Maturing quickly amid fast company

When Alanna Ubach’s mother saw her play Reese Witherspoon’s sweetly ditzy sorority sister Serena in the “Legally Blonde” hit comedies, she told her, “ ‘That’s cute, Alanna, but that kind of role is a no-brainer.’ But when I called my mom and told her I was going to be playing a 50-year-old woman with a huge [Spanish] accent in ‘Meet the Fockers,’ she flipped,” Ubach says.

Ubach plays Isabel, the Fockers’ former housekeeper, who once had a fling with a teenage Greg (Ben Stiller). In a tight-fitting dress, padded hips and breasts and sporting a vivacious attitude, she more than holds her own with Stiller and the rest of the “Fockers’ ” high-wattage stars -- Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand.

“When the audition came around,” she recalls, “they didn’t have an age for the character. They said she might be in her 30s.”

Eventually, director Jay Roach decided he wanted Isabel to be middle-aged. But could Ubach pass as a fiftysomething mother?

To prove she could, Ubach, who’s 29, dressed the part when she was called in to read for Roach and the cast.

“I put tan makeup on my skin and all over my hands and put this boxed black hair color from Rite Aid on my hair. I dressed in this domestic, very matronly sweater and these huge palazzo pants and had red Lee Press On Nails. I made them all laugh.”

After Ubach was hired, Roach decided to make Isabel more zaftig and sexy. “So they put padding on my rumpus and gave me some hips and some double-D breasts and [gray-flecked] hair.”

Ubach, who has been acting since she was 4, says she was pinching herself every five minutes when she was on the set. “I kept saying [to myself], ‘I don’t want to step on any toes. I don’t want to mess up.’ But they made me feel so much at home. They can calm any person down who looks at them as a ‘star’ and brings them into the scene.”