Reluctant Star After Many Supporting Roles, Paltrow Shines As Lead In ‘Emma’

Perhaps not since infancy has Gwyneth Paltrow, 23, been so much the center of her own universe. In the last three years, she has received fawning reviews for playing mostly ancillary characters in so-so movies.

When she ventures out in public with her boyfriend, curious onlookers gather, if not precisely because they know who she is, but because the man who is gazing at her so adoringly is Brad Pitt.

This month, she swans through her first leading role, in “Emma,” based on the Jane Austen classic, making it look easy to be an American passing as England’s most beloved heroine in a film overflowing with acclaimed British actors.

In celebration of this occasion, a media assault is under way, making her the most deified young actress since the recent deification of Matthew McConaughey.

And now it even seems that everyone in the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills wants to greet her. In the next hour, a manager, a lawyer and three publicists will, one by one, approach Paltrow’s table, each time causing her to spring from her chair. Upon spotting her friend Catherine Keener (who gives her own much talked-about performance in the independent film “Walking and Talking”), Paltrow reacts like a wound-up sorority sister.

“Sweee-tie!” she cries. Then Paltrow and Keener cup each other’s faces with their hands, press foreheads, rub noses and begin squealing merrily.

That Paltrow can engage in this profusion of cooing and still seem like a genuinely nice person is a feat in itself. On the other hand, with the exception of not being able to drive a car with a stick shift (“Too scary,” she confesses), it seems nauseatingly clear that there is little Paltrow cannot do.

In “Emma,” the story of a sweet natured but much-indulged rich girl who tries to organize everyone’s life but her own, Paltrow plays piano and sings harmony. She shows herself to be a skilled archer. All her lines are spoken in a tinkly, pitch-perfect English accent. A stunt double, brought in to do a tricky maneuver with a horse-drawn carriage, was rendered useless when Paltrow took over the reins and got it right on her first take.

“After a while,” says Douglas McGrath, who directed and wrote the screen adaptation of the novel, “I started wondering if maybe I should put stunts in the movie just to see if she could do them. I thought to myself, ‘What about having her drive a motorcycle over 12 burning oil barrels? Would that be wrong for the period?’ “

Paltrow’s reputation for precociousness isn’t new. For that, you’d have to rewind back to 1993, when she turned in a highly acclaimed appearance as an amoral grifter in Steve Kloves’s “Flesh and Bone.” In it, she had little dialogue, but every time her haunting character slinked onto the screen, Paltrow’s more seasoned co-stars - Meg Ryan, Dennis Quaid and James Caan - seemed to noticeably recede and only she seemed worthy of attention.

Back then, film critics eagerly anticipated her leap to title roles, ready to anoint her as the next big thing. Instead, Paltrow took an alternative route, accepting mostly supporting roles in six films shot in roughly 36 months.

“I was in no rush to be the star of a movie, because there is so much responsibility placed on your shoulders,” Paltrow says, dragging on what will be the first of an endless chain of Camel cigarettes. “I wanted to learn, to do smaller parts, really diverse things, things that are opposite from the last role you’ve done.”

For a while, she seemed to be specializing in weakly written fringe characters who, by all rights, should have been totally forgettable. With “Moonlight and Valentino,” Paltrow took the diffident Lucy, whom she is too coolly beautiful to completely inhabit, and managed to make audiences see her as raw with self-loathing.

She somehow converted Patsy, Thomas Jefferson’s daddy-loving daughter, into one of the most interesting aspects of Merchant-Ivory’s otherwise bland “Jefferson in Paris.”

After that came “Seven,” starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as homicide detectives on the trail of a serial killer. As Tracy, Pitt’s spouse, Paltrow tried hard to work her magic. But, ultimately, her dutiful wife was so clearly marked for doom that Paltrow might as well as worn a sign that said Plot Device.

“I really got beat up over that one,” Paltrow says of “Seven,” although the pundits reproved her not because they didn’t like her work but because they felt she was squandering her sizable gift. (“The film treats her in ways you wouldn’t treat a dog,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times.) In the end, Paltrow says, the fuss forced her to come to terms with how she will make professional decisions in the future.

“What I realized is that I don’t really care what anyone thinks,” she says. “I read the script and thought, ‘If she’s not full and doesn’t have a soul, then the movie won’t work.’ Then I thought, ‘I’m the only one who can get this right,’ which is egotistical.”

