Nicely Naughty

By RICHARD CORLISS

In moon-princess luster, she is the heir to Winona Ryder. As an icon of indie film, she's a teen Parker Posey. But don't waste comparisons on Christina Ricci. At 18, she is her own, clever young actress grown up onscreen from the gothic child playing with dead things in Casper and The Addams Family to the buxom blond in The Opposite of Sex. "I love her access to her dark places," says Sex auteur Don Roos. "There's a very mature, adult mind behind that childlike face."

There always has been. The daughter of a primal-scream therapist who became a lawyer and a fashion model and real estate agent who raised four kids, Ricci was a devoted reader of C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. She has conflicting memories of her young self. "I was the good child," she says, "always well behaved. Even if I wanted to kill someone." She also says, "I was an evil child--well, misguided. I just felt school was never going to end, that there was a weird smell in the classroom I was going to have to smell for the rest of my life. If a little kid could be depressed, I guess I was depressed."

Acting, which she has done since age 8, was her escape route. "You know how little kids always want to have a job, to be their fathers with the briefcases? Well, this job gave me a purpose." Now, she confesses, she's no longer always angry--"although I am kind of enraged on a regular basis."

With roles in half a dozen eccentric projects, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 200 Cigarettes and Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66, Ricci has no interest in acting lessons. "It's my job--why would I want to do it in my free time?" She has already achieved so much so soon: she's been, and become, Christina Ricci.

--R.C. Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York