Karma Chameleon - Brief Article

Laurel Holloman likes being a chameleon. That's why few people realize that the same woman who played the blue-collar tomboy in the teenage lesbian romance The Incredible Adventures of Two Girls in Love was also Mark Wahlberg's lusty lover in Boogie Nights, not to mention Janet McTeer's coffee-enema-aficionado friend in Tumbleweeds. "Early on I decided not to have any vanity in my work," Holloman says.

An earthy 28-year-old who spent much of her North Carolina girlhood on the horse-show circuit, Holloman lives in New York, not L.A., and is ambivalent about fame. "I'm really sure about having an acting career, but I'm really unsure about what celebrity is," she says. Nevertheless, celebrity is creeping up on her. Holloman stars in four movies this year. Loving Jezebel, an urban comedy about interracial romance; the World War II coming-of-age film The Rising Place; the dark comedy Lush; and Last Ball, where she plays a married mother having an affair with a younger man.

She's also about to begin filming her most challenging role to date, the paranoiac lead in David Smith's modern adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. For Holloman, who laughingly says, "I don't think I'm as neurotic as most actors are," the part will be a stretch. Then again, this woman has yet to meet a character she couldn't climb inside.

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