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JENNIFER JASON LEIGH MASTERING THE MISFITS

COOL MOVIE ACTRESS

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There are reasons, good ones, you remember Jennifer Jason Leigh. She was the sweet young thing in 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High who loses her virginity to a creep in a baseball dugout and is later used and abused in a poolside cabana. In 1990's Miami Blues, she was a harmless young prostitute who mistakes a psycho killer for Prince Charming. In 1991's Rush, she played a devoted narcotics cop who loses everything to her own major jones. And then there was her awesome performance in 1990's Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which she played Tra- lala, a hopelessly hard hooker who ends up violated in the back of a car by every human dog in the neighborhood. ''I always think it's a lot easier to relate to the neurotic on film,'' she says, ''or to the eccentric. It's in the strange that we find ourselves.'' It's this approach that informs her deep, honest, painful, and sensual portrayals of what Leigh calls ''complicated women'': outcasts, misfits, whores, junkies, and other otherwise innocent sisters who find themselves lost. Though none of Leigh's films has set the box office on fire (except 1991's Backdraft, in which she had a small part), that hasn't seemed to matter much to producers and directors, who are eager to hire her. This summer she's starring in director Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female, a hotly anticipated thriller about a young Manhattanite (Bridget Fonda) who makes the mistake of taking in a roommate (Leigh) without checking her references. It could be her commercial breakthrough. And if it's not, well, that probably won't bother Leigh much either. What you expect before meeting Leigh: a rather straight, light-haired, 30- year-old woman-half plain, half pretty-with a Pre-Raphaelite body. What you don't expect while waiting for Leigh outside a Hollywood coffee shop, and what you get: a tiny woman with a bad dye job and chapped lips, swimming in a brown pantsuit, nervously clutching an oversize purse, standing in the middle of the sidewalk behind huge, round sunglasses with lenses like multicolored oil slicks. Before we get to lunch, a little history. She's the daughter of the late actor Vic Morrow (who was killed in 1982 while shooting Twilight Zone: The Movie) and Barbara Turner, a TV writer, who divorced Morrow when Leigh was 2. As far back as she can remember, Leigh says, she wanted only to act. In high school she legally declared herself an emancipated minor, signed her own notes excusing herself from school, and spent many afternoons at the movies in Westwood. Six weeks before graduation, she got her first part (in 1981's Eyes of a Stranger, a horror film shooting in Florida), promised her mother she'd take an equivalency exam when she returned, closed the book on high school, and flew east. Leigh never made good on that promise to her mother; she was too busy getting challenging parts in troubled films. She has since caught up on her education by doing exhaustive research for roles. ''I'm not well educated,'' Leigh says quietly, toying with a piece of lettuce in her Chinese chicken salad. ''So it's through my research that I come to understand things. I love throwing myself into something.'' For the part in Single White Female, she read books on borderline personalities and talked to several therapists (including her own). She'll soon start research for her next role-a mother who makes her living doing phone sex at home-in Robert Altman's film Short Cuts. ''I don't know what phone sex is like,'' she says, ''but I'm going to find out. They have a training course people take to learn how to do that. Obviously we all know how to talk dirty, but there are ways to keep people on the phone longer. I think I might take that course.'' Leigh gets frequent offers to play what she describes as ''the woman who has it very easy,'' but she turns them down. ''There are a lot of other people who can do that, and do it beautifully. I don't relate to that woman. It's not why I wanted to act. I work so hard that it doesn't make sense for me to do something unless I really want to explore it. I want to change my life, and I want to become another person.'' Flicking her yellow Bic and firing up a Marlboro Light, Leigh starts to describe that process: ''The way your personality sort of dissolves, and the other personality sort of embraces you, is so subtle and such a slow transformation, you don't really feel it happening. But suddenly your reactions to things are very different than they would normally be. It's like having a virus. And then, after the shoot, in a couple of weeks, you get over it. You come back to yourself.'' Letting go of Last Exit's Tralala, Leigh says, was particularly hard. ''Tralala's disconnected from her feelings,'' she says. ''She doesn't feel anything. And that can feel pretty good.'' Leigh stops and smiles at her own sudden naivete-she knows that for herself, at least, feeling nothing can never feel good. So she backtracks: ''Being witness to extreme pain is not something foreign to me. And in a certain way I'm thankful for it. What I can do is take what pain I have and use it in a constructive way; I can put it into a movie, and express it, and not live it.''