• July 29, 1991
• Vol. 36
• No. 3

Backup Beauty

Pretty Woman's Other Pretty Woman

ON WENT THE MINIDRESS, THE BRACE lets, the long boots, all of them gliding over skin so taut and sleek you could bounce a dime off it. But the reason that audiences didn't see Julia Roberts's pretty face in the toilette de tart at the start of last year's Pretty Woman was that she wasn't Julia. The legs and bust so lovingly caressed by the camera belonged to a "body double." The body belonged to Shelley Michelle.

"It's flattering," says Michelle, 26, "to know I'm helping stars." In Pretty Woman, for example, "Julia needed to be concentrating on her lines." Other times, she explains, "an actress might want you because she just had a baby. Or maybe she ran into a wall and has a bruise."

A native of the L.A. suburb of La Cañada Flintridge and a graduate of USC (she studied drama), Michelle hit on her peculiar stardom as Kim Basinger's legs in 1988's My Stepmother Is an Alien. She has a small (silent) part in this summer's Mobsters but continues to double up at $750 per day. For whom? Michelle, who admitted to tabloid TV shows that she was Roberts's double, is now contractually obliged to keep mum. After all, says casting director Chuck Maytum, who has sent Michelle out on jobs: "What's the point, if everyone knows it's not really the star?"