ACTOR His laissez-faire approach just isn't fair. "It takes me 10 minutes to get ready to go out, and that includes the shower," says Josh Brolin. "I'm really, really lucky. I was given my dad's good genes." The 31-year-old son of James Brolin and his first wife, Jane (who died in an automobile accident in 1995 after their divorce), also learned from his father about the flip side of fabulous. "I think my dad's looks got in the way of his career," he says. "Maybe because of seeing that example, I really fought hard" against being typecast as a "dumb jock."

So, while he says that he has often been tapped to play "the really boring, good-lookin guy" ever since starring in 1985's The Goonies, Josh prefers roles such as a con man in The Mod Squad or a college professor accused of date rape in the erotic thriller Best Laid Plans, due out this fall. "Josh has a rugged, outspoken quality that is very endearing," says Plans co-star Reese Witherspoon.

The father of a 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter (by ex-wife Deborah Adair, an actress) looked like Marlon Brando as a kid," says the older Brolin, who cast Josh as his best man at his wedding to Barbra Streisand last year. "He was always a tough little guy, very active." During high school in Santa Barbara, Calif., the 5'10" Josh gave up team sports to play drums in a punk band. "I had spiky, dyed-blond hair," he recalls. "And I pobably bathed about seven times." Luckily for Brolin's girlfriend of seven months, actress Minnie Driver, the winds have changed.

"A guy has the smell of a man at about 35," says his father. Josh is getting right in there now. He didn't really turn heads until about 30, but now women are magnetized to him."

Photograph by Robert Fleischauer/LaMoine