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The actress wasn't entirely low maintenance. Costner calls her "one of the most beautiful women to come on screen in the last 10 years," but Williams made the hair and makeup departments earn their keep. She refused to stay out of the rain ("That really f - - - ed up my hair extensions"), and between horseback riding ("I fell passionately in love with the wranglers"), football games, and insisting on pedaling to work instead of using a car and driver, Williams was covered with black-and-blue marks by the time she had to shoot a sex scene with Costner. "I had the most god-awful bruise on my ass," she says. "It took about 10 layers of makeup to disguise it."

Williams, who's single, isn't yet committed to another project. "Until now, if someone offered me a job, I took it. It's like filling your handbag with food," says the actress who, accustomed to a grab-it-while-you-can existence, found herself doing just that at the set's craft-services setup. "It's a hard attitude to shake." So is her distaste for stasis. She's about to spend two weeks in Bolivia with a friend who is studying bears in the rain forest. Then it's back to L.A. for the Postman premiere. "I'll have to get the twigs out of my hair and get myself a manicure," Williams says thoughtfully. "And rethink my fake-tanning technique." --Rebecca Ascher-Walsh

DIANE VENORA

Frankly, the woman sounds like a masochist. At age 45, when her more established peers are calling for soft lighting, Diane Venora is dodging bullets alongside Bruce Willis and Richard Gere in the run-fast-shoot-faster thriller The Jackal, playing a Russian agent with half her face covered by a hideous prosthetic scar. As if that weren't enough, the actress, who normally looks like a cross between Jessica Lange and Audrey Hepburn, wore the scar in public for a week, "to learn about the character."

Nor did Venora lighten up on the set. "She was very hard on herself," says Michael Caton-Jones, who directed the remake of 1973's Day of the Jackal. "Sometimes she'd go away at the end of the day in tears."

Then again, Venora has never taken the easy route. Fifteen years ago, the actress got critically famous fast. She had left her home in Hartford for a full scholarship at Manhattan's Juilliard, played Hamlet (yes, the lead role) for Joseph Papp in 1983, and got a Golden Globe nomination for her role as Forest Whitaker's wife in Clint Eastwood's 1988 film Bird. Then she quit.

"Here's the story," Venora says. After she and her husband, cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak (Speed), divorced, she was living in New York with her daughter, Madzia, and traveling often for work. "One day, when Madzia was 8, I was supposed to go to Paris to do this film called Impromptu," Venora recalls. "And my daughter says, 'You're selfish, and I'm not going with you.' " The next morning, Venora walked into the William Morris Agency and said: "I'm resigning from show business. I can't explain it to you because you'll never understand. It is not a Hollywood thing, but it's a life."


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