"I ain't no star," she says, her bony hands soaring through the air, "and I ain't gonna be the one. I'm just an actress who got no answers about success. I ain't," she repeats slowly, her voice rising above a whisper, "no star."
Amanda Plummer, 24, is making her Broadway debut in Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey. The controversial play, which revolves around a girl's relationship with her prostitute mother, brought the young actress a stream of accolades. Witness:
"She rolls her vulnerablility into a ball and bounces in off anyone and anything.'- theater critic John Simon.
"She has great strength, lots of spirit and a luminous quality on stage."- Valerie French, Plummer's Honey co-star.
And when Cattle Annie and Little Britches, a newly "discovered" 1978 film in which Plummer shared glowing notices with Burt Lancaster, recently ran for a week in New York, the praise grew even more lavish.
"The only other actress I've ever seen make a movie debut so excitingly, weirdly lyric was Katherine Hepburn."- film critic Pauline Kael.
But Plummer shrugs it all off. Repeat the quotes to her, mention her 1981 Theatre World Award and her Drama Desk nomination for Best Actress, and you're cut off quickly and without hesitation. "I ain't no star," she insists for the third time. "Stars shine, stars sparkle. Stars have personality. My personality ain't gonna make me one."
Five minutes into the interview, Plummer smokes her third cigarette. Her fingers tap the table with machine-gun speed. "Nervous?" She repeats the question in singsong. "No, I ain't nervous." Pause. "Yes, I am." Pause. "No, I ain't." Pause. "Oh," she wails in mock-despair. "I don't know anymore!"
If her inconsistent grammatical accuracy hints at waif-like innocence, her street-urchin appearance- yellowing peasant blouse, lavender overshirt, tousled, short-cropped hair- italicizes it. When she laughs, her mother's husky bellow emerges, but when Amanda speaks, the focused determination recalls her father. Her mother is actress Tammy Grimes; her father is actor Christopher Plummer.
"Two years ago, if someone mentioned my parents, I'd feel exploited," she says, her fingers busily picking at the late-breakfast bacon. "It was very, very hard for me to be known as Tammy Grimes' and Christopher Plummer's only daughter- and I think that's why I rebelled."
Her parents divorced when she was 4. "I was raised by lots and lots of English nannies," Plummer recalls. "I spent lots of time with my grandmother Wooley. Mother traveled all the time and couldn't separate herself from the theater. So I saw very little of her. It wasn't easy being her daughter- I didn't speak to her until I was 18. When I was 20, I moved out. As for Daddy, I didn't speak to him for years, either. One day, I guess I was about 18, I called him. I picked up the phone and said, 'Hi, Daddy! I just saw you in The Sound of Music. What's new?' We had a real long talk. I stopped rebelling and decided to act."
Plummer's just finished filming the role of rape victim Ellen James in The World According to Garp. And though the film won't be released until next spring, she's already worried. "I think I did awful," she says shyly. She has no reason to fear failure. Praise has flowed in ever since she began her professional career as a member of the prestigious Williamstown (Mass.) Theater Festival. Brief stints at Middlebury College and the Neighborhood Playhouse (her mother's alma mater) were quickly aborted. "I didn't go to school to graduate," she says, "but to discover what happened to my childhood."
There was a pregnant pause and Plummer looks around nervously. "I'm the total opposite of my mother. She's social; I'm antisocial. Growing up, I had this morbid side of me, which I liked to let out. That's why my mother never bothered with me. I was a pain in the ass. "For years, I lived in a fantasy world," Plummer remembers. "I never left the house. I'd talk to make-believe friends, listen to music and write. By the time I was 9, I wrote a novel. I chose to live a life of solitude- something Mother would never understand."
Plummer, New York-born, lives in a once-fashionable lower Manhattan hotel. She still shuns any social life, preferring to keep to herself.
"Acting is a solitary life," she says, "because I make it one. When they start throwing jewels at me, I'll be grateful. But I'll say give them to Mother. Just leave me alone." US

The article is accompanied by a half page black and white photo of Amanda seated in a white robe, with her head turned sideways to the left; a half page black and white of Amanda and Diane Lane from Cattle Annie- Plummer as Cattle Annie (with Diane Lane): "I hated acting school", she confesses, "because they tried to mold me. I only mold myself."