Hot Phenom: Cameron Diaz
There are many schools of acting. There is classical acting, based on the stylized projection of an emotion. There is Method acting, which involves the subtle truth of an emotion.
Then there is the How Hard Can It Be? approach. “In a strange way,” says Cameron Diaz, former model, recent actress, “modeling and acting are really the same. Modeling is a performance, and you’re not yourself in the pictures. You take direction from the photographer, you wear a costume.” While Larry Olivier is probably whirling in his grave, the fact remains that Diaz, who walked off with a lead in The Mask with no prior film experience, actually can act.
There’s also the serendipitous combo of luck, well-chosen character roles (she plays a bitchy ex-hooker in She’s the One; a down-and-out felon in September’s Feeling Minnesota, with Keanu Reeves) and well-chosen refusals (saying no to McHale’s Navy ensured that Diaz did not drive down Kathy Ireland Boulevard). Finally, throw in a few raves: Roger Ebert drooled that Diaz was “a genuine sex bomb with a gorgeous face” (Mr. Ebert, please!), and the National Theater Owners Association crowned Diaz as 1996’s Female Star of Tomorrow. Hey, don’t laugh: Previous winners include Nicole Kidman and Juliette Lewis.
And Diaz is insensibly beautiful. As she glides past a row of New York policemen, the cops fall utterly silent. “Oh. My. God,” says one. They gape, slack-jawed. Understand, this is New York, which is teeming with stunning women, and these are New York’s finest, jaded folk who see things like human sacrifices. Yes, walking around with Diaz is not unlike being in a bad slapstick movie. You almost expect to see two moving men holding a mirror and a stunned onlooker crashing through it.
Because she looks the way she does, Diaz seems to work overtime to prove she’s just like one of us, just a stranger on the bus, trying to find her way home. She ain’t. As she slides into a wooden booth at an amiable West Village dive, she orders a cheeseburger. “I love grease,” she says. “When I was a kid, my mom would fry a steak, and my favorite thing to do was to soak a slice of bread in the pan, let it soak up the grease, then eat the bread.” Ah, shut up.
When the burger comes, however, Diaz literally sops up the grease with the already-sodden french fries. She looks at the wooden table, which is covered with carvings. “What does this say?” she asks. “I can’t read it” — she slurs her words for effect — “I think shomebody wash high.” She has a braying laugh that erupts frequently, and she swears like a longshoreman. Yet there is a sort of breeziness about her that suggests world travel, expensive hotels, open doors.
“Halfway through filming The Mask,” she is saying of the Jim Carrey megapic, “I was like, ‘Is there any place my friends and family can see this movie?’ I was so ignorant.” She scoops up a fry that is gruesomely transparent with grease. “I was having such a good time, I didn’t even think. Somebody said, ‘Do you want to act?’ All of a sudden I had to make a decision.” She lets out a huge, juicy belch.
A boisterous gaggle of 40ish guys who collectively share one head of hair sits in the booth across from Diaz. They promptly see her, and the conversation dies. “Doh!” says one of them, just like Homer Simpson.
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It’s not hard to imagine that in high school in Long Beach, Calif., Diaz was the Scary Pretty Girl Who Hung Around the Older Kids. A confident child, she was raised by easygoing parents (her dad is Cuban, her mom is German, English and American Indian) who toted Diaz and her elder sister, Chiméne, everywhere. “My parents were young, and if they went to a party at a friend’s house, they took us,” says Cameron, who turns 24 this month. “All the adults treated us like we were adults.” So did her parents. When she was young and curious about religion, they were only too glad to drop her off at any church she felt like checking out
Touchingly, Mom supported her young daughters’ budding interest in heavy metal by accompanying Cameron to her first Van Halen show. “My mom drove my sister and me in the VW bus,” Diaz recalls as she fires up a cigarette. “She took a little TV and a cooler with wine and cheese, and sat in there and did her needlepoint for two and a half hours in the Forum parking lot.” The news that David Lee Roth is rejoining Van Halen makes Cameron apoplectic. “I am so happy!” she crows, holding out her hand for a high-five. “All right!”
Diaz, you see, was a card-carrying headbanger. “I was the tough kid with the jeans, the concert shirt with the flannel over it, the comb in the back pocket, the feathered hair,” she says. “It was frightening. I saw every concert that came to Long Beach Arena. Metallica four times. Ozzy, Dio, hello. And I loved Ratt. Ratt is the shit! In Feeling Minnesota, there’s this song that Keanu and I have to sing in a car. I was pushing so hard for ‘Round and Round.'” Sadly, it was not used.
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As a kid, Diaz planned to be a zoologist but instead settled on being a model. This happened the way those sorts of things happen. When she was 16, she went to a party in Los Angeles: “There were all these sleazy guys going, ‘Hey, baby, do you want to be a model?’ Giving me cards with naked girls in champagne glasses. They would say, you know, Mitch, Photographer.” One guy who directed her to the Elite agency actually had a last name and a fax. Diaz was signed. Thus began an accelerated adolescence. In the summer of her 16th year, Diaz headed for Japan with a 15-year-old model pal and began to swing. “Models are like movie stars in Japan,” says Diaz. The girls were set up with a two-bedroom apartment. Four blocks down the road, there was a building that housed seven clubs. “You’d just get in an elevator and ride up and down,” says Diaz.
Hot Phenom: Cameron Diaz, Page 1 of 2