Dear Lords

“I don’t really expect people to take me seriously as an actress now, or ever,” says Traci Lords, the ex-underage princess of porn, “and this movie, though it was a great, great experience, won’t force that issue.

“But I know I’m going to do it as well as I can. I’ve already gotten my chance. Now the pressure’s really on.”

In case you’ve been out of earshot of a TV or radio and haven’t seen the newspapers lately, Lords, now a grown-up 20-year-old, came out of the blue Friday to star in B-movie master Roger Corman’s “Not of This Earth.”

Two years since a firestorm of controversy blew up around her and her career as a teen-age porno performer, Lords is trying to make a new name for herself as a serious actress. She’s realistic about her past, however, and doesn’t try to sweep it away.

“I know I wasn’t acting, not in any real sense, in those X-rated films,” she said, over lunch in West Hollywood. “But I felt there was something in there for me to exploit as an actress. Porno may not teach you much, but it does teach you about distancing, about giving yourself over to some sort of role.”

Lords said she’s been taking lessons at Stella Adler’s school in Hollywood for the past six months--”You should have seen the looks I got in the beginning of that,” she said--and has put her “day job” of modeling on the back burner. (For the record, her non-porno debut, however, was as a “female escort” in CBS-TV’s “Wiseguy” earlier this year.)

“I did a scene as Maggie (from Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”), and I gotta say, I really felt the connection there,” Lords said. “I think I shocked some people, though Elizabeth Taylor doesn’t have to worry, you know?”

In person, Lords has the take-no-prisoners bluntness of an adolescent Cher, and she talks in bursts of words, some of them getting lost in the rush. But she’s also conscious of having missed out on a large chunk of her life “doing drugs and in general, just (being) out of focus.”

“That’s why I’m hoping (“Not of This Earth”) will get me some offers to play younger women, nearer my own age,” Lords said with a sigh. “There was a whole period there I just kind of waltzed through, where I didn’t really know what I was doing.

“That experience made me grow up faster--I hardly look, or act, my age--but it also made me miss out on that time where you can kind of explore yourself.”