Christina Ricci is going through another "rebellious" phase, but it's not what you think. Her latest offscreen incarnation is as a sleek, Versace-wearing Beverly Hills princess with a taste for luxury who gets a manicure every other week and goes to yoga wearing "these little workout outfits." Her favorite clothes, she tells me, are her Anna Molinari frocks, a Chanel twinset, and her new Gucci leather jacket. On "special occasions" her lilac Chanel quilted-leather bag gets to go out with her. When she has extra money, "I buy another Chanel diamond. I was like, 'I'm going to wait for a man to buy me jewels.' I waited forever. Finally I was like, 'Damn it, I want diamonds.' So yeah, I do buy them for myself. At Cartier, too. The first thing I ever bought was a platinum three-diamond ring from Boodle and Dunthorne in London." So long, she seems to be saying, to the quirky rebel I once was.

Hollywood's Dark Princess is growing up. The daughter of a former model and a therapist, the 22-year-old actress, who was reared in New York and became an icon for troubled teenage girls, has, for the time being, dropped her the-world-sucks pose in favor of something more adult. "Sometimes I feel embarrassed because I'm not living up to people's expectations. You know, I don't look like a cartoon character in the miniskirts and the ripped tops," she says, delicately undoing and reknotting her shiny mahogany hair.

Sitting by the pool at the Chateau Marmont during a break from filming an episode of the last season of Ally McBeal, the new Christina Ricci is sophisticated, skinny, and sweet. So skinny—"I'm a size 0"—that she insists on conducting the entire interview wearing a flowery pink Gucci bikini. An offbeat beauty, she has a heart-shaped face, huge saucer eyes, and pale skin, which is makeup-free.

With her hair pinned up in a prim bun and her tiny proportions—she's five foot one—Ricci looks like a demure schoolgirl. She is poised and polite, nibbling on her nachos with a neat, birdlike elegance. Occasionally, just to let you know she hasn't completely lost her bite, she reveals her sharper side. On the fate of child stars, she says, "I really don't feel sorry for Macaulay Culkin, because he's got, like, $30 million in the bank and, you know, he'll have a genius memoir or whatever." On vacations, of which she has only taken one—to Hawaii—in her life, she says, "I feel like if I am too frivolous it will never stop. I have to set rules for myself; otherwise I would probably go on vacation to Hawaii every two weeks." She confides that the key to her new shape was the aforementioned workout outfits. "I always wear these really flattering stretch pants that end right here," she says, pointing to her ankle. "Then I wear a sports bra on top and nothing else. You know why I don't wear anything else? Because I might want to quit after half an hour. So I look in the mirror, and because I can see my stomach, I'm like, 'got to keep going.' That's what I do. I once read that Uma Thurman eats naked so that she remembers what she looks like while she's eating. That's my equivalent." Donatella Versace is so enamored with Ricci's look that she lends her frocks at every opportunity, saying, "Whether Christina is in a swimsuit or couture, she always has a unique sense of style."

It wasn't always like this. After mesmerizing audiences at the age of nine as Cher's daughter in Mermaids, and then again as Wednesday Addams in the Addams Family, Ricci entered a teendom marred by anorexia and wild-child antics. "I've had periods of time when I'm maybe going a little crazy or partying too much. But ultimately I'm pretty sensible—I'll never let myself go through anything silly for that long," she says. This, she recalls, is how she conquered her anorexia. "Once you're in it, you're so involved in whatever the mind shift is that you can't see clearly. The second a therapist finally explained to me what I was doing, I was just like, 'Oh, this is ridiculous!' " The upsetting result for Ricci was that post-anorexia she put on weight and was then taunted for being "a little chunky."

Ricci's first foray into fashion was influenced by her iconic screen mom Cher. For the Mermaids premiere, Ricci telephoned her for some style advice. Cher dispatched the child to the Beverly Center, where she bought a short, oversize dress and black-and-white cow-print leggings that she wore with black shoes and a black hat. "When Winona [Ryder] saw me, she fell on the floor laughing," recalls Ricci, a smile creeping across her face. Her best friend, Gaby Hoffman, who acted with her in 200 Cigarettes, recalls that as a fourteen-year-old, Ricci "had a very specific style. I met Christina when she was in her clown-shoes phase. They had big round toes and were made of five different colors of patched leather. They were absolutely hideous, and she wore them every day."

Fashion choices aside, Ricci did some great work as a teenager, in films like The Ice Storm, Buffalo '66, and The Opposite of Sex. After 37 movies she has established a reputation as an independent, talented actress with a penchant for playing risqué girls-on-the-verge. Just as she is trying on a new, grown-up skin offscreen, likewise her cinematic career is maturing. "I always wanted to be someone with power," she says. "I saw Working Girl, and I wanted to be Sigourney Weaver with the big, boxy shoulder pads and the desk. The people I idolized when I was younger were the producer Scott Rudin and my agent. I decided when I was eleven that I wanted to run a mini-studio one day." To that end, Ricci set up the obligatory production company, Blaspheme, but seems serious about it. She has produced two upcoming movies, Pumpkin and Prozac Nation, both of which she stars in, and is directing a film this summer that she describes as "a black comedy about a woman on death row." Her indie streak is as strong as ever, and despite her glossy veneer, Ricci's view of life is constantly surprising. When asked what she would be had she not become an actress, she doesn't miss a beat, replying, "A trophy wife. I mean, how fabulous. You just wear Versace all the time, and jewels, and, you know, drink champagne."