THE MOVIES : THE NEWCOMERS

Summer is the hottest season for the movie industry, when it makes its major gambles-- including substantial wagers on new discoveries. The young nes can come from anywhere. This group hails from such distant points as suburban New Jersey and suburban Minnesota to the Sonoma Valley of California and the Hunter Valley in New South Wales.

No wonder the forces behind the upcoming James Bond film, “License to Kill,” thought Talisa Soto was right for the role of a former Miss Galaxy who fell in with the wrong crowd. Nature was good to her. At 22, she is enormously beautiful: dark hair, full lips, almond eyes.

Wearing a pale-blue denim shirt and black leggings, Soto turns heads at the Bel Age. But she doesn’t seem to notice; she’s used to it. She fell into modeling almost effortlessly at 15, she relates, when she showed up at New York’s Click agency in quest of a summer job. “I walked in on a Friday and got a job on Sunday,” she remembers.

Her first assignment was in Italy for Lei magazine. A few days later, she was in Paris for British Vogue. Now, she thinks she was too young to savor the experience. “I lost a pound a day,” she recalls. “I wanted my mom’s cooking, or pizza. I wasn’t into the saucy meals.”

She’s wiser now, and happy to acknowledge that she’s acquired a tough veneer. “I might have an edge and I would love to develop that even more,” she says. “Because if you’re too sweet--forget it, darling. Always question everything and don’t be gullible. You are your own boss.”

One requirement of the Bond job is publicizing the product. But with Soto’s strong instinct for self-protection, she’s not entirely comfortable meeting the press. One of the perks of being a big star, she imagines, is being able to turn down requests for interviews--but the Bond producers will have none of that.

Director Paul Morrissey, who cast Soto in his feature, “Spike of Bensonhurst,” says Soto’s reserve makes her intriguing on screen. “She’s very quiet and withheld, and the more she withholds, the more you’re attracted to her,” he explains. “She’s kind of a femme fatale . She has a kind of dignity.”

However reserved she may be, Soto found her leading man, Timothy Dalton, even more reserved: “Between actors, there should be give-and-take. I’m not saying he’s selfish, but at certain times he would put up this wall. He’s very serious and very English.”

In fact, “License to Kill” was a relatively confining experience, especially after the freewheeling set of the low-budget “Spike of Bensonhurst.”

“I wanted to make this part as strong as possible,” she says. “I wanted to make my character manipulative. (But) I realize in the Bond thing, they try to have a formula. They don’t go for any spontaneity.”

And shooting for 5 1/2 months, with an extended stay in Mexico City, was no picnic, either. “It was great for the first month,” she says. “The downfall in this business is staying in hotel rooms. If you’re in your own surroundings, you’re in luck. Going out to dinners, room service--you get depressed. You cry for nothing. It’s ridiculous. But tough luck, baby. You chose to do this.”

Even at the tender age of 15, Soto assumed a no-nonsense attitude about her career. “For me, the first day I started working I realized this doesn’t last forever,” she says. “It’s quite obvious. It’s all based on beauty and youth.” So she kept the modeling in perspective. “You use it,” she explains. “It gives you the freedom to do so much more. I view it as a job.”

Soto grew up in Northampton, Mass., the youngest of four children born to working-class Puerto Rican parents. She finished high school, then moved to New York when her modeling career took off.

Eventually, modeling became boring and acting became interesting. She attacked improvisation classes with her mind-over-matter determination: “When I knew I was so scared, I said, ‘Now I know I have to make an effort.’ When you feel you can’t do something, you have to say, ‘I’m going to do it.’ ” And the effort paid off. “I was quite shy, and it helped me realize that if you want to accomplish things, they don’t listen to the quiet ones,” she says.

Soto got into the movies through Morrissey, who is represented by Flick, the talent arm of the New York agency that handled Soto’s modeling career. Morrissey says photographers at Click, the modeling division, referred to Soto as “the Puerto Rican Grace Kelly.” But with her air of mystery, he says, she reminded him of Gene Tierney or Garbo. He adds that her beauty didn’t hurt. “The real history of the cinema is the history of great-looking people,” he says.

