COVER STORY : Lights! Camera! Cheekbones! : Cindy Crawford is traveling a path that is well-worn by the well-thin. For many supermodels (and even lesser ones), acting seems the next logical career step.

As trends go, the steady, stunning parade of fashion models marching to Hollywood is hardly a startling one. If we start with the premise that seeing a movie is like sharing a few hours with a film’s characters, then the explanation for why models show up on theater screens could be stupendously simple: Most audiences prefer to spend time with attractive people.

Hollywood hasn’t suddenly been besieged by an attack of the killer tomatoes--models have been storming the studios’ gates for decades (see accompanying chart). Some of the pretty women who turned to acting were queens of the modeling world--Suzy Parker in the ‘50s, Twiggy in the early ‘70s. Others, such as Susan Saint James and Geena Davis, modeled anonymously to pay the bills till acting jobs were offered.

Lauren Bacall was summoned by Howard Hawks back in 1943 after her picture in Harper’s Bazaar caught the attention of the director’s wife. In 1970, Peter Bogdanovich spotted Cybill Shepherd on the cover of Glamour and cast her in “The Last Picture Show.” It seemed logical that beauty that shone on the printed page would become more radiant when every exquisite movement and expression was captured by the motion picture camera. Like modeling itself, the process of models “morphing” into actresses has long seemed to display its truth on the surface.

Yet subtler questions nag. Is there something in the very nature of stardom, and in the changing character of modeling, that explains the common element on many actresses’ resumes? Case in point, as Rod Serling used to say, consider one Cindy Crawford, irresistibly nice, bright, successful, 29-year-old beauty and/or cultural icon (depending on which lusciously photographed magazine story one digests).

The planned late-summer opening of “Fair Game,” an action film in which Crawford makes her acting debut, has been postponed and an October release is scheduled. She plays a lawyer in jeopardy in the Joel Silver production, rubbing pumped deltoids with Billy Baldwin as they exchange banter, dodge explosions and outwit bad guys.

The decision to cast Crawford as the lead in a movie, and the choice of what kind of role she would play, drive the current fascination with supermodels right to the klieg-lit corner where it intersects timeless movie magic.

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It isn’t really necessary to furrow our culturally elite brows over the ascendance of Cindy Crawford. She is clearly a hard-working phenomenon. She isn’t just a model; she is also a television hostess and talk show guest, a corporation, a spokesperson, the preeminent mistress of exercise videos, a launcher of beauty products without peer. Children think she should be President. Men and women of all ages admire her, and she has a particular following among boys, who, crossing the puberty bridge, envision her waiting on the far shore, the embodiment of womanhood.

Her appeal has been dissected ad nauseam, but its essence reduces to gorgeous, sexy, smart, wholesome and honest, an impression that is only enhanced by a personal encounter.

Hollywood stars used to project particular images, even if those alter-egos were fabrications of creative studio publicity departments. Now celebrity models tote defined media personas in their Prada backpacks. Everyone knows Linda Evangelista is the unpredictable party girl, Kathy Ireland the good sport next door. The creation of these identities and a beloved, larger-than-life Cindy character is an achievement, when one remembers that fashion models used to be called mannequins, and were considered blank, as lifeless and devoid of personality as department store dummies.

But that was then--before the expansion of electronic media--and Cindy, Elle and Naomi are now, a time when name recognition earned in modeling can bring audiences into theaters. The current industry belief in the drawing power of models has given rise to a wealth of opportunities for a number of recognizable faces. It wasn’t a stretch when Naomi Campbell played a married man’s love toy in “Miami Rhapsody,” and she has gone on to roles in “Invasion of Privacy” and “Girl Six” for director Spike Lee. Elle MacPherson’s respectable debut in the Australian comedy “Sirens” landed her an overall deal with Miramax.

“Cable television, with its tremendous need for programming, found a great subject in models,” Ford Models CEO Katie Ford says. Twenty years ago, print and runway models were of two distinct castes, laboring under very different pay scales: Photographic models were the elite; only their relatively poorly paid step-sisters walked the boards. Then the same models who appeared in the glossy magazines began showing the collections of name designers, and videos of the increasingly theatrical runway presentations were broadcast on CNN’s “Style.”

That weekly show spawned several imitators and mutations, including Cindy Crawford’s “House of Style” on MTV. All the fashion TV shows regularly feature profiles on models, as do infotainment programs such as “Entertainment Tonight” and “Extra.”

Larry Thompson, a manager and producer who helped former models Maud Adams, Jennifer O’Neill, Catherine Oxenberg and Joan Severance become actresses, says: “Everyone knows the top models by name these days. I think a lot of people will go to see Cindy Crawford just to see if she can or can’t act, or just to look at her, because they think she’s pretty. That will make for a big opening weekend.”

Or not. Since a model without acting experience is an unproven commodity, giving a rookie actress a major role can be risky. For every promising freshman model-actress, there’s a forsaken sophomore, buffing her nails by a silent phone.

