Sex, lies and videotape

AS HER first marriage collapsed, Andie MacDowell felt the tug of nicotine. Taking up smoking wasn't something she was proud of, just something to take the edge off. She'd even try to mask her habit with mints and perfume.

"I was a closet smoker. I hid it from everybody," she recalls, now tobacco-free. "I needed to smoke in that period of my life and I forgave myself and I did it."

The vice was seemingly at odds with MacDowell's public, Southern belle-like persona: virtuous, reserved and demure.

And that persona may have been part of the problem.

"I feel like I have had extra burdens or pressures on me to be some kind of image of something," she says. "It's like when people get upset about Britney Spears and the way she dresses -- I have tried to be responsible."

The pressure displayed itself in her acting choices, which tended toward buttery, safe comedies like Groundhog Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Green Card, Michael and Multiplicity.

Divorce

THE 1999 breakup of her 13-year marriage to Paul Qualley seemed to change all that.

MacDowell poured her personal anguish into two dramatic back-to-back performances that recall her breakthrough work in 1989's Sex, lies and videotape, which also followed personal disappointment.

"I was really ready to be brave -- throw caution to the wind," she says. "Like my sister told me, 'When are you going to stop caring about what everybody thinks? You can't please everybody.'

"I did do a lot of safe stuff, but I don't even regret that because a lot of it was good stuff."

In Harrison's Flowers, which opened in the US in March, her character throws herself headlong into Yugoslavia's civil war to find her husband, a photojournalist lost on assignment. It's an insane quest, set against a backdrop of snipers, rapists and ethnic cleansing.

"When I went through my divorce, I was crazy. There was a time period where I didn't function properly. I was not rational. I could not think," she says. "And so I understood from my real life what that would feel like.

Catharsis

"THE odd thing that happened to me during Harrison's Flowers was that I got happy. It was bizarre. It was cathartic for me having to put myself through all that. I realised that none of my problems were really that bad," she says.

In Crush, her other new movie, MacDowell plays a 40-ish, straight-laced headmistress in England who risks public rebuke for having a reckless affair with a man many years her junior.

John McKay, the film's director, was surprised by the gusto MacDowell brought to the part. "She had a lot of pain and loneliness and anger to express," he says. "I think the role and Andie met each other at the right time."

MacDowell says she related to the pressure her character felt to maintain a certain decorum. She even lobbied the director to add her own furtive fumblings with cigarettes.

It might be sheer coincidence that both films focus on formerly reserved women who stray off the safe path. It could be a fluke that both deal with the anguished loss of loved ones.

But MacDowell, 43, isn't buying it. "They use acting in therapy all the time," she says with a smile. "It's a great tool for releasing emotions that you might be afraid to go through."

Like the cigarettes, MacDowell has since put aside her unhappiness. In November, she married Rhett Hartzog, an Atlanta jeweller, and made her home in the South with her three children. It was a return to her roots; MacDowell was born in the small mill town of Gaffney, South Carolina, and grew up in both Carolinas.

Dubbed

HER brief personal crisis reminded her of the crisis she faced in 1984 when she first began acting -- a fresh-faced model from the cover of Vogue who was literally made mute.

MacDowell learned only at the end of filming Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes that the movie bigwigs had balked at having their English Jane Porter speak with a Southern drawl.

Alone in a hotel room to do publicity for the movie, MacDowell picked up a ringing phone to learn that her part was going to be completely dubbed by another actress, Glenn Close.

It was a hard blow. Her first acting role had ended in humiliation; the Calvin Klein model was now the butt of jokes. She was 23.

"It was really awful. I would never do this to another human being. I cannot image why they chose to do it this way. I think they were just cowards, personally," she says.

She has never brought the issue up with Close.

"What am I going to say? It's not her fault. And in the end I wonder if she has any regrets. I wonder if it felt creepy to her," MacDowell says. "She must have felt sorry for me. She would have to."

At the same time, she admits, "I really wasn't ready. I hadn't had time to prepare myself and I was given a huge role.

"What I really did realise was I had two options at that time: to quit or fight."

She did the latter. MacDowell sought out an acting class that would nurture her and give her somewhere to "be put back together."

From her bitterness came her portrayal of a shy, sexually repressed housewife in Sex, Lies and Videotape, a role that earned her respect and a new lease on a film career.

"I'm a better person because of it," she says now.

"Every time you go through something horrible you end up being a better person.

"It just stinks when you're doing it." -- Sapa-AP