'Joan of Arc,' Kubrick take Leelee Sobieski to stardom

LOS ANGELES -- Leelee who? Not for long.

Leelee Sobieski is giving up the relative anonymity of a typical American adolescence by playing Joan of Arc on TV and appearing in Stanley Kubrick's much anticipated last film.

So what was it like to work for the famously private and obsessively painstaking Kubrick?

"He was a very charming man, a great help," Sobieski, 16, said.

Kubrick "told me and my mom that the next time we came to England he would show us around," she said.

It was not to be. Kubrick died March 7, at 70. But his "Eyes Wide Shut," starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, promises to be one of the big movie events of summer.

Sobieski said Kubrick's shooting schedule required her presence for two weeks and ended up lasting two months.

"His reputation for wanting many takes was true. I didn't count how many, but they were pretty long. But I didn't mind, because he was no dictator. He really valued your opinion and asked, 'What do you think?' It was different every time, and it was really fun, never boring at all."

Of her co-stars, "I worked only with Tom, not with Nicole," she reported. "He was always very nice, smart guy, played chess. He was very kind."

She said she couldn't say more, because Kubrick had her pledge in writing not to discuss the movie publicly.

Audiences of last year's "Deep Impact" will remember Sobieski as the girl who marries the boy next door and flees with him on his motorcycle just before the asteroid hits Earth.

TV viewers will get more of her on CBS Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. in the four-hour miniseries "Joan of Arc," in which she plays the 15th century French heroine who led her people in battle against the English.

The Maid of Orleans was 17 when she raised the siege of her native city. Ingrid Bergman was 32 when she starred in the 1948 "Joan of Arc." Jean Seberg was 19 in the 1957 "Saint Joan." So Sobieski's age seems right for the role.

Both earlier films flopped. But Sobieski jumped on the part nonetheless.

"How many times do you get to play Joan of Arc in your life?" she said. "I figured Joan of Arc was the most famous and important teenage girl in history. Hey, I couldn't pass up that opportunity."

Moreover, her co-stars include such greats as Peter O'Toole, Olympia Dukakis, Shirley MacLaine and Maximilian Schell, who also was in "Deep Impact."

Sobieski admitted she started out knowing no more about Joan of Arc than the average teenager. So she read Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan," Mark Twain's "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc," French biographies and a book of Joan's heresy trial testimony.

How does an American teen immerse herself in the persona of Joan of Arc on location in the Czech Republic? Easily, she replied.

"Suddenly finding yourself on horseback, wearing 50 pounds of armor, riding through muddy snow, with a couple of hundred soldiers behind you, you quickly feel very much in the part."

Sobieski (pronounced SO-bee-es-kee) was born in New York City. Her mother is a New Yorker, her father a Parisian. They named her Liliane after her grandmother, but called her Leelee.

At 10, she was eating lunch in her school cafeteria when she was noticed by a casting agent for Woody Allen. She failed the screen test but was intrigued enough to enroll for drama lessons.

Since then she has quietly kept busy with smaller parts in several TV series, including "FX," "Grace Under Fire" and "Charlie Grace," as well as the features "Deep Impact," and "Never Been Kissed."

It was last year's "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" that first drew attention to Sobieski's acting talent. Based on a book by the daughter of James Jones, she played a girl growing up with expatriate parents (Kris Kristofferson, Barbara Hershey) in Paris.

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