Annabeth Gish found that out in the same place where most actors discover it - in auditions.
"It was a shocking time for me, when I began to audition with all of these girls in New York and L.A. - younger, the same, older, they were auditioning all the time. It's a way of life. I'd been singled out for `Desert Bloom' and there was some resentment from people who wondered how I got such a lucky break when I hadn't paid my dues. I was fortunate. But then the hard time came. Auditions are so competitive, so hard and discouraging, that they wear people down.
"A lot of the girls I saw had lost any natural appeal they might have had, through the cynicism and bitterness of being rejected so often. You're just laying your life out on a table for people to reject you. Logically, I can deal with it; my head says it's OK to be turned down, but my heart sometimes feels so small. Sometimes I wonder if it's masochistic or something, if actors get off on having people say these awful things about them."
One of the things I was noticing about Gish, as we talked, was that she has spent her last four years in the movie business as essentially an observant outsider. She may have some kind of a book in her. She centers herself in Cedar Falls and makes forays into the movies, and thinks about what she sees.
"One trend you see today," she said, "is that they're not always looking for an actress to play a part. They're looking for the real person, to play herself. Surely the whole point is that I can play someone else. In `Desert Bloom,' they thought I `was' the character. That's why you can't win at a lot of auditions - they're not looking at your ability, they think they can find the real person they've written about."
And yet Gish has worked as often as she could, while still keeping up with her class in high school. And it is likely that, like Brooke Shields and Jodie Foster, she will continue to work through college, as a model as well as an actress. She is tall, about 5 feet 8 inches, with brown hair and a face where you see the intelligence immediately and the beauty after a moment; her presence strikes you, that is, before her appearance. Of the three teenage girls in "Mystic Pizza," she is not the bouncy one who is always climbing all over her boyfriend, and she is not the gorgeous sex bomb who turns the head of the rich boy. She is the smart one who baby-sits for a 30-year-old architect whose wife is in Europe, and of course, they meet when he joins her guided tour at the local planetarium.
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