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Model sightings have become increasingly frequent and varied. Look, there’s Kate Moss in premiere party mufti in the pages of In Style. And there’s Victoria’s Secret model Jill Goodacre doing a guest shot on “Friends.” Did you catch Christy Turlington on David Letterman’s show, batting her eyelashes so vigorously that one feared a wind shear in “The Late Show” studio? As models have become full-fledged celebrities--a status that has made their romantic encounters with actors, rockers, athletes and tycoons prime gossip fodder--modeling has acquired a new cachet and the lines that separate models from actors have further blurred.

Tom Skerritt and Drew Barrymore have both appeared in Guess? magazine advertisements, Isabella Rossellini will continue to represent Lancome cosmetics until the end of next year, Fred Ward and Dylan McDermott posed for Donna Karan ads and although this summer she was chiefly catnip for the tabloids, Elizabeth Hurley acted in a dozen movies before identifying herself as a model and being chosen as the face of Estee Lauder.

To understand the increasing interest in modeling among actors, follow the money. “A lot of actresses want those $1 million-a-year modeling contracts,” Ford says. And the fashion and cosmetics companies offering those deals know when they hire an actress they often get an image along with a face.

Melanie Griffith was a model who became an actress who went back to her roots, signing with Revlon as the spokeswoman for its mature makeup line. In television commercials and magazine ads, she is the sum of her most successful roles--sweet, flirtatious and more sexually knowing than any wrinkle-free teen-ager.

Image maintenance, for both the model and the actress, is serious business. Cindy is so aware of the living doll her public assumes her to be that she speaks of that creation of designers, hairstylists, makeup artists and photographers as a separate being: “Cindy Crawford, The Thing. She’s me but she isn’t, because she’s only two-dimensional. I’m not looking to destroy that image. I want to be conscious of it and aware. I wouldn’t do a cigarette ad, because it wouldn’t fit. I’m looking to be me and find my own way. But sometimes the image has a life of its own. It’s silly to pretend that you don’t look the way you look. I think maybe the reason I’ve been successful is I know, pretty much, what people will accept me as. I don’t think I would go play a bag lady in the next movie, because people don’t want to see me that way.”

What about the fine art of submerging oneself in a character? If she can’t play a street person, or her fans would be upset to see her self-destruct as a junkie, then how can she be an actress?

Producer Frank Mancuso Jr., whose summer hit “Species” introduced model Natasha Henstridge, says: “In some ways, somebody like Cindy is more an example of an old kind of movie star, where whatever it is that they do is in a pretty narrow context. If you were going to see a John Wayne movie, you had a pretty clear idea of what that was going to be. Cindy has cultivated an idea of who she presents herself to be, and she won’t allow anybody to violate that. If she were going to be in a movie that I was producing, I’d want it to be a movie that makes sense for her to do. You can’t have her as a frumpy housewife or as someone sitting home on a Friday night saying, ‘Nobody wants to take me out,’ because no one would believe it.”

Film critic Pauline Kael advanced the theory that many of our most enduring movie stars never played anyone but themselves, or at least that image of themselves that the audience came to know. “If he didn’t grow as an actor,” she wrote of Cary Grant, “he certainly perfected ‘Cary Grant.’ ” That character, according to Kael, became “an immortal, an ideal of sophistication forever.”

Warner Bros. casting director Marion Dougherty agrees. “You would never think of Katharine Hepburn as a slob,” she says. “It just wouldn’t work. I think Cindy will have a larger range in parts, but I don’t know that I would believe her as a truly bad person, because the goodness in her comes through. If an actor’s personality is so strong and so well received, why bother to work against it?”

Crawford and her advisers don’t subscribe to too limited a view of her possibilities. “Cindy didn’t want to just play the beautiful girlfriend, a person without a lot of substance or without any dramatic side to the character,” says Michael Gruber, Crawford’s agent.

She turned down a number of roles as a model, but felt confident playing a lawyer. “I’m old enough to be a lawyer,” she says. “I was valedictorian of my high school and I’m definitely smart enough to be a lawyer. Probably the meanest thing that’s been written about me so far regarding ‘Fair Game’ was a woman who wrote, ‘If you were going to hire a lawyer, would you hire Cindy Crawford?’ I was so offended. I thought we’d gotten over the idea that if someone is beautiful they must be stupid.”

Old prejudices die hard, even about a woman who holds her own in business meetings with men twice her age and has succeeded in negotiating a partnership interest in several of the products she endorses. Negative assumptions about models cause women with thespian urges to develop a rare form of amnesia when asked about their professional pasts.

Susan Blakely made the transition from modeling to acting in the early ‘70s, when attitudes toward models were openly harsh. “I wouldn’t do interviews if they said I was a model turned actress because I felt it harmed me,” she says. “I didn’t want the stigma. There were a few models who had gone into acting and hadn’t been very good. They were pretty, but they had no training and no ability to act. I would hear people in the business say things like, ‘If I want to see a model, I’ll look in a magazine.’ I got the message: I can’t even let people know I was a model.”

