CAMERON DIAZ - ANY GIVEN SUNDAY - CHARLIES ANGELS

Cameron Diaz, 29, is the blue-eyed blond with the quirky smile that has enchanted moviegoers as Mary in THERES SOMETHING ABOUT MARY (1998) and as Julia Robert's rival in MY BEST FRIENDS WEDDING (1997). After her film debut in THE MASK (1995) with Jim Carrey, she had starred in SHE'S THE ONE (1996) with Edward Burns, FEELING MINNESOTA (1996) with Keanu Reeves and A LIFE LESS ORDINARY (1997) with Ewan McGregor. This year she plays against type in two very different roles, she's frizzy haired in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH with John Cusack and Catherine Keener, a bizarre comedy directed by Spike Jonze, and she's the owner of a Miami football team in ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (WB) with Al Pacino, an intense drama directed by Oliver Stone. She is starring next in the film version of the 70s TV series CHARLIE'S ANGELS (Columbia) a big studio production with Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu, but she has also made two smaller films, THE INVISIBLE CIRCUS (Fine Line) about a young girl trying to find out about her older sisters suicide, THINGS YOU CAN TELL BY JUST LOOKING AT HER (UA) with Glenn Close, Holly, Hunter, Kathy Baker. After a relationship with Matt Dillon, she is now dating another fellow actor, Jared Leto.

Q. In ANY GIVEN SUNDAY you play a young woman who inherits her fathers football team because he didn't have a male heir. Did anything like that happen to you since there were only two girls in your family? Did your father encourage you to play sports?
A. Yes, he did. My dad didn't have a son, it was just my older sister and I, so we played sports too. I played softball and I was on an organized team for several years when I was younger, but I always played football and basketball and also baseball on the streets with the kids in the neighbourhood. So I believe that you learn from teamwork, that's important to me.

Q. So you went against expectations in high school, you played sports rather than being the typical pretty girl that was a cheerleader and went out with the football players?
A. Well, I was on the drill team once, but I only got on it because we could dance for it, it was a dance class basically and all my girlfriends were doing it; but then after the football season I kind of lost interest and so did the teacher; she asked me to leave. Certainly there were a lot of girls that really wanted to go out with the football players, that was their main goal; but for me it wasn't about that, I was just interested in boys, period, I liked boys, whatever they did. I kind of put them in a hat and picked one out.

Q. Has it been tough for you to assert yourself as a young actress in Hollywood, which is still a largely male-dominated business?
A. I'm not a feminist, you know, I'm not like that at all, so I don't put myself in that frame of mind. I do expect to be treated with respect as a person, but I haven't really run into much problems. I like being a woman, you know, and I like the power that women have as a woman, like I appreciate t he power that men have as a man; but they're two totally different things. So we as women have to approach things differently then men do because of those powers being different.

Q. What are the masculine qualities that you appreciate in men that are different from the feminine qualities that you possess as a woman?
A. I don't know. Its one of those things that you cant find just one example of, like, women can bake pies better than men, you know. It's more conceptual than that. I just love the fact that a man possesses something that a woman can never understand because we don't have the experiences of it and that a woman possesses something that the man doesn't understand because only she possesses it. Its like when you're on your period and you say to your guy, You will never ever be able to understand what I'm going through right now. Because guys just can never grasp what's going on with a woman's body and that sort of thing, you know; so there are physical or emotional characteristics of women that men don't understand and vice versa.

Q. What did you think when you were growing up about the image of those smart and sexy women on CHARLIE'S ANGELS?
A. I was so young that it didn't represent anything more to me than entertainment. And because I had an older sister, basically I always looked at my sister like she was one of Charlie's Angels. They were just girls older than me who were pretty and running around and got to do things that I didn't get to do but wanted to do. But I didn't have really any kind of thinking where I was like, Wow, a woman can do that!? Because I wasn't of that generation. In my generation women have always been able to do anything they wanted, you know, women have never been held down.

