DATE: Sunday, August 17, 1997               TAG: 9708150212

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E16  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   81 lines

SORVINO GETS DOWN AND DIRTY

SO, WHAT'S A GORGEOUS GAL like Mira Sorvino doing crawling around a grimy, flooded New York subway tunnel with roaches and other unpleasantries?

She likes it that way.

The shapely blond (who is now a brunette) talks about the after-Oscar fallout in which ``I turned down more scripts than I thought I'd ever be offered.''

Her choice? ``Mimic,'' the sci-fi thriller that opens Friday. She spends most of it in tattered rags and makeup that included ``some kind of brown powder mixed with water. Once I forgot to take it off and went out on the street. People thought I'd been in a fire.''

``I wanted an action role,'' said Sorvino, who won her Oscar for playing the dim-witted, helium-voiced prostitute in Woody Allen's ``Mighty Aphrodite.'' ``I didn't want to play `the girl' in some silly movie. The woman I play is a scientist whose experiment backfires.

``She's not a hardbody. This is not like the woman in `Terminator 2.' This is a normal woman to whom all these horrible things happen, but she's intelligent. Maybe, now, I have the action-movie thing out of my system.''

Surely, her most public role was at the 1996 Academy Awards. As an international audience of 1 billion watched, she walked on stage and said, ``When you give me this award, you honor my father, Paul Sorvino, who has taught me everything there is to know about acting.''

The camera flashed to Dad, who was crying uncontrollably. It was great television.

Sorvino's pop is the veteran character actor who starred in ``Nixon'' and ``Goodfellas.'' She grew up in Tenafly, N.J.

``He would be happier, even today, I think if I'd become a college professor,'' Sorvino said, ``but he taught me at an early age the basics of emotional preparation. He never helped me to get jobs and he encouraged me not to go into acting.''

She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in East Asian studies, but spent each summer in New York auditioning for parts.

``I wanted to go to college and act at the same time. Finally, I just gave it up and concentrated on the studies, planning to go into international business.''

After college, she lived for eight months in Beijing, learning to speak Mandarin. Still, the urge to act remained. A role as the intellectual wife of Rob Morrow in ``Quiz Show'' was a breakthrough. Initially, Allen thought she was too intelligent and classy for the prostitute in ``Mighty Aphrodite,'' but she developed a voice that sounded like Minnie Mouse and walked around New York in character.

``I never ran into anyone I knew,'' Sorvino said. ``Once, I bought a camera in character as Linda - and got them to cut the price by $50.''

Off-screen, she's been seen everywhere with Quentin Tarantino, the extroverted director and Oscar-winner for writing ``Pulp Fiction.'' Hollywood onlookers see them as an odd couple.

``Quentin and I have a romantic chemistry that works, and I don't give a damn what they say,'' Sorvino said. ``Quentin is brilliant and the bravest person I ever met. He doesn't have formal education but he has this quick mind that is awesome.

``When we go out, it's usually he who is recognized. For one thing, he's so tall, 6-foot-3. I like not being recognized but the Oscar has changed my life. It's made it more public.''

The big question among movie fans was how would she follow up the Oscar win? Here's how: She won an Emmy for playing Marilyn Monroe on TV, then starred as one half of the title characters in the surprise hit comedy, ``Romy and Michele's High School Reunion.''

Still, the honors graduate, who wrote a prize-winning thesis on racial conditions in China, had the public image of a blond bimbo.

She chose ``Mimic's'' Dr. Susan Tyler to put that image to rest.

Tyler is a scientist who, after discovering an antidote to a terrible disease, learns that the species she created has learned to reproduce and mimic humans. Breeding in the subways beneath New York City, they're horrible things to behold and - you'd think - to be near on a movie set. In a portion of the movie, she's called ``the bug lady.''

``In one scene I had to put my hand in a nest of roaches,'' Sorvino said with more pride than repulsion, ``and another was played to a dead carcass.''

So much for the glamorous life of an Oscar-winner. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

DIMENSION PICTURES

...Mira Sorvino... KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY MOVIES

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