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MOVIES; Pop star Mandy Moore is poised for a new career in 'Princess'
submitted by: Lisa D.
source: Boston Herald
Date: August 1, 2001
By Stephen Schaefer
As a teen singing sensation, Mandy Moore knows she ranks somewhere below Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
And, as an actress, she knows she ranks nowhere - never having appeared in a movie. But that didn't stop her from wanting to make her film debut as Lana, a blond high school student everyone loves to hate in "The Princess Diaries," which opens Friday.
"This is a trial," Moore said of her leap to movies, but not a trial by fire. "Is it ever going be better than working with (director) Garry Marshall on a great film? I don't think so."
Marshall, however, didn't know what he was getting with Moore.
"Mandy Moore? I didn't know her, I thought she was an emcee on MTV," said Marshall, who catapulted Julia Roberts to superstardom with "Pretty Woman."
"Then I saw her. She's gorgeous - but 16 years old," Marshall said. "How steady is she? I wondered."
Marshall soon found out the poise Moore possessed as a singer carried over to acting.
"(She was) solid as a rock, and she didn't mind playing the bad girl, which is rare," Marshall said. "She wanted to act and try it out."
The petite, down-to-earth Moore, now 17, says it's too soon to determine the direction of her career.
"I don't know what my ambitions are," Moore said. "I'm not some huge megastar. I'm actually good friends with Jessica Simpson. We have each others' cell phones (numbers). Christina and Britney are the megastars."
Moore isn't interested in just milking her musical clout for film work, although she does sing "Stupid Cupid" as an homage to the '60s beach party movies in "Princess Diaries." And she shrugs off any notion it's unusual to be a vixen who torments Mia (Anne Hathaway), a classmate who discovers she is actually the heir to the throne of a small (fictional) European nation.
"Lana is the stereotypical girl in every high school and obviously it's jealousy and lack of confidence that drives her," Moore said. "Girls like Lana have no reason to be mean to people."
Moore's high school experience in Orlando, Fla., wasn't quite like Lana's.
"I was halfway between the popular clique and the book clique and they left me alone," Moore said. "I like sports events and sang the national anthem around town."
At 14, Moore recorded three original songs with producers who had heard her sing. "That demo was on my own dime, you could say," she said. "A FedEx guy took my demo to a friend at Epic Records. It was really random and lucky - I was in the right place at the right time.
"They heard the demo and called me in and signed me. It was weird. I left the meeting and went to my high school homecoming football game, which was fun, but I didn't want to tell my friends that in December I had to leave school to go record."
With a new album in stores, Moore's career will continue to be a double dose of music and movies.
"I just finished 'Walk to Remember,' which is my first lead role," Moore said of her next movie. "It's a nonteen film, the opposite of this ('Princess Diaries'), where I play the daughter of a Southern Baptist. I'm very good-natured this time, very sweet, and it's very sad: I have leukemia. It's from the book by Nicholas Sparks, who wrote 'Message in a Bottle.'"
If Moore is riding a teen wave, she also is looking ahead to days when the surf has stilled.
"The key to longevity is to have as many people around the world hear your music, and have people around you to support you and make the right decisionsand not go for the quick buck," Moore said. "Because so many are out there for that."
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