HOT FACES: IONE SKYE AND MATT ADLER

Surrounded by the warm wooden walls of her home in the Hollywood hills, 16-year-old Ione Skye counts off famous young casualties on her fingers like court cases.

“Freddie Prinze,” she says. “Len Bias, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix.” Skye shakes her brunet head. “Janis Joplin. It got to them, really strongly.”

It , to her, is celebrity and all the things that come along with being gazed at in public places.

And Skye--basically a shy, somewhat nervous teen-ager with a disarming smile--is aware of the problem of being no one one minute and someone the very next.

Suddenly, she has it . She’s currently seen in “River’s Edge” and later this summer will portray Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline in the ABC-TV miniseries “Napoleon and Josephine.”

What she likes most about her high profile is “people coming to ask me questions, being interested in who I am,” she says. “Very flattering, and for me it hasn’t gotten to the point of interrupting my life.

“But I think you can get caught up in that, and start being all sorts of people for everyone else,” Skye continues, playing with the laces of her high-top sneakers. “That makes someone like me just want to be taken care of; and I panic at the thought of it, just handing over my life like that to other people.”

The daughter of ‘60s pop singer Donovan Leitch (who gave her the unusual names that she uses professionally), Skye admits that the comfort of being “handled” is sometimes too much to reject. Skye has a manager and a publicist and an agent, but wants to exert some control over her career.

“Those people know how to do all that stuff better than I do,” she says. “I’m not saying I don’t want to handle more of that by myself . . . but I’m not going to concern myself with it now. The creative part of the job is what I like and am trying to get better at. It’s just a question of learning to trust your instinctual self.

“The other night I was driving home from a friend’s house and began thinking (that) the street directions I had were bad; I didn’t seem to be going in the right direction at all. I thought to myself, ‘Should I follow the directions, even though I think they’re bad, or trust my instincts?’ I decided I’d trust me. And you know what? I got really lost.”

Skye laughs. “But the point was, I guess, you have to just try it sometimes. You gotta fall down a lot.”

That philosophy does not extend to behavior on the movie set, she says. “Sitting around, sitting around, sitting around,” she intones. “It drives me crazy after a while, but I’ve learned to handle it better. I learned that if I fool around and make people screw up, people don’t get to go home, see their kids, have dinner, whatever. Part of that is my responsibility.

“My biggest responsibility, though, is being really prepared to do my job, to get out there and be someone else.”

Like she had to do at the remote locations and during the tight filming schedule of her first movie, “River’s Edge,” the critically acclaimed film by director Tim Hunter about a group of teen-agers who cover up a friend’s murder.

Since Skye is the kind of person who gets upset when baby birds die, playing a blanked-out teen-ager was a bit of a stretch for her.

“Most of that was fun, though--honestly,” she adds. “Those people became my best friends, but really. We kept asking ourselves, ‘God--we’re getting paid for this?’ ”

Skye turns, fixes a visitor with a hazel look. “That sounds pretty Hollywood, huh?” she says after a pause. “What’s weird about that is that I grew up here, and always thought it sounded pretty stupid. I mean, my friends, almost none of whom are in the business, don’t talk like that.”

But Skye adds quickly that being an actress, while Career Choice No. 1, isn’t all she thinks about doing with her life (running a children’s theater would be great, for instance, she says). She’s quite sure that whatever she does, no matter how old she gets (“20 is coming up pretty soon,” she murmurs), the important thing is to stay open, stay vulnerable.

“I can’t imagine not listening to people and valuing what they think,” Skye says, leaning back in the big sofa and looking out at her front yard. “That’s what distinguishes good acting from bad, and good living from bored. I haven’t really gone very far yet, but I got that down.”