In a part that could have dissolved into sentimental mush, Amanda kept things tight: Lydia was a wallflower with thorns.

A klutzy office serf with a habit of dropping Chinese dumplings in her lap. An Austrian terrorist with a secret passion for The Great Gatsby. A forsaken drifter who can't help murdering the people who get on her nerves. Call them complicated, out-there, eccentric, one thing you can never call Amanda Plummer's movies is boring.

"Look at me- I do not scream status quo," Plummer laughs, having just put away a sandwich almost bigger than herself. Pixie-ish and full of beans, she is the perfect answer for anyone who suspects there might be more to oddball feminity than Calista Flockhart's antics on Ally McBeal. Sitting in an overstuffed armchair in Hollywood's elegant Chateau Marmont, Amanda looks like a wood sprite who's just danced in from the garden. Smoke curls from her ever-present cigarettte, and there's a mischievous glint in her round eyes. "Unhireable!" she booms, mimicking the disapproval of a big-time Hollywood exec. She tilts her head on one side, smiles a crooked smile. "Even if I did myself up, my behavior would be unhireable. So it's just as well that I'm not interested in those kind of movies, isn't it?"

Luckily, there are directors who revel in difference, and who do hire Plummer- for her intelligence, her acuteness, and the layering she brings to each role. Most recently, she's worked with Peter Greenaway's Eight and a Half Women and Wim Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel, both edgy, provocative pictures which U.S. distributors are handing with kid gloves. The Greenaway film--a dreamlike meditation on sexuality in which a naked Plummer charges around on an equally bare Portugues stallion-- is especially unlikely to play in Peoria. "I do hope it comes out here, because it would wake people up," she says. "It breaks every rule you can think of."

She laughs again, and I think of the opening scene of Pulp Fiction, in which her character Honey Bunny smiles up at a waitress just before climbing on the table and shouting "Any of you fucking pricks move, and I'll execute every mother-fucking last one of you!" Smaller than she appears on screen, Amanda also seems warmer: She has an infectious, chuckling laugh that's at least an octave lower than her light, piping voice.

Although born of solid acting stock (she is the daughter of actors Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes), she was a somewhat reluctant inductee into the business. A shy only child, Amanda spent her youth devising plays that she performed alone in her room, because "they weren't meant for anyone else." She did track-and-field and was a skilled horserider- a hobby she still enjoys. There's nothing like riding a horse at top speed," she says. "It's like skiing, where you reach the point where if you go any faster, your life is in danger. I get exhilarated and I do go faster. And I start laughing my fucking head off. Because I'm challenging the fear."

Challenging the fear, in fact, could be the motif of her life. "I chose acting because it was what I was most scared of," she reveals. "I was very shy, and I knew that it would change me. I'd have to learn to talk to people, different kinds of people-- and this was terrifying to me as a kid."

Somehow, though, she managed to take the terror and meld it into a finely tuned intensity. Her early roles in the theater- in A Taste of Honey, Pygmalion, The Glass Menagerie, and Artichoke- won her a string of Tony nominations, and then an award for her performance in the 1982 Broadway production of Agnes of God. In 1980, when she made her movie debut in the obscure Cattle Annie and Little Britiches, Pauline Kael wrote that "the only actress I've ever seen to make a debut this exciting and weirdly lyrical was Katherine Hepburn."

That's quite good, isn't it?" Amanda laughs, after she's finished cringing at the memory of her first celluloid experience. "Pauline Kael- I mean, she's huge! Well, OK. Maybe I'm not as bad in the movie as I think."

It was during her first big theater role, in Joanna McClelland Glass's Artichoke, that Amanda discovered something else important: she could be funny. The play wasn't a comedy, but somehow, Plummer's innocent earnestness tickled the audience. "I came on and approached Michael Higgins, who was playing my grandfather, and started talking, and the audience burst out laughing. And both of our eyes bugged out at each other, and I thought, are they laughing at me?" Energized by the memory, she gets up and moves around the table, then drops into another chair. "I was terrified! I thought, wait 'til they see what I come up with next! It'll be too much for them- they're going to walk out!"

But the audience loved her. Pushed bodily out on the stage for her curtain call, Amanda realized she'd been doing something right when she heard applause rather than cat calls. "What it taught me is that you should never go for a laugh. Never try to be cute."

