La stampa americana parla di "Streghe"...
Alyssa Milano
Sweet Alyssa
Copyright 2000 TV Guide
Articolo tratto da "TV Guide" (del maggio 2000) di Robert Abele
The
secret to Alyssa Milano's Charmed life? Hard work, and lots of it. Now with her
hit show and a burgeoning Internet business, there's no question that she's the
boss.
For the first six hours, she was completely nauseated. Here she'd made several
movies, been on two successful television series (Who's the Boss?, Melrose Place)
and worked as an actor consistently for 20 years, and yet the first day of
filming on WB's Charmed was the most nerve-wracking ever for Alyssa Milano.
Not only was she cast as the youngest Halliwell sister, Phoebe, a mere three
days before she had to report to the set for work on the first episode, she was
also replacing the actress from the pilot (Lori Rom, who left for personal
reasons). Plus, her costars Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs had been best
friends for seven years. Milano was pretty sure she was about to find out what
it was like to feel like a third wheel. "Oh, God," she recalls
thinking, "I'm going to be the total loner and have to stay in my trailer.
I can't even come near them."
In the end it was Milano's approach to the role that broke the ice. "Phoebe
was sort of a brooding, serious, rebellious character, and I think from the
first day it was apparent that's not who I am," says Milano with a laugh,
collapsing into a chair minutes after a photo shoot. A relaxing slump undoing
hours of stillness for the camera. "[Shannen and Holly] were happy that I
was bringing a new energy, so they made me feel really comfortable."
Aaron Spelling, the ever-grateful producer of Charmed, was the one who made the
call to Milano in July 1998 and asked to book the next nine months of her life.
(The actress was in Hawaii at the time, shooting an episode of the short-lived
ABC revival of Fantasy Island.) "She brings an I-can-do-this attitude to
Phoebe," he says. "What she did was step in and kick the hell out of
it."
The programming spell cast by this coven certainly reduced executive stress
levels at WB when Charmed, despite the network's wall-to-wall Felicity blitz
that year, became an unexpected hit. Now, as its second successful season (it's
WB's second-highest-rated series) winds to a close with an elaborate episode
directed by Doherty, the show has become impossible to envision without Milano's
delicately sexualized brand of humor and vivacity. She won't say much about the
final episode (airing May 18, 9 P.M./ET) except that Combs's character "goes
away, and there's that feeling that she might not come back," and that
Phoebe will develop a new, "active" power.
Milano, 27, has fought to rescue the jobless Phoebe from being a housebound
layabout, and she takes credit for the character's return to school this season.
"I think part of the cool thing of the show is having to keep this secret
from friends, and college seemed like a good arena for that," says Milano,
who didn't go to college. But she sees another difference between herself and
her character: "[Phoebe is] less driven. A little flighty. I never went
through a slacker period because I've been working consistently since I was 7
years old." After stating this admirable fact, she raps three times on the
underside of a nearby table and whispers, "Knock on wood." When a
reporter repeats this knuckled action on a table's surface, however, Milano
offers a correction: "You have to knock on wood up, to let the wood sprites
out." She smiles reassuringly. "I just learned that."
The show's bubbly tales of empowerment witchcraft may have increased her belief
in superstitions, but Milano (who was reared in Staten Island, New York) knows
firsthand that there's no magic in the perseverance it takes to be a child star.
Her musician father, Thomas, and fashion-designer mother, Lin, cheerily accepted
their firstborn's love of hamming it up. But when 7-year-old Alyssa turned to
her parents after seeing "Annie" on Broadway and announced "I can
do that," their response, Lin admits, was a gently dismissive "Uh-huh.
Let's go out for ice cream."
Cut
to an open-call audition for "Annie" months later--an afternoon time
filler improvised by Alyssa's baby sitter--where Milano, after taking the stage,
found herself one of the kids chosen for a touring version of the musical, cast
to play orphans Kate and July. That breakthrough was, Lin says, "very
frightening, the realization that we can only add support. We can't hold her
back."
Mom dropped her business to travel with her daughter, and the two laid a
groundwork for family soundness--home-cooked meals, mother staying out of the
stage wings--that has kept Milano centered and her mother functioning as Milano's
manager to this day.
