Kensit Makes Most Of Big, Juicy Role In Racy `Twenty-One'

At the tender age of 23, Patsy Kensit already has played a Spanish prostitute, an American standup comic, Mel Gibson's South African girlfriend, the devout Italian follower of a saint, a ruthless real-estate agent, and key roles in television productions of "Great Expectations," "Richard III" and "Silas Marner."

At 14, she also was the lead singer in her brother's band, Eighth Wonder - a gig that convinced director Julien Temple that she should play the leading lady, Crepe Suzette, in his popular 1986 British rock musical, "Absolute Beginners." She's never had any formal training, but she thinks working steadily, if not starring, with such actors as Ben Kingsley and Daniel Day-Lewis has been education enough.

But the movie that's likely to make her a marquee name is "Twenty-One," a racy comedy-drama in which Kensit plays Katie, a 21-year-old London receptionist with a sex-obsessed married boyfriend, another boyfriend who's a heroin addict, and a husband she has married for legal reasons only. She's in every scene, making ample use of four-letter Anglo-Saxonisms to describe her sexual needs.

The film, which opens Friday at the Metro Cinemas, begins as Katie arrives in New York and takes the audience into her confidence by addressing the camera. The performance caused a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival in January, drawing comparisons with Julie Christie's Oscar-winning work in "Darling" (1965), and Kensit was a runner-up for the best actress prize at the Seattle International Film Festival in June.

"I hate the term `career move'," said the British actress during a recent visit to Seattle. "That's not why I did it. I had no idea this little $1.2 million film would get such attention. It was just a great opportunity to really act, to tackle a range of emotions, and Katie's so different from me. I like playing a different person each time."

The film's director, Don Boyd, was opposed to casting her at first, because he was familiar only with her work opposite Gibson in "Lethal Weapon 2" and a couple of other films. After she sent him tapes of the BBC productions in which she played Shakespeare and Dickens, he gave in.

"We decided Katie should be as down-looking as possible in the looks department, so I cut my hair short and went without makeup," she said.

"What was scary was talking to the camera. I've spent all my life avoiding looking at it, and I worried about having those `dead eyes' people get on television when they're reading teleprompters. It must be tough being an anchorman on the news. I finally thought of one person, a girlfriend, I could deliver the monologues to, and tried to forget about the camera."

Although Katie's brassy qualities get her through some desperate situations, and she seems indestructible by film's end, Kensit doesn't think of her as any kind of role model.

She thinks the movie, which was written by a 25-year-old woman (Zoe Heller), is simply about someone who's trying to survive emotionally in the 1990s. She has more ambivalent feelings about such films as "Pretty Woman" ("Julia Roberts is terrific, but the script glamourizes prostitution") and Christie's promiscuous jet-setter in "Darling."

"I didn't really know about `Darling' until the critics brought it up," said Kensit. "I don't understand the comparisons. That woman was quite evil, she was manipulative, she really used people. Katie's not like that."

Since shooting "Twenty-One" in the summer of 1990, Kensit has completed four more films, and she begins another next month: an updated version of Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," co-starring Julian Sands and Janet Suzman.

The chief reason for the spurt of work is "Lethal Weapon 2." She got the part because Tim Burton was looking for an actress to play the Joker's girlfriend in "Batman." Burton and the casting director, Marion Dougherty, decided she wasn't right for it, but Dougherty remembered Kensit from "The Great Gatsby" and suggested her for the other film.

But there's a down side: She's never been crazy about the kind of attention "Lethan Weapon 2" and "Absolute Beginners" brought her.

"After `Absolute Beginners' I grew up a lot," she said. "I'd been so protected. My parents had kept me away from the press as a child, when acting was just a hobby, and I didn't do any television interviews. Then I got exposed to all this publicity, and the British journalists can be very waspish."

Kensit admits that she's "totally consumed with acting right now. At some point I'd like to disappear and have babies, maybe start living a quiet life when I reach 30."

Perhaps the script of "Twenty-One" will prove prophetic and she'll follow the lead of another actress who retired early to marry, after a successful though brief career. In the movie's first scene, Katie covers her face with a green-mud mask and announces to the camera, "When this comes off, I'm going to look like Grace Kelly."