Q. Haven't you had to fight to get what you wanted in life?
A. Yes. I think that anything that you do, any accomplishment that you make, you have to work for. And I've worked very hard in the last ten years of my life, definitely, and I can tell you that hard work pays off. It's not just a cliche.

Q. What did you learn from your father during your upbringing that you carry with you to guide you through life?
A. I've learned a lot from my father, and from my mother. My parents were a good team. My father never put any pressure on me to be anybody but myself, so I feel that I've done him proud certainly. He thinks I'm a good kid and that I've done well for myself and he's very proud of me, so that's nice to know definitely. I was always taught that you have to be good to people if you want them to be good back to you. Its sort of that basic principle of do unto others as you want to be done unto you. It's just respect, and that's what I got from my parents that has really helped me throughout my life.

Q. Was your family life particularly close because you're from a Latin culture, your father being a second-generation Cuban?
A. Yes, definitely, there's that strong bond in the Latin family; we had big Christmases and stuff like that. Also, if I was doing something wrong, my father never had to say it to me, he just had to look at me and I would know. I knew what was right and what was wrong and when I was doing something wrong, I knew it. So a lot of times, when I was doing it, I was looking for my father to give me that look so I could stop.

Q. Do you speak Spanish?
A. My dad didn't teach it to me, to everyone's chagrin. He wishes he had now, but he thought he was doing us a favour. And for me its never going to be possible to learn it now; I'm so bad, I can barely speak English.

Q. Where does your interest for the arts come from?
A. I think its because my parents always encouraged me. They themselves have their own sort of outlet of creativity, although it isn't necessarily along the lines of acting or music or that sort of thing. My mother laughs pretty much at anything, so all of my life my mom was my best audience and I performed for them my entire life.

Q. How did it happen that you started a modelling career so young?
A. I was a pretty enthusiastic child, which kind of worked for me, because, by the time I hit 16, I felt like I had calmed down; I had experienced a lot of things as a teenager prior to that time, and by the time I hit adolescence I was okay, or maybe my adolescence just started really early. So I entered a career where I could make decisions, whereas, if I had been doing those other things, I probably wouldn't have been able to do that, because I wouldn't know what I was doing. But at 16 I felt like starting off actually working toward something, and it didn't start clicking until exactly a year into modelling, so that I could take this career further than just doing it here and there. By that time I had a lot of experience behind me and I was able to keep focused on that and try to achieve what it was that I set out to do. But luckily I didn't, because I wouldn't have become an actress if I had.

Q. Did your experience in modelling help you when you became an actress?
A. I definitely think that what I took with me from my modelling experience is how to deal with people, especially in a professional situation, and travelling. For modelling I travelled a lot, and doing it at a young age by yourself, I had to really be aware, and that kind of prepared me to work with people and also to being in front of the camera. I was comfortable in front of the camera because Id performed in front of it before, so I could pretty much pretend like it wasn't there.

Q. Since you're usually so pretty and sexy on screen, was it difficult for you to look unglamorous in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH?
A. It was so difficult. I called my agent all the time and had my hairdresser and my stylist going, please, please let me be glamorous. I can't do this any longer. No, I'm kidding, it wasn't hard for me. I can't remember, but if I think about all the characters that I played, the only one I could ever think of as glamorous was the first role I had in THE MASK, and I haven't played a glamorous girl since. I think all my characters have been pretty human, although in kind of obscure hyper-reality sort of situations, because I like comedies and often dark comedies are slightly skewed; but I feel like my characters have all been like real people and not particularly glamorous. I don't think Kim in MY BEST FRIENDS WEDDING was anything special, you know, she was a very conservative girl, and Mary was just an average girl. Lotte being frumpy or not taking care of herself particularly was just Lotte, that's the character I wanted to play; I wanted to portray somebody who sort of forgot about herself and hadn't done anything to herself for so many years because she gave it up when she got married and became a part of this unit of two people. That's where the whole story starts and then they grow apart as individuals and that's why the story is what it is.