Despite her propensity for playing offbeat characters, though, Amanda resists being tabbed as "quirky." In fact, she hates the word. "Quirky is dismissive, it doesn't take you anywhere," she explains. "These are actually the usual roles, the normal people. Go out on the street, and these are the people you'll see. In the movies, what you see as 'normal' is not "normal." She pauses. "Sorry," she says, with the gracious patience of someone who's had the q-word leveled at her a few times too many. "I get a bit soap-boxy about this."

Her ability to elicit pathos for the misfit, as well as her seemingly effortless comic talent is perhaps best embodied by the portrayal in Freeway of Ramona, the aging junky prostitute mother to Reese Witherspoon's Vanessa. In the movie (a kind of contemporary Red Riding Hood, with a heroine who kicks serious wolf butt), Ramona and her crack-smoking boyfriend are carted off by police almost before you can say "methadone clinic," but not before Plummer has imprinted Ramona- with her curious mix of maternal love and naive depravity on viewers' imaginations.

Amanda takes a sip of peppermint tea, nibbles on a biscotti. Talk drifts to her father's recent starring role in Michael Mann's The Insider, where he played the veteran news anchorman Mike Wallace. She beams, exclaiming, "Yes! He can do anything!" I wonder aloud if there's anything in the fact that Plummer pere has built a career playing dignified, authoritarian types, while his daughter has tended to portray the shadow-dwellers, society's disenfranchised. But Amanda doesn't take the Freudian bait. "You can get typecast for 10 years doing one thing, then for another 10 years doing something else," she says.

Still, she's "in love with movies" and with the whole process of making them- especially when she gets to work with directors like Greenaway, Wenders, and Terry Gilliam. ":Those are subtext masters," she says. "They're beautiful and generous. When you work with someone like that, it's the difference between working with a lion, and....' she pauses, reaching for the exact analogy,"...and a kelp."

Gilliam's 1991 film, The Fisher King gave rise to one of Amanda's most loved performances: Lydia Sinclair, the klutziest office worker ever to get stuck in a midtown Manhattan revolving door. Lydia's romance with Robin Williams's homeless ex-professor, Parry, was proof that love can sprout in the most unlikely of places. But in a part that could have dissolved into sentimental mush, Amanda kept things tight: Lydia was a wallflower with thorns, a mouse that roared. In one sequence, Parry follows Lydia through a crowd in Grand Central Station, whose bustling and shoving suddenly turns into a slow, beautiful waltz. It's a breathtaking moment, as though the magic of his love has transformed the world into their private cocoon.

"Oh my god, how extraordinary that was!" Plummer recalls. "A real magical moment. All of us, all the extras and everybody who was there, we all felt it." She remembers Gilliam as "the funniest, most impulsive guy. Even just walking down the street with him was an incredible feeling- the world suddenly became magical, funny, and disturbing."

"Disturbing," one realizes, is a high compliment from Amanda- it's certainly an adjective that could apply to some of the more audience-challenging moives she's made. Chief among these is the 1995 drama Butterfly Kiss in which she played Eunice, a god-forsaken drifter who goes on a bloody road trip through the north of England. Charasmatic and dangerous, Eunice ("Eu") takes up with the innocent gas station attenant Miriam ("Mi") and tells her that "I'll make you bad before you make me good." And yet, she's not your average sociopath: At the heart of Eunice's murderous rage is her lost faith, her sense that life is an empty game. "I can't help feeling that this is a common thread in a lot of people's lives, that they feel forsaken by their beliefs, " says Amanda. "What she's after is not killing, it's a dream come true."

At the same time, I say, Eunice does tend to murder people rather casually. Her character makes Pulp Fiction's Honey bunny look like Nancy Drew. Amanda laughs. "Right- this is not a safe film. It will stir your innards. But it's not like Rambo. The killing is done swiftly, you don't even really see it." She frowns. "I'm not saying that violence is a good thing. But films is the only place, other than books, where you can live fantasies- if you don't have that, you're going to have a lot of frustrated people. And I don't think we want that, as a society."

