When it comes to ‘Rent,’ Rosie definitely paid her dues

Rosario Dawson pined so hard for the movie role of Mimi, the HIV-infected strip club vixen of “Rent,” that she nearly skipped the audition.

It just meant so much to her that the idea of not getting it seemed crushing.

“I got freaked out because what if my voice broke while I was dancing because I was out of breath or something?” she says.

Dawson, like Mimi in the hit Broadway musical turned movie (opening today), hails from the Lower East Side. Like Mimi, she lived in an apartment without heat or electricity.

“We had a big, gaping hole in the middle of the floor when we moved in,” she remembers. “Sheets of plastic on the windows. At first there was no running water, no heat, no electricity. My mother learned to be a plumber and put in all the pipes in our place.”

The way Dawson, 26, describes it, it all sounds kind of exciting. Then again, she could make a tax audit sound festive. Whatever that mysterious quality called “it” is, this woman has by the heaps.

“When I saw the first cut of the movie,” recalls “Rent” director Chris Columbus, “I remember seeing this close-up of Rosario and thinking, ‘This is the birth of a new movie star.’ “

Well, not exactly new. Over the past 10 years, Dawson has appeared in more than a dozen movies – starting in 1995 with “Kids,” a brutal and unforgettable indie film about a group of Manhattan teens.

Since then she’s turned up in “Sin City,” “25th Hour,” “Men in Black II,” “Josie and the Pussycats,” “Alexander” and “The Adventures of Pluto Nash.”

She was recruited for “Kids” right off the street, in an urban version of a Hollywood fairy tale.

“There was a Vibe commercial being filmed on my street that day and my dad said, ‘Go down there and get discovered,’ ” Dawson says.

She wheedled her way into a couple of shots as a dancer, and during a lull in shooting she noticed two men staring at her. One was 19-year-old Harmony Korine, who wrote the screenplay for “Kids.” He and director Larry Clark happened to be passing by, scouting locations.

Within days, Dawson was perched on the front of her father’s bicycle (“That’s how we traveled back then”), pedaling to Clark’s office. There they read the script, the account of a violent, druggy and sexually depraved day in the life of some New York teens.

Recalls Dawson: “My mom and dad were like, ‘You can do the movie as long as you don’t smoke!’ “

After the film was shown at Sundance and became a cult hit, an acting career suddenly seemed possible.

Dawson moved back into her parents’ apartment, this time with roommates, and enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Then Spike Lee cast her in his 1998 movie “He Got Game.”

These days, she lives with her boyfriend, “Sex and the City” star Jason Lewis, in Los Angeles – the site of her second “Rent” audition, in a dance studio with Columbus watching.

Dawson remembers being so terrified she forgot to sing and dance at the same time, pretty much required skills in a musical. Columbus, though, was awed.

Says Dawson: “They told my manager, ‘You know, even when she was screwing up she seemed perfect.’ “

The birthday bunch

Composer Johnny Mandel is 80. Actor Steve Landesburg (“Barney Miller’) is 60. Musician Bruce Hornsby is 51. Actor Chris Hardwick is 34. Rapper Kurupt is 33. Actor Austin Majors is 10.