Stone’s ‘The Doors’ Brings Out a Different Side of Kathleen Quinlan

As a teen-ager growing up in Marin County in the late ‘60s, the music of Jim Morrison and the Doors did not light Kathleen Quinlan’s fire.

“I was a Motown R&B; girl,” she explains. “I remember hearing ‘Light My Fire’ but it wasn’t my music of choice at the time. I was a little hippie. I had strict parents , but my mother didn’t think I was doing anything too awful.”

Quinlan didn’t get into the music and poetry of the late mythical Morrison until she was cast as Patricia Kennealy, a writer who bewitched Morrison (Val Kilmer) in Oscar-winner Oliver Stone’s ballyhooed new movie “The Doors.”

“I appreciate the Doors much more because I can appreciate Morrison’s poetry,” Quinlan says. “I love his lyrics.”

Quinlan, who made her film debut in 1973’s classic “American Graffiti,” has played everything from a mental patient in “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” to a young nun victimized by a priest in “The Runner Stumbles.”

But a sexy femme fatale ?

“Most people wouldn’t see me in that role,” Quinlan admits. “That’s why I was thrilled that Oliver did.”

Quinlan also persuaded Stone by dressing the part at her audition. “I wore a black lace skirt, a black leather jacket, a black velvet top, boots, a hat and lots of jewelry,” she says.

Stone, she says, was shocked. “He said, ‘I have never seen this side of you before,’ ” she recalls. “I read for him and the next time I read with Val, he sort of asked me right then if I wanted to do it.”

But she didn’t initially want to do an explicit nude scene with Kilmer. “I only agreed to do it because of Oliver’s vision of it,” Quinlan says. “ And ,” she adds, laughing, “because of a complicated legal contract. That took care of that. But when I walked into the room (the set) and saw how it was lit, it was so beautiful and such a fantasy, with that music and the candles and the dancing, I went with it.”