When You’re An Actor, Fame Is No Accident

Chris O’Donnell’s face keeps getting more and more familiar.

The “Batman Forever” star began modeling at age 13, and appeared with Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman.” He has two new films coming out, “The Chamber” with Gene Hackman and “In Love and War” with Sandra Bullock.

But being a celebrity has its downside, O’Donnell tells Premiere magazine.

Last winter in Chicago, another driver ran a red light and rammed into the passenger side of his 1987 Honda. All he wanted to do was “slug the guy that hit me.”

But when he got out of his car, O’Donnell said, “People started recognizing me. Suddenly I’m signing autographs. My car is trashed and I’ve got a woman giving me gift certificates to some lunch place … I even signed an autograph for the cop.”

Loose talk

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, on the plot of next summer’s Sigourney Weaver sequel, “Alien 4: Resurrection” (in Newsweek): “They have said they will rip out my tongue if I speak of it, and gouge out my eyes.”

She’s been waiting to exhale on her candles

Whitney Houston turns 33 today.

For him, no rescue mission is impossible

Tom Cruise, who in March assisted a woman who was struck by a hit-and-run driver in California, came to the rescue Tuesday of five people whose yacht caught fire off the isle of Capri. Cruise, wife Nicole Kidman and several friends were yachting themselves when they discovered the survivors in a lifeboat.

We’re sure she’ll make a splendid Soon-Yi

“Striptease” star Demi Moore will be playing it a bit more low-key as part of an ensemble cast in Woody Allen’s next, yet-untitled film this fall. Robin Williams has been approached to fill the leading role of a writer whose fantasies and real life intersect.

Guess Francis was more of a godfather figure

To get Robin Williams in the right frame of mind to play a 10-year-old boy in “Jack,” director Francis Ford Coppola took him and a handful of young actors camping for two weeks. “They swam together, ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and had food fights,” Coppola said. “After that, we went and made the movie, but they were already a gang. They had all sorts of inside things and even I didn’t know anything about it.”

Doesn’t he know that loose lips sink ships?

Jason Alexander (“Seinfeld”) passed up a movie role in “McHale’s Navy,” starring Tom Arnold, telling Entertainment Weekly “it was not a very good script.” Complained a studio publicist: “He’s basically throwing a negative personal opinion in the way of the picture.”

Sorry, kid, typecasting is as typecasting does

Michael Humphreys, who played the young Tom Hanks in “Forrest Gump,” is still suffering from an identity crisis. “Even when I’m not running, people will say, ‘Run, Forrest, run!’,” says Humphreys, now 11. “They don’t learn my name. They call me Forrest in my regular life.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color photos

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Rick Bonino