In the indie film "Foxfire," her character was called "Legs." She's most identifiable by her sensuous full lips. And she told one magazine that her greatest challenge starring in the HBO movie "Gia" was to avoid being upstaged by her breasts. Though she's as well known for her body as for her body of work, Angelina Jolie is proving herself in a series of high-profile roles to be greater than the sum of her parts.

Jolie's first starring role in a feature film was in the 1995 teen techno-thriller "Hackers," which did poorly at the boxoffice but introduced some promising new talent to the scene, including Renoly Santiago ("Dangerous Minds"), Matthew Lillard ("Scream") and Jonny Lee Miller ("Trainspotting"). "Hackers" led Jolie to both national recognition and a husband-she married co-star Miller shortly after filming wrapped. And despite the film's less-than-stellar performance, Jolie says it "taught me a good lesson. I was just starting out, and I think a lot of young actors take themselves so seriously that unless we're crying and screaming, we don't think we're acting. There's something to just being present and being in the moment and having a good time."

At 23, Jolie has a pragmatic, centered, wise-beyond-her-years demeanor likely fostered in part by growing up in a showbusiness family. The daughter of Academy Award winner Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand (a former actress who now managers her daughter's career), Jolie was exposed early on to the workings of Hollywood, though she herself didn't start acting until she was in her teens. One of the first plays she did, in a workshop at the Strasberg Institute, set the precedent for her eccentric inclinations. "We did `Room Service,' the Marx Brothers movie. There were all these different roles in it, but I wanted to audition for the big, mean manager. I was 16, and I thought [I should play the role as] this German dominatrix.

"[My dad] came to see this play to see what kind of an actor I was going to be or what kind of choices I was going to be making. And instead of seeing me come out as a sweet little girl or the sexy woman who's from out of town and staying at the hotel, I came in as this insanely driven, dominant person who everybody laughed at. That's when he realized, `she does [share my] sense of the bizarre.'"

From a cybervixen in "Hackers" to a lesbian vigilante in "Foxfire" to a gangster's girlfriend in "Playing God" to a bisexual, drug-addicted supermodel in "Gia," the roles haven't gotten any more straight-laced over time. And Miramax's "Dancing About Architecture," in which Jolie stars with Madeleine Stowe, Gillian Anderson, Gena Rowlands, Ellen Burstyn and Sean Connery, continues the trend.

"I usually try to look for something I haven't done before, a side of me that I haven't completely explored," she says. "There's a truth in acting, and there is a very real part of me that can understand that or can believe in that or can see the beauty of that or see the ugliness in that and the statement that needs to be made. So it's kind of all me. But there are different sides of me that are harder. [My role in] `Dancing About Architecture' was a very, very [extroverted] kind of personality who just had no darkness, really, and was just very, very positive, and wanting love, and kind of kooky and fun and up all the time and colorful, [with her] little short skirts and big huge monologues where she just goes on telling people stories and making faces. And for me, there is nothing in me that is normally like that or doesn't find that annoying. I had a hard time finding that rhythm in myself. But I eventually found it. I found that when I was four years old, there was this part of me that liked making people laugh and liked wearing glitter underwear. And how can you not?"

The reason Jolie was drawn to a role so diametrically opposed to herself was that the script was "amazing," as she puts it. "Sometimes it's not the role but your one piece of a really beautiful puzzle."

Nevertheless, she does admit that she eventually came to find that her character "is a beautiful person to me, because she wants to love and believe so much, and isn't shot down by the world and wary. She's just so hopeful. And I wanted to understand that side of me, and I wanted to answer the challenge." Her castmates were also a draw. "I can't even believe how I got into this cast with these people that I admire so much. You're up there and you're trying to perform or trying to say something, and you're looking out and you're seeing Sean Connery, Gena Rowlands, Ellen Burstyn and these people, and they're smiling at you, and they're so supportive, and you're just like, `Oh my god! Oh my god! They're my heroes!' I was in the middle of doing [a scene], and I looked over at Sean Connery and he suddenly smiled, and I just forgot what I was doing."

Says Jolie of the storyline, "'Dancing About Architecture' comes from the idea that talking about love is as pointless as dancing about architecture. And all these people are trying to deal with the loss of love or a love that has gone bad or finding love, coming to terms with themselves, life and death. It's the story of people that are unique and interesting to watch, but very human. Everybody will identify with somebody in it. And there are a lot of surprises in it. And it's sad and very real but it's also really colorful and fun to watch because there are so many people and so many different stories." Up next for Jolie is Fox's "Pushing Tin," in which she'll tackle a Texan accent as Billy Bob Thornton's contentious, tippling wife, and Universal's "The Bone Collector," in which she'll play a cop from Queens who teams up with a quadriplegic investigator (Denzel Washington) to track down a serial killer. "The thing about this business, they like to stick you in one thing, and they like to tell you `you're the dark person' or `you're the sexy person' or `you're the mother, and you can't be something else.' You just have to keep fighting against it."

Another role Jolie has played was the part of a student-she recently studied film at NYU. "It was very good for me to get away after `Gia,' to not be in the spotlight, not have a chair, not have somebody bringing me coffee, and get on the bus with my backpack. But I'm working now, so I can't go to school. [Besides,] I learn so much on a set-like John Frankenheimer [who directed Jolie in the 1997 TV movie "George Wallace"], who's become such a close friend, has said I can come visit him and he would show me lenses-or I could sit in a classroom.
"So I don't think I'm going to go back."

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