Or merely confident. The golden offspring of a theatrical family (her mother is the actress Blythe Danner; her father is the television writer and producer Bruce Paltrow, who created “St. Elsewhere” and “The White Shadow”), Paltrow’s tutelage began early on.

Her summers were spent in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, watching Mom take curtain calls at the Williamstown Theater Festival. “As soon as I could read, I was running lines with her,” Paltrow recalls. “My earliest memories are of climbing on the artistic director’s lap and crawling in and out of rehearsals.”

By the time she was 12, she’d gone from her observation post in the wings to doing summer stock herself. In 1991, Paltrow dropped out of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and began acting full time. It is part of the growing Paltrow legend that her first film assignment came about when the director Steven Spielberg, a family friend, tapped her to play young Wendy in his 1991 film “Hook.”

As it happens, Paltrow had already made her screen debut earlier that year in “Shout,” a pre-comeback John Travolta vehicle, which Paltrow categorizes as “so bad, it’s amazing.” Her one speaking line consisted of a single word. “Re-bec-ca,” Paltrow recites, pretending to give as much importance as one can to three dinky syllables.

But the screenwriter and director Paul Thomas Anderson (“Mortal Combat”) saw prospect in the radiant blond day player. “It didn’t matter that she didn’t have anything to say,” he says. “She still made moments for herself.”

Two years later, when he cast his movie “Hard Eight,” which will be released in January, he chose her to be Clementine, a self-destructive cocktail waitress and prostitute.

Though Clementine is a liar and a cheat, Paltrow could still summon nothing but affection for the disgruntled chippie. “I love her,” she says, “because she’s strong, crazy and has her own code of morals.”

Then again, Paltrow’s minimum emotional requirement for the women she portrays always seems to boil down to whether or not they at least attempt to exert control over their own destiny.

Which is perhaps why Paltrow’s voice goes flat when discussing “Kilronan,” a psychological thriller co-starring Jessica Lange that was recently completed.

“Jessica is amazing, she’s brilliant in this movie,” says Paltrow, struggling to find the right diplomatic take. In the film, Lange plays an enraged mother-in-law who torments her son’s malleable bride, played by Paltrow.

“But I’m just kind of this victim, which is good because it taught me that I never want to do that again.” Then reflecting on the experience, Paltrow cranes her lovely neck to the right, sticks out her tongue and makes a soft, retching sound.

While it is moments like these that remind one that, just like Emma Woodhouse, Paltrow is still in her early 20s, she also has poise and dignity to spare.

This year, at the Academy Awards, she made perhaps the classiest showing of all the ingenues in shiny slip dresses who traipsed up the red carpet. Throughout the long evening, she grinned and waved excitedly, appearing to be having too much fun to mind that most of the fans were screaming for her boyfriend, Pitt, whom she met while making “Seven.”

“I was just so proud of him, just so happy that we were there in that capacity,” she says of that night. Pitt had received a best supporting actor nomination for “12 Monkeys.”

Paltrow talks about her evident talent for wholly absorbing her characters the way she does about almost everything, which is to say as if it is all part of a great and lucky accident.

“When you do a character like Emma, so many things are handed to you,” the actress says, noting that she has read every Jane Austen novel, except “Persuasion.” “All of a sudden you completely understand this person and why she feels what she does, even though under the same set of circumstances, you would never behave like her. I just loved how Emma was a complete solipsist. And I loved how she pulls out of it and really learns from her mistakes. She’s a good girl, she’s just mixed up.”

Toward the end of “Emma,” there is a pivotal moment when Paltrow’s character realizes she has fallen in love with her good friend Knightly (Jeremy Northam) and may lose him to another woman. Within a matter of minutes, Paltrow deftly takes her Emma through seismic shifts of moods: panic, adoration, sadness, horror. It’s a funny, poignant scene, just one more piece of evidence to suggest why she is worthy of the tizzy she has been generating in Hollywood.

Even Paltrow, who says she dislikes seeing herself on screen, can muster praise, albeit faint, for her work in the film. “As mammals,” she says, wrinkling her forehead, “I don’t think we’re supposed to see how we behave or what we look like in all kinds of situations. But I’m getting better at it.”

“I saw ‘Emma,”’ she says, looking satisfied, but sounding tough, “And I thought, ‘This doesn’t suck.”’