"My goal is to try as many types of characters as possible," says Robin Williams, 48, who follows his comic turn as an M.D. in Patch Adams by playing a Polish ghetto resident in the Holocaust drama Jakob the Liar. Still, Williams admits that he may always be best remembered for his portrayal of Mork on his 1978-82 hit sitcom Mork & Mindy. "TV is subcutaneous. People never forget. John Travolta is Vinnie Barbarino forever," he says, referring to Travolta's Welcome Back, Kotter character in the 1970s. "I can meet a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and he'll say, 'You're Mork, aren't you? How's Mindy?' "
Clean Living
With his role as Ricky, the video-camera-wielding boy next door to Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening in American Beauty, newcomer Wes Bentley hopes that the lean times are finally behind him. "I was once so broke that I had to plan which days I would eat," says Bentley, 21, who beat out a host of Hollywood's more established young actors for the part. "I'd actually get up in the morning and think, 'Okay, Wes, today you can either go to the Laundromat or eat. And your clothes smell bad. And you have to go to an audition.' It was a sad day when the Laundromat won out."
In Praise of Older Women
In the romantic drama Random Hearts, opening Oct. 8, Harrison Ford plays a policeman who falls in love with a congress-woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) after their respective spouses, in the midst of an affair, die together in a plane crash. The film includes a steamy sex scene in a car that may surprise his fans. "There's no issue with me about love scenes," says Ford, 57. "I did love scenes sexier than this with Lesley-Anne Down in [1979's] Hanover Street." The actor, who raised eyebrows last year for his romantic pairing with Anne Heche, 27 years his junior, in Six Days, Seven Nights, was happy to find an older love interest in Scott Thomas, 39. "There's a dearth of appropriately aged actresses," says Ford. "So beyond being remarkably capable, she's a good age for me."
The Once Over
After her 1991-96 run on NBC's Sisters, Sela Ward admits she was reluctant to return to series television on ABC's new drama Once and Again. "I have two kids now, a 5-year-old [Austin] and a 1-year-old [Anabella]," says Ward, 43, "and I want to make sure I'm there for them. That was my holdback from doing another hour drama." But for Ward, who plays a fortysomething mother of two embarking on a romance with Billy Campbell, the role was too good to pass up. "There just isn't a lot [on TV] for adults to relate to," she says. "All I need is time to see my kids, be able to take them to school a couple of days a week, and I'll be fine."
The Best Medicine
"Every time you meet a funny person, they've probably done a lot of crying on the inside," says Saturday Night Live's Molly Shannon, 35. "I come from a sad place, and the only way I could make peace with it was by making others laugh." In fact, she traces her comedic roots back to a tragic car accident that occurred when she was only 4. "My mother and my cousin died in front of me," says Shannon, who then went to the hospital with her injured father and sister. "I spent my time there trying to make the other kids laugh, figuring that they had it worse than me." These days, Shannon has plenty to smile about, including her first starring feature-film role, in Superstar, opening Oct, 8, which is based on her popular SNL sketch as Catholic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher. "The only thing that really depresses me now," she says, "is that I don't have a date for the millennium. But the year is still young."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
