Taking the Long View

Actress Shawnee Smith, who stars with John Candy in the recently released “Who’s Harry Crumb?,” says she strives to keep her career well rounded, and judging from the variety of roles and mediums in which this 19-year-old has already performed, she’s doing just that.

“A good combination of everything will do me just fine,” said Smith, who says she is equally comfortable with comedic roles, as in “Harry Crumb,” and with dramatic roles, as in the remake of the 1958 thriller, “The Blob,” or in the Los Angeles stage production of “Hands of the Enemy,” where she plays the daughter of a deaf mother.

“It’s good to have a nice mix,” said Smith, recalling that her work as Meg Penny in “The Blob” required a lot of “physical” acting: “I was working with this piece of tape that was supposed to be this terrifying thing-- The Blob . That took a lot of focus,” she said.

In contrast, Smith called working with Candy (who also produced “Harry Crumb”) “non-stop laughing--my sides would ache when I was done working for the day.” Smith plays Candy’s tomboy sidekick, Nikki Downing, who, like Candy’s character, is the black sheep of her family. “We come together and help each other feel good about ourselves,” she said.

So what’s next for Smith, who began doing commercials at age 8, became the youngest actress ever to win the coveted Drama-Logue Critics Award for her role in the Los Angeles production of “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday” in 1985, and was a regular on the television series “All is Forgiven” in 1986?

Her dream role is “a nything where I could work with one of the ‘greats’ “--a category in which she includes Meryl Streep, Geraldine Page, Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro--but for now, Smith’s aims include working on a demo tape (she writes her own songs and describes her “up-tempo stuff” as “Latin-gospel-African”) and acting in more than just “ ‘the girlfriend’ roles.”

“There’s not a whole lot of real interesting things out there for women,” she said. “But I’m patient and . . . I plan to be around for a long time.”