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Rebecca Romijn-Stamos sets the screens on fire in Femme Fatale
The Brian De Palma film opens this Friday
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Arthur J Pais
Seductress, temptress and siren are too mild words to describe the character
that Rebecca Romijn-Stamos plays in the erotic thriller Femme Fatale.
You see her in a torrid lesbian scene in a plush toilet at Cannes, and later in a highly charged, simulated sex scene and a scorching striptease. Perhaps no actress, not even Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct has lit up the screen in an R-rated film as Romijn-Stamos does in Femme Fatale, the newest film by Brian De Palma.
"It was alright with my husband to do the scenes," she said at the Toronto International Film Festival in September where Femme Fatale was the closing night film. "I am not sure Antonio had any problems with his wife," she said with a hearty chuckle.
She plays Laure, a sultry jewel thief in Paris, who abruptly leaves her life of crime and transforms into a respectable married woman in Washington. But when she returns to Paris, she has to face her former colleagues who are her foes now. In her complicated life walks in an ex-paparazzo (Antonio Banderas). Fighting for her life, she ensnares him and tries to use him to extort millions.
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, whose hits include Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and X-Men, has modeled for the covers of many big time magazines including Cosmopolitan (including their biggest selling issue of the '90s), People and Glamour.
But her work in other movies and television shows never demanded her to participate in highly charged sex scenes as in Femme Fatale. She did not also have the kind of dramatic part in her young career as in Femme Fatale that opens across America on Friday.
"Laure uses her beauty and sexuality like powerful weapons to obtain what she wants," Romijn-Stamos, who gave up her university studies in California to pursue a modeling career, notes. "She (Laure) is a born actress, using her talent for split second improvisation to get out of any jam. She knows very well who she is ---- she has to be extremely strong and focused to take on all the different identities she appropriates."
The biggest challenge to her was not the nudity, she says, but to make her character convincing. "I would periodically reread the script from cover to cover to fully grasp its different levels. It was a fantastic experience to play a character that constantly evolves and changes."
De Palma, whose hits include Mission: Impossible and Body Double, believes Romijn-Stamos' modelling experience helped the movie considerably. "I was fortunate to work with an actress who knows all about lighting and is treated well by it," he says. "Her modeling experience has taught her how to stand in the light and she is so photogenic that even when she is not in the best position in relationship to the light, it always finds her.
"Rebecca threw herself into the work 100 per cent and delivered a lot, like the incredible strip tease she perfected for a pivotal, climatic seduction," De Palma adds.
Was she bothered that she had to play yet another duplicitous, predatory and sexy woman? "Not many such roles are written these days," she says. "On the other hand, you see men playing similar roles. "