KELLY LYNCH Kelly Lynch comes to an interview wearing no makeup, no nail polish, with her blondish hair hanging limp to her shoulders. Dressed in an dark green T-shirt and baggy black pants, the former model isn’t making a fashion statement. It’s hardly what you’d expect of a starlet with a major role behind her (in “Cocktail,” opposite Tom Cruise) and three pictures coming out this summer.

But Lynch says she’s embarrassed about “Cocktail” and she hardly thinks of herself as a starlet. She’d rather play a real person, as opposed to beautiful bimbo roles--in movies as well as in life. That’s why she proclaims herself particularly pleased with her roles in two smaller films, “Drugstore Cowboy” and “Warm Summer Rain,” even though her role as Patrick Swayze’s love interest in the just-opened “Road House,” is a bigger-budget studio film that might give her higher visibility.

“In these next movies, I have layers to the characters. I didn’t have to have a makeup artist on me every five minutes making sure I looked beautiful. I can do that, but it’s an illusion. After a while, I want to geek out,” she says.

“Drugstore Cowboy” producer Cary Brokaw says Lynch was true to her word in her role opposite Matt Dillon. “If Kelly has a type, she was playing the far extreme away from it,” he says. “She plays a young woman addicted to drugs who’s spent most of her life in prison. She’s an ‘80s equivalent to Ma Barker. She’s sort of played down her good looks, as much as that’s possible.”

A few years ago, Lynch careened around New York on a motorcycle and led a life that was “a little, like, you know, experimental.” But now she’s a single mother with a 3-year-old girl, Shane. “I want to be around for her,” Lynch explains. “I try to be a daredevil in my work, but not my life.”

Coy about her age, Lynch acknowledges that she was born 20-some years ago in a Minneapolis suburb called Golden Valley. “I had a mother like June Cleaver and a little sister I used to beat up regularly,” she says.

Her father was a restaurateur who didn’t encourage her interest in performing. “My mom was always sneaking me off to dance class and acting class,” Lynch says. “My dad was worried that I was going to be what I’ve become. He was worried that I wouldn’t make enough money to eat.”

She barely sampled college before pulling out to pursue acting. But her career was almost ended before it began by a car crash that threatened to leave her paralyzed. She spent months recuperating.

“It was actually the best thing that ever happened to me,” she says. “I decided I wouldn’t limit myself. When you really get your life taken away from you for a long period of time, you (later) go at it with a different sense of purpose and drive.”

After recovering, Lynch went to New York and surprised herself by landing modeling jobs--posing for catalogue. “I kept waiting for them to take the clothes off me and tell me to wash my face. I had this image of myself as a goofy-looking thing.”

Still, she says, her assignments weren’t particularly glamorous. “Anybody can make a $5,000 dress look good, but it’s a really great model who can put on a housecoat and sell it across America,” she laughs.

Lynch almost apologizes for the television roles on “Miami Vice” and the cable series “Hitchhiker” that got her started as an actor: “I assumed I was going to be working in theater. But I had a rude awakening with rent and food and the cost of living. How can people do that and work on the stage? I wasn’t that clever.”

She first appeared in movies in a small role as a jaded model in “Bright Lights, Big City.” Then she went on to “Cocktail” as the insecure (and often scantily clothed) wife of Tom Cruise’s best friend, fellow bartender Bryan Brown. But much of her performance was edited out of the film.

“I think it was more interesting as written,” she says. “We had a dark story about the ‘80s and it ended up being about flipping bottles and a stupid love story.”

Cruise, the hottest male star going, seemed uptight. His character repels her in the film--but there was that one moment where they kiss--the moment of “heat.” She says that Cruise kept his lips firmly compressed during their supposedly-passionate kiss.

Another rude shock occurred when United Artists canceled her next picture, “Atuk,” on the first day of shooting because of the studio’s disputes with star Sam Kinison. But UA rerouted her into “Road House,” in which Swayze plays a bouncer with a degree in philosophy. She’s a doctor who becomes his sweetheart.

