Her size is actually a big plus

IT’S easy to see who Nikki Blonsky was just a year ago. On YouTube, there is footage of a then-unknown girl -- small, chubby and makeup-less and completely forgettable in black jeans and a schlumpy black T-shirt, scooping ice cream in a Cold Stone Creamery on Long Island.

There’s also footage from the moment Blonsky left scooping for good -- “Entertainment Tonight” showed up to film the 17-year-old receiving the news that she’d won the part of Tracy Turnblad in the new screen musical “Hairspray.” In the clip, Blonsky begins yelling, throws her hands over her face and then promptly falls off her chair, crying hysterically. “I’m shaking. I’m surprised I’m still standing,” she tells the interviewer.

And then she belts in a startling vibrato: “I love you, Baltimore!”

Less than a year after she was anointed, Blonsky already looks streamlined and professional as she poses for pictures in the rarefied climes of Porterhouse, a fancy Manhattan steakhouse. Professional makeup makes her eyes appear alert and doe-like; her hair now cascades over her delicate white blouse -- cinched precisely with a huge red belt. She totters on red platforms that add a few inches to her 4-foot, 10-inch frame. While she kind of flopped around in the pre-fame videotape posted by New Line studios, she now perkily holds her hands to her face in a semi-straight, semi-mocking send-up of an old-fashioned publicity still.

Without a doubt, the 18-year-old Blonsky is hurtling through Hollywood’s star-making machinery. If New Line, which is releasing “Hairspray,” gets its wish, she will become the Jennifer Hudson of 2007, the unsuspecting, unlikely ingenue who by dint of her sheer talent gets to be queen for the day.

A STAR IS BORN

MUCH the way the Nathan Lane-Matthew Broderick film version of “The Producers” was based on the Broadway show rather than the original Mel Brooks movie, director Adam Shankman’s “Hairspray” follows the stage version more closely than the John Waters movie -- which is not to say the camp film director had no input.

Set in 1962 Baltimore, the movie tells the story of the irrepressible Tracy Turnblad, a chubby girl with the improbable dream of appearing on the local teen-dance program, “The Corny Collins Show.” When fate intervenes, she not only ends up boogying infectiously on the TV show, she becomes a star and launches a campaign to racially integrate the program. The film, which opens July 20, also stars John Travolta in drag as Tracy’s mom, Christopher Walken, Queen Latifah, Michelle Pfeiffer and “High School Musical” star Zac Efron.

When the photo shoot is over, the teenager, who still lives at home on Long Island with her parents and brother, heads to a primo table overlooking Central Park and picks at a fresh tuna salad. She talks about playing Tracy as if the character were her best friend, her alter ego, her destiny.

The daughter of a school aide and a local government worker was given a ticket to the Broadway musical when she was 15, and as the first scene began she leaned over to her mother and whispered, “That’s me. That’s totally me. I can do that.” Soon after, Blonsky who’d been singing since she was 3 and began voice lessons at 8, auditioned for the Broadway show but was told she was too young. Two years later, she was scouring the show’s website looking for open auditions when she saw the notice that the movie was casting.

She sent in a homemade tape to New Line and an assistant there actually watched it, posted it on myspace.com and called the casting department to take a look.

Shankman, who was a choreographer before becoming director of such films as “The Pacifier” and “Bringing Down the House,” wanted to find a 17-year-old to play Tracy, someone who could not only sing but also “needed to be really pretty, so there was a believability factor about Link falling in love with her, and she had to be fat, not chubby. That was John Waters’ request: ‘Promise me she’s going to be fat.’ That’s an essential component to her character.”

The director saw Blonsky’s tape early in the process and thought, “That’s really authentic. She’s very green, but seemingly spot-on,” Shankman says. He and his casting team nonetheless finished their search, which encompassed some 1,000 girls and open calls in the U.S., England, Canada and Australia.

In the end, the finalists came down to three girls who’d played Tracy in various professional productions and Blonsky, who appeared to incarnate Waters’ screen heroine.

“She was living [Tracy’s] experience. Nikki doesn’t see the world with any judgment. She’s nothing if not unbridled enthusiasm with a strong family life, and that’s who she plays in the movie. The biggest challenge for me was when I brought her to Baltimore to dance with the other candidates. She wasn’t the best dancer but she had the most joy. That’s the idea. She’s not the best, but she sells it the most and she enjoys it the most.”

Blonsky then spent five months just in rehearsals, with an assistant choreographer assigned solely to teaching her how to dance -- everything from the fundamentals of switching her weight from foot to foot, to “Hairspray’s” more elaborate choreography.

Blonsky has a huge voice, an operatic one (the last part she played in high school was Carmen in the Bizet opera), but “she sounded like an old lady,” says Shankman, who worked with her to re-engineer her singing to make her sound younger, teaching her to sing from the front, rather than the back of her throat and her chest.

Like Tracy, Blonsky has always been heavy-set. “I was a curvy girl,” she says matter-of-factly. “Growing up, I would see all these thin, tall pretty girls that I looked nothing like, but I did realize you don’t have to be a size 2 or 6 feet tall to be a singer. You can be who you are and believe in yourself. Tracy is that amazing character that I was meant to have in my life. Watching her in the Broadway show and listening to the songs changed my life.

“It doesn’t matter what anybody looks like, what race, how tall or how thin. To Tracy, it’s not about that. It’s about what’s in your heart, your passion, your love for life.”

Plus, Blonsky is happy to point out that Tracy Turnblad is not only helping break some Hollywood taboos, she’s breaking the mold for dolls as well. “We just found out there’s a Tracy doll. I’m excited to have the first plus-size doll, a real woman-curves doll. It looks like me as Tracy. I’m really excited for little girls to be able to go to the store and see my dolls next to the Barbies and realize it’s OK to be different.”

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rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com