Soar Winner

Nobody's selling the film harder than Paltrow. On Dec. 11, she made the Today show's Matt Lauer blush with stories about the prosthetic bean bag she wore betwixt the thighs to pass as a man in the movie. She talked turkey on a Thanksgiving-eve Late Show With David Letterman. She taught Rosie how to proffer a proper English accent. She even spent an entire afternoon pasting on fake mustaches for a cross-dressing sketch on The Tonight Show. ''I'm so sick of myself and my boring voice and my stupid sound bites,'' Paltrow says, laughing. ''This is the last cover of a magazine I am doing until I'm 30.''

For Paltrow, a respite from the spotlight might not be such a bad idea. Beautiful, blond, talented, and to the manor born — her parents are showbiz royalty Bruce Paltrow and Blythe Danner — she's the kind of person you could love to hate. (In fact, she was snubbed in her own hometown last month when the New York Film Critics Circle handed its 1998 Best Actress honor to the seemingly more lovable Cameron Diaz.) Add to that intelligent costume dramas, romances with Brad Pitt and Affleck, and she sounds too good to be true.

To Paltrow's credit, however, she's now being less vocal about her love life. ''I said things about being in a relationship [with Pitt] that felt wrong to me even as I was saying them,'' she says. ''I was more concerned about hurting the reporter's feelings or coming off as being overly self-protective...but I've realized that absolutely no good can come of my talking about it.''

She also says that she'll be choosing projects more carefully. ''For a while, I was going along, saying 'Oh, wow, cool, I can be in this movie with, you know, Ethan Hawke, who I like, and it shoots in New York, I'll do it.' But I never really thought deeply about what it would mean in terms of the work.... With a movie like A Perfect Murder [last summer's glossy thriller costarring Michael Douglas], my thinking was, this could be one of those movies you watch on Spectravision when you drive up to Santa Barbara for the weekend and get in a hotel and cuddle in bed. That sounded like fun. Looking back, there really wasn't anything to sink my teeth into.''

Even before Shakespeare, Paltrow had pretty much cornered the market on roles calling for a young American actress who can put on a corset and pull off a British accent — though not always to her own satisfaction. ''I'm not crazy about my work in Emma,'' she says. ''It wasn't deep enough for me.'' Another period drama is next: In The Talented Mr. Ripley (directed by The English Patient's Anthony Minghella), she plays a wealthy American living in Italy in the 1950s; Damon portrays a killer. After that, she plans to step out of the period pigeonhole. ''I just hope that people don't get possessive of me that way,'' she says. ''Like how they get over the sweetheart type of girl. It's hard when you see an actor or actress you respect, like Julia Roberts, continuously being asked to play the same role because that's what the American people demand.''

At the moment, at least five other scripts have been connected with her name. ''At a certain point, I'll probably work less," she says. ''I'd like to take some time off and do normal things. Be a volunteer somewhere. Read poetry. Or have a family. I'd just like to dig in and nest for a while. But I probably won't have to worry about it. They'll probably kick me out of movies before I'm ready to go.''

Come now, Paltrow. From the looks of things they like you. They really like you.