STAR LITE, STAR BRIGHT

By RICHARD CORLISS

People go to the movies to fall in love, and not just with their dates. Wholesome sex appeal has kept Hollywood purring for 80 years. But today's prime actresses-Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, even Winona Ryder-are a formidable bunch, serioso artists who don't fit into a fellow's dream of easy chatter and backseat romance; they are more likely to hand you a petition. As for Sharon Stone, she's gorgeous, but thanks all the same, we would just as soon survive the good-night kiss.

Then there's Meg Ryan, with a radiance that neither forbids nor threatens. At 33, Ryan is the modern mediator between the goddesses onscreen and the mortals in the theater seats. She's the star you could take home to Mom. With her tousled but well-scrubbed blondness, she looks as if she would be at ease in a law office or a pta car pool. Her suburban incandescence is warm, not scalding. Ryan is the low-calorie, '90s incarnation of celebrity: Star Lite.

As the female lead in two huge hits, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, and in the new box-office favorite French Kiss, she is also the current soul of romantic comedy. And what you see on screen is what you get on the set. "She's adorable, huggable, smart, funny and strong," says French Kiss director Lawrence Kasdan, listing the five Comic Heroine virtues as if they had been minted for Ryan. "Men want to be married to her, and women want to be her friends.'' Says Nora Ephron, who wrote When Harry Met Sally and directed Sleepless in Seattle: "Women somehow don't mind if their boyfriends like Meg, because they like her too."

They like her-and this is one mark of a movie star-even in her worst, or least, films. For example, French Kiss (co-produced by Ryan), which achieves a level of agreeable inanity only after a grating first hour or so. As a jilted fianca who hooks up with a Gallic jewel thief (Kevin Kline), Ryan cedes all the charm to Kline while remaining the center of attraction. Even in this wan caper, though, she is bold in her playing of an insecure woman who is so intense she seems dense. Her clear blue eyes widen in a perpetual double take at a world that loves to play practical jokes on her. Before surrendering to romance in the final reel, she cranks up a frantic sort of charisma-frazzle-dazzle.

To discuss comic actresses is to invoke some sacred names from Hollywood's golden age. Ryan, who as a kid in Fairfield, Connecticut, loved to watch the classic comedies, has acute ad-lib analyses of the pantheon residents. On Carole Lombard: "Elegant, but a little blue collar. She's not afraid to be funny at her own expense." Rosalind Russell: "A real quick draw, the fastest of them all, and extremely comfortable with winning." Audrey Hepburn: "In a class by herself. She was mysterious, but totally vulnerable and accessible. There was a light in her eye. And she loved being a woman."

So what about Ryan on Meg Ryan? "I don't knooow," she says, chuckling. "It's not for me to create a persona. I create nothing. It's created for me. An idea of me gets out there with or without me."

The idea of Ryan as the comedian who copyrighted Cute is too limiting; she has dark tones in her palette as well. She's done terrific work as down-and-outers in Flesh and Bone and When a Man Loves a Woman and as the body-snatched bride in Prelude to a Kiss. The lovely wrapping is still there-but beneath it, the hint of fervid desperation, of a deep wound she both hides and nurses.

Her marriage to actor Dennis Quaid (The Right Stuff, The Big Easy, Wyatt Earp) is an opposites-attract story. "Dennis is from Texas," she says. "He's expansive. He likes space. I'm from a state with little hills, valleys and towns. It's condensed and defined. I like to call things something, put words to it, make it understandable.''

There are darker shades too: Ryan refused to marry Quaid, with whom she had been involved for years, until he gave up cocaine. He did, she did, and they now have a son Jack, 3. So how are the cowboy and the lady making a go of it? "By just facing it. Love is not a decision your brain makes. It's a feeling you know somewhere else, and your brain catches up. But love challenges you in areas you need to be challenged in. It rests somewhere in not knowing what's going to happen. Not predicting. That's what I love."

Wife, mom, movie star, in a grownup comedy-drama with lots of twists and smiles. Why, it's the sort of movie role you might give to ... Meg Ryan.

-Reported by Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles

With reporting by JACQUELINE SAVAIANO/LOS ANGELES