Lynch seems slightly baffled by the recent heat on her. She maintains that stardom isn’t her goal. “I’d rather do a small movie that just a few people see than a big movie that I’m not proud of,” she insists. “The integrity part of this is as important to me as anything. I’m still an idiot and I look at this as an art.”

ROBERT SHAWN LENARD At 20, Robert Shawn Leonard worries that he hasn’t suffered enough to be great. He has convinced a lot of people that he’s a pretty good actor but he thinks a lot of people are easily pleased. “You sort of get cast as a kid and you sort of just have to play a kid,” he says simply. “It’s really later, when you get into roles in Chekhov when you have to have incredible resources to fall back on.”

But there’s “talk” around town, fired by advance screenings of the film “The Dead Poet’s Society,” that Leonard manages to stand out in a group of seven young actors who play Robin Williams’ students. Williams portrays an English teacher who sets out to inspire his prep school wards.

It was the first major motion picture role for Leonard, who has been concentrating in theater since he appeared at age 12 in a summer stock version of “The Music Man.”

Joked Robin Williams of Leonard: “If Laurence Olivier and James Dean had a kid, this is what it would look like.”

But he went on to say that Leonard combines a theatrical talent with a strong, emotive film presence.

Even though Leonard is thoroughly American, Australian Peter Weir, who directed the film, saw something of the theatrically trained British actor in Leonard.

“Bobby struck me as magic from the moment he first read for the part,” Weir says. “In his work, he combines the best of the British (stage) actor with the best of the American screen actor. He has the training and discipline that most British actors get, (and) the camera loves him, which makes for a unique leading man.”

The young actor says Weir sought a theatrical performance focused more on his body language than his facial expressions. “He was really into the physicality,” he explains. “Most film work is taking what’s in your head and showing it in your eyes. I’m not sure I have that much inside me yet.”

But has his life has been too normal? He grew up in an “average suburban town” in New Jersey. His father is a retired teacher, his mother is a nurse. “My parents are still together, I don’t do drugs . . . . Why am I an actor?” he asks wryly.

Leonard followed “Dead Poets” with a stint in a free one-act play in a theater-bar in New York. “All the theaters are sort of in my backyard here and I know everyone . . . . I’ve never taken an acting class, never studied. But in a way, it is studying, going from play to play,” he says.

The Hollywood scene strikes Leonard as far less nourishing: “In L.A., actors just sort of come and go. There’s no base, no center where you see other actors and study their work.” Nonetheless, movies have their place in a young actor’s life. “The money’s great,” Leonard admits. “It certainly pays for doing theater. I audition for everything.”

Before “Dead Poets,” Leonard had a couple of roles in small films and in TV movies. On Broadway, he starred as Eugene in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and shared the stage with Derek Jacoby in the British play, “Breaking the Code.”

While he pursues his career, Leonard also is toiling as a student at Fordham University in New York. “Right now, I’m weeding the garden of Plato’s Republic, which has been hell for me,” he says. “I’ve been studying part time for three years, on and off, and I plan to finish before I die.”

Nothing in Leonard’s life at the moment seems likely to provide the baptism of fire that he thinks he lacks. But he finds consolation in considering that his hero, Jimmy Stewart, also had a fairly stable background. And Stewart, in response to several fan letters, wrote to endorse Leonard’s plan to stay in the theater for the time being. “He wrote, ‘It’s the best training for an actor,’ ” Leonard says happily. “If I can’t follow Jimmy Stewart’s advice, I don’t know whose I would.”

YAHOO SERIOUS If Warner Brothers is right, Yahoo Serious will prove to be more than just another fresh face in the movies this summer. He will be a sudden sensation, duplicating his phenomenal success in his native Australia with his first film, “Young Einstein.”

How much does the studio believe in this bizarre blending of Paul Hogan and Pee Wee Herman? Enough to spend (they say) $8 million or more to market a movie that cost just under $4 million to make. So keen were Warner executives to show him off at February’s ShoWest film market in Las Vegas that they offered to send the corporate jet to retrieve him from his honeymoon in Africa. Serious caught a regular flight, just like a regular guy.

