt the ghost of the popular actress hovering over her scenes. "Other actors would say, 'Oh, that's a Mindy thing to do,' and it wasn't necessarily that it was 'a Mindy thing'; it was the other actress's personality trait," notes Kimberley. "Over time, that became much more difficult than it was when I started."

Simms's transition into the show had been further complicated by the fact that she wasn't settled in New York yet (she won the part just a month after arriving from California), had no friends in the city and was mourning the death of her grandmother. "I had a really hard time in the beginning," she admits. "I had trouble with memorization, problems getting adjusted to the cameras, things I'd never had before. Terrell [Anthony], who played Rusty, was so supportive and patient with me."

When the rumor mill began predicting Anthony's departure from the show last fall, Simms refused to believe it. "In my mind, Terrell couldn't leave, because he'd gotten me through so many things and was such a dear person to me. When he said to me in rehearsal one day, 'The door is shut [on signing a new contract], and it's not going to be reopened,' I just walked out and started crying. I said, 'They can't take Terrell away from me! They can't do this to me again!' I mean, I'd just gotten close to Joe Breen [ex-Will], and he left. It was horrible. Even now, in the back of my mind, I believe Terrell's going to come back."

Simms's tendency toward the dramatic developed early in life. The second of five children, she was born in Toledo, Ohio, and moved with her family to Melbourne, Florida, at fifteen. Kimberley's father, a real estate developer, first suggested she become an actress "because I always came up with all this melodrama when we were fighting," she says with a laugh. Her mother, who ran a silk flower boutique when she wasn't raising the kids, "is the rock of the family," the actress says. "We are all strong individuals."

A child of the suburbs, Kimberley longed for city life from a young age and attended college first at the University of California at Irvine and then at UCLA, where she earned a degree in theater. "Los Angeles was a big transition," she says, "but I was excited to be there." She found an agent while in college and worked sporadically in commercials, a few forgettable movies and the soap CAPITOL.

"If I hadn't had the support of my family, there were times I might have given up," she says now. "They made me feel that if this business wasn't right for me, I could come home and be accepted. My father still calls me and says, 'Come back to Florida and work for Daddy in real estate! You'd be great at it!'"

Ready to make a change last spring, Simms decided to give New York a try, with quick success. She made friends with another GL newcomer, Sherry Stringfield (Blake), whom she calls "the Golden Child" because of her instant success. "It's been nice to have someone to compare notes with, and discuss the changes we're going through," she says.

Shop talk ends when Simms and Stringfield join other friends at the upstate weekend cabin they rent from one of GL's directors. "He lives on the property next door, and one of his rules is that we don't talk about the show," she explains. "Sitting around and talking about the show or about theories of acting gets very boring."

For the same reason, Simms had avoided dating actors. "I'm too neurotic for that," she explains. "I need someone who's more balanced, someone creative, but not an actor." At the moment, she laments, "My love life is not good. I had my heart broken when I first came to New York, so I was sort of put off by men for a while, but now I'm open again. I've had such a maternal quality in me since I was a child, and I've always said, 'I want a baby but not a husband.' Now, for the first time, I've been thinking, 'Well, a husband might not be so bad.'"

As lunch winds down, one is left with the impression that Kimberley Simms thrives on "getting a little rebellious," as she puts it. "It's very easy to want security and stability," she says. "You need a certain amount of routine and structure in you life, but I also want to keep some spontaneity and risk."