Overnight Sensation

It’s not unusual to find a lag between a movie’s casting process and its subsequent shooting. For the talented unknowns populating “True Love,” an independent comedy-drama that opened late last year to glowing reviews, the pre-production suspense was especially unnerving.

“I got cast three years before I actually shot the movie,” says Annabella Sciorra, a native New Yorker who led the ensemble as a Bronx Italian about to be unhappily wed. “It was always very clear that if (director) Nancy Savoca ever got the money, she did want me to be Donna, but I always thought by the time they got the money I’d be too old to play Donna!”

Fortunately, fellow film maker John Sayles and some other financial benefactors arrived before Sciorra’s wrinkles did. And the young actress--seen in the “True Love” ad art as the weeping girl in the wedding dress--ended up with the plum role in one of the year’s best movies.

“I did ‘True Love’ and life went on and I was still waiting on tables, and then it won the grand prize at the United States Film Festival in Park City last year. Suddenly, within an hour my phone was ringing--people in Utah wanting my picture and resume, wanting to know if I was coming to L.A., wanting to know who my agent was, wanting to be my agent. . . . It was like one of those overnight things that you read about.”

Slicker, bigger-budget projects were on the way: A producer of “Internal Affairs” (which opened Friday) was at Park City and invited her to read for a role. “I ended up as Richard Gere’s wife . . . but for me it was all very magical, being in a Hollywood picture.”

Sciorra will next be seen in March in “Reversal of Fortune,” director Barbet Schroeder’s account of the Klaus von Bulow trial, and in May as Tim Robbins’ suspiciously sexy wife in the Robin Williams comedy “Cadillac Man.”