Q. Did that ever happen to you in relationships with men that you felt like you became part a unit?
A. Yeah, I start dressing like my boyfriends immediately. No, I don't know. Maybe.

Q. How do you personally feel about marriage now that this institution has changed so much compared to your parents generation, and divorce is much more prevalent?
A. I think marriage is a beautiful thing, I love seeing two people who decided to dedicate their lives to one another and work as a group. Absolutely, things have changed, from what I've seen; comparing myself to my parents, there's so many more opportunities for young people. You're not expected to get married at 18, as soon as you get out of high school, the guy isn't expected to have a job and the wife to have children. Kids go to college now, they go after careers, they have the opportunity to make more money and the experiences -what we're going through in our generation- are definitely much different than in our parents time. So opportunity, I think, is the biggest reason why couples separate, but it has also given us the liberty to choose whether we want to get married at a young age or not.

Q. Do you think we live in a different society because of the information age?
A. Yes, I think that there's too much information, that television has definitely become completely responsible for that and its gotten out of control.

Q. What qualities are you looking for in a husband?
A. I'm for the basics qualities, Id love to have a relationship like my parents do, an understanding and giving exchange. They're very compatible people, so I'm just looking for somebody I'm compatible with, that I don't want to kill and they don't want to kill me.

Q. Has your life changed now that you've become so famous? Are there certain things you can no longer do?
A. I can't go to Disneyland or to Magic Mountain anymore. I can't go into large crowds. And I used to go all the time. Disneyland was always like a yearly event with the family and I love Magic Mountain, I love rollercoasters.

Q. Did you learn anything about being a celebrity from some of the veterans you worked with, like Ann Margaret (who played your mother-in-law in FEELING MINNESOTA) or Charlton Heston in ANY GIVEN SUNDAY?
A. Yes, I love Ann Margaret. She was amazing and, of course, she is full of wisdom and stories. She is just a beautiful soul, fearless and still like a child, you know, it's amazing, and it was so much fun to get to spend time with her and just watch her. She's incredible. With Charlton Heston I only spent an afternoon with and he was a very nice gentleman, but I didn't get to know very much about him at all.

Q. You made a movie with legendary actresses like Glenn Close and Holly Hunter, THINGS YOU CAN TELL BY JUST LOOKING AT HER. Are those people you admire?
A. We all worked separately on that movie, we all tell our own stories and I only worked five days, so I never got to meet those women, but I certainly admire them and the reason why I was so flattered to be a part of that was because of actors like Glenn Close, who's amazing, and Holly Hunter, who is one of my favourite actors, and Kathy Bates, who is always so exceptional. So for me just getting an opportunity to work with those actors or be a part of the same project was very cool.

Q. Who were the actors that you most admired growing up?
A. I loved Michelle Pfeiffer and I still do. But I wasn't a big huge movie buff when I was a kid, I didn't go to movies a lot. Except that Harrison Ford was my man, I was going to marry him, you know.

Q. What are you doing next? Will you be in Martin Scorsese's film with Leonardo Di Caprio, GANGS OF NEW YORK? Will you start your own production company like Drew Barrymore?
A. No, Drews so much more multi-task orientated than me. I'm very much like, one thing on my plate at a time, you know, I'm not very good at lots of things happening at once. I can't do that, I have to just concentrate on what I'm doing. To work with Martin Scorsese would be a dream, but I don't know if it will happen, I have no idea. I'm doing CHARLIE'S ANGELS now and its a long schedule.

Q. Personally what are your goals? Are you happy and confident or are you afraid that you might become self-destructive? A. I think everybody has that tendency, that ability to beat up on themselves and tear themselves down, but I try to stay away from that. What I go after for myself is just happiness, I like being happy, its not fun being unhappy.