THE HOST MAN'S BURDEN

By RICHARD CORLISS

THIS IS A CINDERELLA STORY, like the one in Sabrina, but with a twist. Once upon a time, there was a fellow with the most despised job title in the country: talk-show host. Little did he know that a movie director was having trouble finding an actor for a big role in the year's pedigree romantic comedy. The director spotted the chat host on late-night TV, making a joke about his goofy new hairstyle, and, the director says, "I believed him." Presto! From the night shift, a star was born.

"Thank God for a bad haircut," says Greg Kinnear, 32, of his good fortune. But Sabrina was lucky too. Kinnear, host of NBC's Later and, before that, the E! channel's Talk Soup, swipes his scenes from Hollywood belle du jour Julia Ormond and nearly matches Harrison Ford for easy radiance. In his first major film role, Kinnear seems comfy-cozy on the big screen, humanizing a character--Ford's playboy brother--who could easily be a thin, tennis-anyone anachronism. "He has a lot of charm," says Sydney Pollack, who first sought Tom Cruise for the role. "You like him immediately." No wonder: the play of emotions in Kinnear's eyes is subtle, suggestive; he makes contact enough to break a girlish heart. Sabrina may be sinking at the box office, but it could launch a dreamboat.

The joke is that until now, Kinnear has been making eye contact mainly with a TV camera. On Later, a half-hour chat show with a single guest, he uses it with irony, as a mirror to check how very fabulous he looks. Or, after the guest has uttered some mild inanity, Kinnear stares ahead mutely, as if he'd just been whacked on the skull by a bear paw but is too stoic to wince. It's this bland poise that keeps him from blinking when film stardom stares him in the face.

The youngest of three sons of a State Department official, Greg was on the move as a kid, in Washington, then in Beirut, where he literally dodged bullets by day and listened to bomb blasts at night. "I was just at that age when I could absorb it all without fearing my own mortality," he recalls. In Athens as a teenager, he was host on a show on Armed Forces Radio before returning to the States and attending the University of Arizona. He worked for the deadly B-movie studio Empire Pictures, flunked a veejay audition at mtv, then became a cult fave by making sly mock of Geraldo, Ricki and the rest of the wackpack on Talk Soup. He's been at Later for almost two years.

Now Kinnear is being touted for every slot from TV prime time to a co-starring role in a Julia Roberts movie. But the late-night kid plays it cool. "They tell me, 'Don't give up your night job,'" he says, and that's fine with him. "We've sweated blood and cracked our knuckles, and pretty much we've come to the determination that at 1:35 a.m., people are . asleep. But I've worked in the twilight zones of television before, and it's always been fine with me. I've just been grateful to have a job."

Cinderella probably said that to the press--right after trying on the glass slipper.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles