DEATH BECOMES HER

Jenette Goldstein knows more than most about living and dying in L.A. She’s done the former nearly all her life, most recently in Silver Lake. And since breaking into the film business, the 37-year-old actress has amassed a remarkable record of on-screen deaths--nine, to be exact, over the past 11 years.

She blew herself up to save Sigourney Weaver in “Aliens,” played a vampire who self-combusts in the cult hit “Near Dark,” perished in a nuclear holocaust that also claimed Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham in “Miracle Mile” and was terminated and morphed in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” She’s been fatally shot twice (in the cop film “The Presidio” and the Charles Bronson TV flick “Donato and Daughter”), stabbed to death once (1995’s “Fair Game,” remembered chiefly as Cindy Crawford’s acting debut) and obliterated by bad guys while jumping off a diving board in “Lethal Weapon 2.” In December, Goldstein will bite the dust yet again, playing a doomed passenger aboard director James Cameron’s “Titanic.’

“Let’s just say that ‘women and children first’ applied only to first-class passengers,” she observes. “I’m in steerage.”

Gallows humor has helped Goldstein survive her grisly oeuvre without dying a thousand deaths of the spirit. (The biggest bummer about buying the farm on film, she insists, is not being around for the sequel.) She is nonetheless deadly serious about her craft and approaches each demise as if it were her first. “I try to bring something new to each role,” she says.

Of the manifold ways Goldstein has died, her favorite was her explosive end in “Aliens” “because I chose it--it was a heroic suicide.” Her least favorite came in “Fair Game,” chiefly because her character outlived most of the film’s inane plot. “We were such wonderful assassins it took us an entire movie to catch Cindy Crawford,” she sighs. “I wish I had been killed off more quickly, believe me.”

Having faced her maker so many times as an actress has given Goldstein unusual perspective as a mother (she has two sons, ages 1 and 8). She has purposely spared her elder son the trauma of watching her die, although “the films I’ve done have been cool, so it holds him pretty well in the schoolyard.”

Still, Goldstein’s days of dying for her art may be numbered. In her next four movies after “Titanic,” she actually gets to stick around.

“It is,” she acknowledges, “a breakthrough.”