Young Gish Keeps Her Feet on the Ground in 2 Worlds

You look into Annabeth Gish’s eyes (brown and large, like a fawn’s) and check out her home address (somewhere in Cedar Falls, Iowa) and you may conclude that the 17-year-old actress is some kind of unspoiled ingenue.

In a way, that’s what Gish is. She’s worked in only five feature films--her two most recent, “Mystic Pizza” and “Shag,” are due out this summer--so her exposure to “kids gone Hollywood” has been limited. In concert with her close family, she has severely limited her Hollywood time and made the most of her Cedar Falls time.

It’s “very, very difficult” to keep all these balls in the air, she said, “especially when you’re just a senior in high school.”

But Gish has the poise and cool of an experienced athlete. She’s unnervingly direct and says she works extremely hard to keep work and being a teen-ager separate.

Critics thought Gish had learned plenty by the time she made her film debut in the 1985 “Desert Bloom.” In fact, her performance as Jon Voight’s troubled stepdaughter prompted many critics to tout her for a best supporting actress Oscar nomination.

Gish, who was 13 when that film was made, was less sanguine about her work.

“I thought some things didn’t look quite right on the screen,” she said. “But, in general, it was pretty good for my first time out.”

She has since modified her opinions of her ability, she added, and said she hasn’t thought much about it, even when the good notices continued to come in for her turn in the otherwise nondescript teen film “Hiding Out.”

Gish--no relation to Lillian--takes her work very seriously when she’s at it. For “Shag,” a film about the subculture revolving around the folk dance of its title, she insisted on mastering the steps before production began. For “Mystic Pizza,” she moved temporarily to Mystic, Conn., and learned how to “seriously cook pizza” in a pizza joint there.

“I can’t do things halfway,” Gish said, smiling slightly. “Which is what makes giving it all up for acting tough. It’s all or nothing there.”

Gish may have adapted quickly to a busy acting career, but getting used to the changes back home have taken some time.

“It’s very stressful coming back from a movie to my friends in Cedar Falls, jumping from one world to another,” she said.

“I’m never sure which world I really belong in. At first I sort of felt guilty, going back and forth, you know? And I also had to deal with the green-eyed monsters among my friends--it’s been rather enlightening to see who my friends were and who the rest might be.”

Her parents cement the holes between the different worlds, Gish says. Her mother, a teacher for gifted and talented children, and her father, who teaches English at the University of Northern Iowa, are valued counselors in her acting career. When Gish discusses her career, she habitually uses the first person plural rather than singular.

“It’s a team decision, even though I’m the one directly affected,” she said.

Young actors in Gish’s position are often faced with choices between acting and college. Do you attempt to balance them, and have each drain something from the other? Or do you give up one altogether?

“That’s what’s most pressing on my mind these days . . . my ‘career,’ ” Gish said, forming quote marks in the air with her fingers.

“I’m really torn between going straight to college like Jodie (Foster) did, or taking a year or two off and working full time, or letting the bug out of my ear and running off to Paris.”

She laughed. “But seriously, I’m getting a lot of different advice. I do know (acting) is something I really want to do and have devoted a lot of energy to . . . but as career? I’m just not positive.”