The success of such former models as Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Kim Basinger and Rene Russo has had an impact. Nevertheless Halle Berry, an actress who has worked hard to be seen as more than a pretty face, often didn’t tell casting directors she had modeled when she began acting five years ago. “When you’re a model, they think you’re stupid and they think, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful, so you want to be in movies, but you have no talent,’ ” she says.

Andie MacDowell, one of the most successful of the current crop of former models who now acts, declined to be interviewed for this story. “Having been a model is the subject she hates most in this world,” one of her publicists said.

One industry observer articulated a common models-are-shallow sentiment, saying, “Do we hire them to act or to look beautiful? If acting is supposed to communicate depth, how can we expect to find it in a woman who spent her formative years in a business that trains its young to focus on the surface? These women have no real lives or experiences to draw upon.”

Many models hoping to make a career change demonstrate their seriousness by studying acting. “I studied before I started and I was really prepared,” Blakely says. “I was queen of the book-outs at Ford because I was always taking time from modeling to take classes.”

Nina Blanchard, who headed her own talent and modeling agency for 35 years, believes training is important for models trying to build acting careers, but a touch of genius is invaluable. “Like murder, talent will be found out,” Blanchard says. “Either you’re gifted or you’re not, but you also have to have the kind of commitment that someone like Kim Basinger had. Lots of girls say they’ll give it a year, but either they want it so bad that they’ll kill themselves if they can’t act, or it doesn’t happen. I don’t have a lot of compassion for the dilettante.

“Sharon Stone was probably the most committed actress I’ve ever met. But it took her 10 years. She’s a classic example of a great beauty who made money modeling but understood where she was going. There are so many that did the pilot, and where are they now?”

Managing their financial portfolios. The era of the model as diva was defined by the parallel escalation in models’ celebrity and earnings. Not many actresses could have uttered Linda Evangelista’s widely quoted line about herself and Christy Turlington: “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”

Blanchard has seen fat modeling fees suck the heat out of a burning desire to act. “If you’re not committed to being an actor, the money in modeling is too seductive,” she says. “How can they turn down $15,000 a day? ‘I’ll do it next year,’ they say, and it never happens.”

Tatjana Patitz was anointed a supermodel in 1990 when British Vogue featured her on the cover with modeling’s reigning goddesses: Naomi, Christy, Linda and Cindy. She has been studying acting since 1988, and had a small but key role in “Rising Sun” as a kinky babe whose murder Sean Connery must solve.

“You don’t get paid as much for acting as you do for modeling,” Patitz says, “but that’s where how much you believe in doing it comes in. I love the creative part of acting, and that it’s not all about your looks. Still, when my agency calls up and says I have a job for four or five days in Paris, I have to take it.”

Envy a model’s ability to pick up some spare change by hopping the Concorde and doing a Lagerfeld show in Paris. Pity her short shelf life. “I started modeling when I was 17, and by the time you were 23, you were too old,” Blakely says. “I was always aware of the clock ticking and I didn’t want to be hanging around too long.”

Models who speak with sincerity of the challenge of acting and the lure of great dramatic material also know it offers greater longevity than their current job.

“Football players retire to become insurance salesmen. Well, models think they can retire to become actresses,” producer Thompson says. “Actresses can be stars in their 40s now, and that allows models to play out their career and then have a future in acting.”

Right now, Cindy Crawford isn’t sure about her future. She understands that her fame robbed her of the opportunity an unknown beginner would have had--the chance to be bad, learn and improve in obscurity. Steeling herself against critical reviews, she says, “Even if I paint a gloomier picture than what will happen, I have to prepare myself. I keep saying to everybody, ‘Please, give me a break. This is my first movie.’ ”

Since the release of “Fair Game” has been pushed back, the rumor mill has been quick to blame Crawford for re-shoots that may have had more to do with the film’s pace or story than her lack of experience.

If her performance is slammed, she can concentrate on her very lucrative day job.

“I’ve just signed with Revlon for five more years, so that really takes care of my financial needs,” she says. “I don’t have to do another movie unless it meets certain requirements and then some. Being an actress was never my dream and it’s still not. I don’t need the movie business for money and I don’t need it for self-esteem.”

In fact, the movie business might need Cindy. And Tatjana, Vendela, Iman, Paulina and a lot of the other models, past and present, who want to work within it. Because they aren’t the only players with profiles to maintain.

William Morris agent Gruber explains: “Beauty makes sense opposite certain leading men.” Sylvester Stallone is the kind of movie star whose public and professional images have become indivisible. Gone are the days when Rocky courted mousy Adrian.

We’ve seen too many breathtaking models on Stallone’s arm to accept him as a character who would pursue a cosmetically challenged woman. The casting departments at Savoy and Universal might as well ask Ford and Elite to send over their books.