A road movie, Butterfly Kiss was compared- perhaps inevitably- to Thelma and Louise, but Amanda says she didn't see any feminist subtext in the film. "It's not very similar at its core. It's not going to make you feel temporaily satisfied." In any case, she says, her attitude toward feminism is mixed. "I'm not that keen on it. Well, I am. I do belive that women are second-class citizens. It's just that the whole world is so rock-hard against feelings, and then women get taught to deny their feelings, too. You see them getting spiritually thinner..." Feminist or not, she has traveled several times to Washington D.C. to campaign for abortion rights on behalf of Planned Parenthood. On one occasion, she overheard Henry Hyde telling a delegation of women that "you ladies nailed Jesus to the cross." She rolls her eyes. "It's depressing. You see these people who are running the country, and they're just not very clever."

Her outrage on how women are treated extends to their depiction in the typical sex scene. "It's a mysogynistic, Pygmalion-esque approach- you've got a woman who's never felt anything before a come, which makes me want to go, oh puh-lease! You're just full of so many high hopes!" In Europe, attitudes are a little more sophisticated- there's not so much grunting and sweating, and a naked body might not always signify an orgasm-in-the-making. "The important thing [about nudity] is whether it's going to move the story forward," Amanda says. "Knowing when to stop, and how to shoot it, is essential."

Still, it can be nerve-wracking to have to put one's blind trust in a director and cinematopgrapher when the camera is 2 feet away from your naked butt. Amanda found herself in this position during the shooting of Butterfly Kiss. "I was scared shitless," she admits. "I remember thinking, this could be really ba-a-ad! But then I thought, I know these guys, I know the writing- I'm know the writing- I'm in good hands. And actually, it was a whopper of a shot, cinematically speaking."

The noise of a crowd at a nearby table distracts, and Amanda decides to go to the ladies' room- but not before asking me, politely, if she may do so. When she gets back, I decide that it's time to show her a song about her that Ifound on the Internet. Written by a fan in Georgia, the song sets her up as the ultimate antidote to airbrushed perfection, the antithesis of Hollywood-dumb. Amanda's thrilled, but since she can't read the song's small print, I have to read it to her.

All we need is
More Amanda Plummer
Without her we're in hell
Watching Dumb and Dumber

I don't need an Elle McPherson
Waving at me with her hips
I only want Amanda playing
Wacky word games, trading rips

Toward the end, the song takes on sinister overtones, and I suddenlly worry aobut reading it aloud. I tell Amanda it's about to get weird.

"As it should," she says approvingly

And if Amanda's star should fall
If she should lose it, mind and all
We'll have a service, with roses
And a eulogy for her
And shout her name, and celebrate her career

All we need is
Another Amanda Plummer
We watched her star pass over
And the light die from her eyes
As she gave her all for us

All we need is Amanda
Waiting for Amanda

"Aww," says Amanda. "That's sweet." She rises from her armchair as we prepare to go down to the parking lot together. Clearly, she can handle the idea that her star might burn out for now, she's just happy that it's up there, glittering with its odd, ethereal light. "She gave her all for us," she says, lingering dramatically over each word. Then she smiles, her face breaking open in a giant grin. "What a nice thing to say."

The article is accompanied by a full page cover color photo of Amanda, from waist up, smiling,: The Unhireable Amanda Plummer; Two page melanges of black and white photos of Amanda walking on a sidewalk, smiling and looking downward, wearing a black top with the words "KIWANIS/LAKERS, and a short leopard skin miniskirt; A long small b&w photo of Amanda wearing a long gown and welders goggles- "Theres's nothing like riding a horse at top speed. It's like skiing, where you reach the point where if you go any faster, your life is in danger. I get exhilarated and I do go faster. And I start laughing my fucking head off. Because I'm challenging the fear." A full page b&w melange of photos of Amanda in a car, hand over mouth in two photos, and behind the wheel, head turned smiling at the camera: When Plummer made her movie debut in the obscure Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Pauline Kael wrote that "the only actress I've ever seen to make a debut this exciting and weirdly lyrical was Katherine Hepburn; A reverse b&w melange of the previous photos upside down- "Thesea are actually the usual roles, the normal people. Go out on the street and these are the people you'll see. In the movies, what you see as normal is not normal."