Accent

No shortage of acting jobs for Laura Linney (and she's 40)

Laura Linney is a no-nonsense woman, not one to mince words or suffer fools. If you're going to work with her, if you're going to tell her what to do, you'd better have your act together, because she's not going to give you any free passes. In a word, intimidating. At least she can be at first. But then there's that laugh, a booming, delightful, from-the-gut roar that comes out unexpectedly and often, usually when she wants to convey that she doesn't take herself - or any of the attention she's currently receiving - all that seriously. The work, yes. She's thankful that it keeps coming. The Oscar buzz: Feh. Unless, of course, it gets her more work. Linney cannot stop working. Ever since her film breakthrough four years ago in Kenneth Lonergan's sibling drama "You Can Count on Me," she has moved from one set to another with hardly a break. She says the thing she wants to see most is her bed in her Manhattan apartment (she has a thing for fine linens), but when you ask her when that might happen, she shrugs her shoulders and confides she's about to leave for Vancouver to start another movie. Linney is certainly an anomaly in Hollywood. She celebrated her 40th birthday in February, arriving at an age when most actresses are, unfortunately, finding doors closed and opportunities limited. Linney, however, is on a career roll, currently seen to fine effect in Dylan Kidd's "P.S.," a romance about a divorced college administrator who becomes passionately involved with a young grad-student applicant because he just might be the reincarnation of her one true love. Opening Friday is "Kinsey," with Linney playing the controversial sex researcher's wife, Clara, a role filmmaker Bill Condon cast first because "she is the heart of the film." "You wouldn't think that in a movie called 'Kinsey' that we'd cast the wife's role before that of the title character (Alfred Kinsey)," Condon says, "but that just shows how much I think of Laura. She's simply phenomenal." That sort of reliance isn't unusual. Last year in Clint Eastwood's acclaimed "Mystic River," Linney had a small role, almost a cameo, really, playing the wife of Sean Penn's volcanic, grief-stricken Jimmy. But there was that one pivotal scene at the end of the film where Linney's wife turned into Lady Macbeth and the movie's already pungent pessimism became something palpably terrifying. "I knew I had to have someone with authority for that scene," Eastwood says. "Few actresses have that kind of power. Laura does." And that's precisely why Kidd decided to adapt Helen Schulman's novel, "P.S. I Love You," especially for Linney. Not because of the aforementioned displays of authority or intelligence. In fact, quite the opposite. "She's incredibly sexy," Kidd says. "That's one of the first things I thought when I met her. Why doesn't she ever get to be the Cosmo Girl?" Linney does look great in "P.S." The movie also contains a fabulous, erotic sex scene between Linney's late-thirtysomething heroine and Topher Grace's mysterious suitor, a young painter who bears an uncanny resemblance to the woman's one true love, a high school boyfriend who died young in an automobile accident. The sequence, shot in real time, is sexy, yes, but it's also funny and, at times, uncomfortable for both the characters and the audience. It's probably Kidd's favorite scene in the movie, but he was petrified (as was Grace) the day he shot it. Luckily, Linney was there to calm the boys down.