A Season of Hope

One of Davis' first auditions was for the sitcom Married...With Children. She lost the part to Christina Applegate. ''I for sure was getting that job,'' she says. ''I swear to God, the guy loved me! He was laughing and laughing. I thought, I'm going to get this. I don't know what happened.'' If she'd landed it, her life would've worked out differently. ''I'd have a much bigger apartment,'' she cracks. She also auditioned, improbably enough, for Baywatch.

Davis' worst moment on a set was probably shooting her first take on her first film 15 years ago. After college at Vassar, the Tenafly, N.J., native had come up through the Chicago theater, where director Joel Schumacher gave Davis her big break in a stage production of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow. Then he cast her as Billy Baldwin's girlfriend in Flatliners — and that's where it all went wrong. In her first scene, she got flummoxed when the cameras started rolling, so she stopped and called ''Cut!'' herself. ''And Joel came out and said, 'Don't you ever say cut!''' she recalls. ''I feel that one moment scared me so thoroughly that I've been really well prepared ever since.''

She next played the French ticket agent in Home Alone, before gradually segueing into indies, with ensemble parts in The Daytrippers and The Myth of Fingerprints. Five years after Next Stop Wonderland, she nearly passed on the film that would earn her a Golden Globe nomination, American Splendor. ''When I read the script I didn't understand how it was going to work with the comic-book panels. It didn't make any sense to me,'' she admits. ''And my agent said, 'You should work on this,' and I'm like'' — she huffs (inadvertently channeling Joyce Brabner) — '''All right, whatever, but I don't get this script.' I didn't want to go to Cleveland. The movie really surprised me.''

For 2006, she's already wrapped The Hoax, a Richard Gere vehicle about real-life con artist Clifford Irving, who wrote a fake Howard Hughes autobiography; and Infamous, another movie about Truman Capote and In Cold Blood. Davis plays Slim Keith, the socialite and Capote confidante. ''We all just assumed that theirs couldn't be as interesting as ours, and then Capote came out and had such great reviews,'' she says. ''I liked Capote. I thought Phil'' — Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played that boyfriend who dumped her in Wonderland — ''was terrific, but I was so happy when I saw ours. It's incredible. And very different in tone — there's a lot of stuff of him in New York, like parties at Diana Vreeland's house.''

And now? ''Well,'' she says, ''I'm looking for a job. I'm reading some big-studio stuff and there's an independent thing that I'm going to look at this weekend. Nothing is out there right now that I'm dying to have. I just kind of hang on till something good comes, and then I hang on again. Then again, it doesn't feel so treacherous now. But you never know when it's going to end, especially as a woman. I was never the ingenue, so hopefully that'll make it easier to age and still work. I know a lot of actors who are really dissatisfied with where they're at even though some of them are huge stars and I feel like, 'Oh, my God, you're at the top.' Something interesting will come. It always does. I have faith.'' Hope has faith! The on-screen frowner is full of cheer. ''And it's going to be something good.''