Life on the road even produced a brother, Cory, who was conceived mere months
after 9-year-old Alyssa had requested a baby brother--and a flute--as gifts to
mark the tour's end. (Cory, now 17, lives at home in a Los Angeles suburb with
Lin and Thomas, who've been married for 32 years.) Of her father, Milano says,
laughing, "He's got a better career than I do," and she notes that he's
worked on such films as "The Insider," The Hurricane" and
"Girl Interrupted" as a supervising music editor. "It's really
important to him just to be the dad, and I love him madly for that," Milano
says.
She holds her former TV dad, Tony Danza, in equally high esteem, although her
recollections of the period that catapulted her to child stardom--when she
played his daughter, Samantha Micelli, on the ABC comedy Who's The Boss? from
1984 to 1992--are slightly fuzzy. "I sort of remember those as the lost
years, because how much do you remember from when you were 11?" she says.
"By the time I was old enough to say, 'I'm going to remember this moment,'
I was ready for it to be over, because it's hard to do anything for that amount
of time," she adds. "But it was the perfect way to grow up in this
business, because it was stability, and I was around people every day [whom] I
loved."
But what did she do for an encore when Who's The Boss? ended and she found
herself unemployed at age 19? If Milano had possessed Phoebe's power of
premonition then, she might have been jolted by a vision of unremarkable
TV-movies, an eye-opening Bikini magazine spread in which she wore only mud, and
direct-to-video erotica. "I saw somebody who was totally willing to take
the risk," Anne Goursaud recalls about directing Milano--a love-scene
novice--clad and unclad, in "Embrace of the Vampire" and "Poison
Ivy 2: Lily" in 1995. "It's like losing your virginity," says
Goursaud. "So the first time is like an acting exercise: 'OK, let's see if
I can do that.' But she really is a consummate professional."
Milano claims to have no regrets about this soft-core detour--it definitely laid
any child-star vibes to rest--but she admits she would have preferred more
mainstream roles. "If I had my choice between 'Embrace of the Vampire' and
'Beetlejuice,' I would have done 'Beetlejuice,' believe me," she says,
laughing. "I did what I had to do to continue working."
Work she did. In 1997, she got a call from superproducer Spelling, who offered
her a one-year stint on Melrose Place playing Jennifer Mancini; that association
would eventually lead to Charmed. She also became an Internet entrepreneur.
Naughty stills from the soft-core movies had come back to haunt Milano in the
for of Web-page fodder, and a rash of faked nude photos began appearing as well.
In 1998, she sued many of the sites that had posted the pictures without her
permission, and began collecting judgments, eventually winning close to half a
million dollars. "I felt like a pioneer," she says of the
much-publicized lawsuits.
As a result, Lin Milano started CyberTrackers, a company that watches out for
unauthorized uses of celebrity images on the Internet (often nudes or faked
nudes) for celebrities who request the service, then sends out cease-and-desist
orders to persuade the sites to take the photos down. Alyssa, meanwhile, created
a flip-side business, Safesearching.com, which designs and protects authorized
Web sites for celebrities by ensuring that only client-approved photos are
posted and that any fan-site links don't contain porn. Aside from obvious
clients such as Milano's Charmed costars, Safesearching.com has created official
home pages for Ally McBeal's Portia de Rossi, Will & Grace's Eric McCormack
and Ladies' Man's Sharon Lawrence. Milano is now expanding her Web business
interests further, through a new joint venture with Internet company Keen.com
that will facilitate phone calls between fans and celebs.
Charmed
actor Greg Vaughan, who plays the sisters' neighbor hunk, Dan, says that between
Milano's sex appeal, her "overwhelming kindness" and her easy
chumminess with guys--she's a basketball fan and encourages raiding of her
well-stocked fridge at home--she'll never lack for suitors. "Every time my
buddies call, they want me to introduce them to her, because she's amazing,"
he says.
Not that Milano has time to rebound romantically. "I'm so busy," she
says. "It's a workaholic thing, not knowing how to be idle." Indeed,
her hiatus will find her corralling celebrities for her Web businesses before
leaving for a 10-week shoot in South Africa for an Italian television miniseries
called Diamond Hunter, in which she'll play a young lawyer who's addicted to
painkillers.
The day after she gets back, Charmed starts up again. So even today, having
wrapped up a season of work barely 24 hours earlier, she can't quite get her
head around the idea of slowing down. "As soon as I completely let go, I'm
going to get sick," she says, laughing.