Leelee's Learning Curve

LEELEE SOBIESKI INSISTS THAT SHE’S just like any other Brown University freshman. Sure, she spent this past summer making a movie in Paris. And, yes, she is friends with such Hollywood heartthrobs as tom Cruise and Russell Crowe, makes $1 million per film and pays Brown’s $35,000 annual tuition herself. But since moving onto the Providence, Rhode Island, campus this fall, the five-foot-nine New York native has tried to blend in with the rest of the class of 2005. She decorated her dormitory room with Matisses and Picassos. (“Not real ones!” she says. “Just posters!”) And she has bonded with her roommate — a girl from Minneapolis named Cara who doesn’t seem to be star-struck at all. “She couldn’t care less that I’m in movies,” says Sobieski. It’s more about ‘Do you have any turkey left over in our little fridge? I’m starving!’”
     Life as a college student actually comes as a relief to Sobieski, who, despite her success in such movies as Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Here on Earth (2000), has never been completely sold on stardom. “It’s nice to be [at college] with lots of really young people who have so many goals and so many different things on their minds,” she says. “I’m happy to get away from actors.”
     Not that Sobieski is leaving the film world completely. “I’m enrolling for one semester at a time,” she says. This fall, when Sobieski scheduled her classes — which include art history and Japanese literature — she kept Fridays free in case she needed to go on a weekend audition.
     Sobieski has become well acquainted with the Thursday-night Boston-to-Los Angeles red-eye flight during the past two months, thanks to her star turns in three films — My First Mister, The Glass House and Joy ride — and the World War II miniseries Uprising, which will air on NBC on November 4 and 5. But acting has always been just one part of Sobieski’s life. While she was growing up on New York’s Upper West Side, her parents — Jean Sobieski, a French-born abstract painter, and Elizabeth Sobieski, an American writer who manages her daughter’s career — took Leelee and her brother, Roby, now 12, to Shakespeare plays in Central Park and gallery crawls in SoHo. Sobieski, whose given name is Liliane Rudabet Gloria Elsveta Sobieski (a composite of family names), learned to dance the flamenco, ride horses and practice tae kwon do. She spent summers at her family’s house in the South of France and, in high school, worked on movies in Hollywood — she graduated in 2001 from L.A.’s Lycée Français, the same French-language private school that Jodie Foster had attended.
     As a teen, Sobieski wrote poems, including one about a friend who had disappointed her called “Mental Ward B.” It begins: “I am sad and you laugh/That’s not very nice/You just follow the crowd like a bunch of white mice.” She and her father often collaborate on paintings, usually starting on opposite sides of the canvas and then switching halfway through. Sobieski has been acting since age 11, when Woody Allen’s casting director, Juliet Taylor, discovered her in her school cafeteria and asked her to try out for the part in Interview With the Vampire that Kirsten Dunst eventually played. But even as her movie career has taken off, she hasn’t given up on her other interests. “I wanted to be a painter, director, writer, architect, potter,” she says. “And an actress.”
     Sobieski’s cultural education has given her more eclectic tastes than many teenagers. She loves John Waters movies, reads The New Yorker and grooves to the trip-hop sounds of Massive Attack, whom she describes as having “kind of a porno beat.” She also has the unusual hobby of collecting hair from her costars. So far she has locks from Drew Barrymore, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh and about 30 others. “I keep them in Ziploc bags,” she says. “But I’m thinking, later on, maybe I’ll paint a canvas and sprinkle them on that.”
     Christine Lahti, the director of My First Mister, has called Sobieski “17 going on 100.” And her Mister costar Albert Brooks has said that “when you spend time with Leelee, it’s just like two adults talking.” Sobieski holds her own with grown-ups she meets at parties: She bantered with Norman Mailer and Salman Rushdie at an event in the Hamptons one summer, and after January’s Golden Globe Awards, she spent much of the evening chatting with Crowe.
     With people her own age, however, she is quick to adapt. When she’s at Brown, Sobieski (who won’t say if she has a boyfriend) goes out of her way not to act like “a diva locked in her room,” she has said. “Once [the other girls] see me in the bathroom picking at my toenails, they realize, [She’s ugly and normal just like anyone else.’” US