A regular guy he isn’t. At 35 he hardly looks like one, with electrified orange hair and unusual sartorial tastes. On a stopover in Los Angeles, he was wearing what he refers to as his “Elvis Presley pink” suit with tailor’s measurements printed on the fabric and a strip of buttons running along the seams. His socks were pink and yellow.

He says, sweetly, “It’s an anti-fashion statement.”

Not only did he star in “Young Einstein,” but he also wrote, produced, directed and edited it. He worked feverishly to maintain creative control through five years of permutations that finally brought it to the big screen. The effort paid off when the picture became the fourth-biggest box office producer in Australian history, behind the two “Crocodile Dundees” and “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial”

Serious describes his film as “a cross between ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and a Bugs Bunny cartoon.”

(He performed his own stunts, including break-dancing, hot-air ballooning, horse riding, surfing, high diving and cliff climbing. In fact, his recent honeymoon with co-star Lulu Pinkus sounded like something out of the movie. Says Serious: “We’ve been white-water rafting down the crocodile-infested Zambezi River.”)

The plot follows the young radical Einstein’s adventures through the invention of the electric guitar and a love affair with Marie Curie. (In one satirical shot, Einstein is ejected from a Sydney University lecture hall filled with sheep.)

So what’s with his name? Serious adopted it years ago (from the more pedestrian Greg Pead) and offers no coherent explanation. But he says it works with his new life as auteur : “When I perform, I’m ‘Yahoo,’ and when I’m the director, I’m ‘Serious.’ ”

Serious grew up in Hunter Valley on the northern coast of New South Wales. After dropping out of school at 15, he briefly adopted his father’s trade of fitting tires. He dabbled in painting, attended art school for a couple of years, then drifted into TV production.

But he dropped out again and went wanderlusting on an extended international hitchhiking expedition that ultimately provided the inspiration for “Young Einstein.” The idea came to him on a trip down the Amazon when he spotted a Brazilian wearing a T-shirt depicting the inventor as an elderly man, sticking out his tongue.

Will success spoil Serious? He thinks not but he doesn’t back away from media scrutiny. “I kind of love it,” he says. “And I don’t do anything I don’t want to do.” In that vein, he recently agreed to appear on Australia’s “60 Minutes” program as long as he could interview himself.

“I lashed myself with a really hard question: ‘How do you cope with suddenly being chased around and being a sex symbol?’ It’s a really horrible question, a crass question,” he says.

“So how did I answer?” He pauses for effect. “I said, ‘Well, I could ask you the same question.’ ”

WINONA RYDER Diminutive Winona Ryder, with her innocent brown eyes, may have one of the summer’s most dicey roles--playing Jerry Lee Lewis’ 13-year-old cousin and bride. Even though she’s all of 17, she worried about her love-making scenes with 34-year-old leading man Dennis Quaid.

“The thing that I was really freaked out about was--how it was going to look?” she says. “Because, literally, I look about 11 years old. My hair’s back in a ponytail and I’m wearing these little Peter Pan-collar things and I just look so young. And he looks older. I was really concerned that people were going to see it and go, ‘This is so perverted--34 and 17.’

“I was afraid that was going to take away from them watching the movie, that all they were going to be thinking about was Winona Ryder and Dennis Quaid, not the love story.

“But Jerry Lee and Myra--as weird as it was--I think they really were in love with each other and I really wanted that to come across. I wanted to come across like, it was love and when love comes so strong, there is no right or wrong.”

Ryder finally met Myra, when she was invited to attend one of the screenings of the “dailies”: “I was so nervous. We were showing her some stuff where he was picking her up from school and says, ‘I’m gonna marry you.’ And it goes to the wedding.

“I looked over and she was crying and I was so scared because I didn’t know what she was crying about. I didn’t know if she was crying because I was a bad actress or that it was so real.

“And then she turned to me and hugged me and said, ‘You’re a gift from God.’ It was probably the most amazing feeling that I’ve ever had in connection with acting, to have that kind of approval.”

