‘Ally Mcbeal’ Star Flies In The Face Of Stardom

Calista Flockhart gets this all the time now: the standard-bearer question.

Is the uniquely named star of Fox’s neato “Ally McBeal” a Susan B. Anthony for the Starbucks set? Are her character’s peaks and valleys a weekly Hallmark “card-iogram” for women born in the post-JFK U.S.A.?

“If that happens, it’s out of my control,” Flockhart said. “I see Ally as an individual … independent of any kind of role model or some sort of symbolic woman of the ‘90s who embraces womanhood. God forbid!”

Of course, it doesn’t really matter what she thinks. TV viewers are going to make of Ally what they will. And the wafer-thin, suddenly sizzling Flockhart will be challenged to endure her newfound stardom and status.

“A lot of people have been asking me ‘the fame question,”’ she said. “And I’m impervious to it. I’ve been working so hard, and my focus is really on my part and doing it the best I can. The rest of it hasn’t become a reality for me yet. I don’t really read the press.”

A peripatetic childhood - Flockhart’s father was an oft-transferred Kraft Foods executive - found her bouncing through Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and New York before she graduated from high school in New Jersey. “Ally McBeal,” in which she plays a fledgling Boston attorney, is her first TV work. Devoted to the New York stage and hoping to return to it during her summertime hiatus, she said the demands of weekly television have both distressed and de-stressed her.

“I’m very hard on myself. I’m a perfectionist, and I really would obsess about scenes,” she said. “The thing I’ve learned most about doing television is that you really have to let go. They’re always saying, ‘Cut, print, move on.’ So I’ve definitely learned to be easier on myself.”

Her personal life is “minimal,” she said: hiking on weekends, walking her “mutt” on weeknights. When a woman critic inquired about her love life, Flockhart replied: “You’re so mean. I haven’t been on a date in a long time.”

Whether participating in an interview session or talking to reporters in a more informal party setting, Flockhart tends to answer most questions briskly, though politely. But she was intriguingly expansive on the subject of her age, which she won’t give. On “Ally,” her character is 27.

“I’m really not ashamed of how old I am,” she said. “But I was raised thinking you don’t ask a woman how old she is and never how much she weighs. I was brought up to think those are very rude questions.”

There’s this, too.

“Giving your age does stereotype you, in a way, in Hollywood. I look very young, or used to. You don’t want to give anybody any fuel to not hire you. If they want a 19-year-old and you look 19 but they find out you’re 46, chances are you won’t get the part. And it’s just like a fun little game I play with myself. I don’t even tell my boyfriends how old I am. I really don’t.”

Her “fun little game” extends to this:

“Sometimes I wish I was older. Sometimes I wish I was a man. Sometimes I wish I was younger.”

Um, why do you sometimes wish you were a man?

“I just wanted to throw that in to see if you were listening.”

Hey, she’s just acting her age.