Ryder has little in common with a 13-year-old growing up in Memphis in the ‘50s (“It’s the absolute opposite of me,” she says). But she admits that she’s not entirely grown up yet, either. “Now, amazingly, people look at me--I don’t even want to say it but--not like a little girl anymore,” she confesses. “I’m talking about guys. It is sort of strange because I’m not, like, this really experienced--I don’t really know what to do in . . . situations.”

She laughs. “This is a strange place to be when you’re 17. I’m still jailbait, really. Thank God. When I turn 18, I don’t know.”

All this made her scenes with Quaid awkward, particularly because her leading man immersed himself in the role of the wildly unpredictable rocker of living legend.

“I never knew when he was being himself,” she says. “When he would say something to me, I didn’t know if it was him saying it or Jerry Lee Lewis saying it. I did sort of get confused from time to time. On the whole, he was just very, sort of, obsessed. Obsessed and possessed.”

For the most part, Quaid/Lewis played the protective role toward young Ryder/Myra. And Ryder thinks the unnerving aspects of his behavior helped her. “During actual filming, my stomach was sort of coming up through my throat,” she explains. “When he gets into it, he gets into it. I was a little scared, but that’s great because Myra was scared a lot. When he would yell at her, when he would not trust her, when he would accuse her of being unfaithful, what could she do? When he would come on to her, no one had ever come on to Myra before. So I think all my--Winona’s--reactions worked very well for her reactions, too.”

“Great Balls of Fire” producer Adam Fields says Ryder isn’t feigning the role of ingenue. “Winona is a very young 17,” he says. “She’s not like New York or Hollywood kids.” Originally, he considered Emily Lloyd or even Holly Hunter for the part, but Ryder surprised him with her performance: “She reminds me of Elizabeth Taylor in ‘National Velvet’ or a young Audrey Hepburn.”

Until this summer, Ryder’s best-known role was as the mournful daughter in “Beetlejuice.”

The character seems alien considering Ryder’s exuberance, but she says appearances are misleading. “I’ve gone through very dark stages where I would only wear black,” she explains. “I went through that stage right before I did that movie, so it was a cinch. I was very dramatic. I was like a living sigh. It was my ‘Sunset Boulevard’ thing.”

Right now, Ryder’s enthusiasm for life is fully restored. She and her best friend, model Heather Bursch, have plans. “I want to do the backpack thing--first drive across the United States, rent a car and bring no money and no clothes and write really bad poetry,” she says, dissolving into a self-mocking laugh.

“Do the whole Jack Kerouac thing. Then we want to go to Europe and do it there. We also want to go to Africa. We want to go to college together. We want to end up in Trinity in Ireland for the last two years but the first two years we want to go somewhere in the United States.” Meanwhile, she’s taking guitar, piano, cooking and fencing. “And I write a lot,” she says.

Ryder grew up in Petaluma . She’s the third of four children born to Cindy and Michael Horowitz; her mother makes educational videos, and her father runs a bookstore specializing in the ‘60s and the counterculture. The daughter chose her current surname when she started acting.

Ryder’s acting career lifted off effortlessly when she was 12. “I started going to a little acting class and a casting director was there by chance,” she says. Her success came as a surprise.

“I thought about acting but it wasn’t a life ambition,” she says. “When an agent called me, I said, ‘Well, what do you do?’ I never had to really work for the things I got . . . . I concentrate a lot and I’m a really hard worker, but everything happened for me in a great way.”

She debuted in “Lucas” when she was 13. She followed with roles in “Square Dance,” “Beetlejuice,” “1969” and the recent black comedy about teen suicide, “Heathers.”

Ryder’s work prevented her from attending her local high school so she studied independently and completed her high school requirements with a perfect 4-point average. While she feels some yearning for the prom and other adolescent trappings, she wasn’t especially happy at her school.

“I was not Miss Popularity,” she says. “Me and Heather were sort of the geeks. Nobody ever paid attention to us or if they did, it was all negative . . . . They confronted us a lot. They would say, ‘You’re going to go nowhere.’ It’s funny. Now, she’s in Elle and I’m sure all those girls are feeling a little bit stupid.”