Instead, she became a model at 14, starred in "The Princess Bride" at 19, played Tom Hanks' sweetheart in "Forrest Gump" and got married to the brilliant and turbulent Sean Penn.

"I don't know how I got to Hollywood," she says. "It's a long way from Darfur."

And there, if she ever writes it, is the perfect title for her autobiography. Robin Wright Penn is such a good actress, and at the same time so disinterested in the tinsel and sham of Hollywood, that she can't help but look like the perpetual Stranger at the Party.

Her newest movie is exactly the kind of project that feeds an artist's creative urges but simultaneously does zilch to boost her career or marketability. "Sorry, Haters," opening Friday at the Roxie, is a low-budget drama with a scorpion's sting -- an often wildly implausible parable about a lonely New York woman (Wright Penn) who encounters a Syrian Muslim cabdriver (Abdellatif Kechiche) and tries to enlist him in a violent scheme.

Her character, Phoebe, is a liar and an impostor -- a raging psychotic who cuts herself with forks and knives and harbors a corrosive resentment of her successful best friend (Sandra Oh). If you see the movie -- Wright Penn jokes that "four and a half" people are likely to catch it -- you'll watch one of the bravest, most wrenching performances since Isabelle Huppert played "The Piano Teacher."

Like Huppert, Wright Penn doesn't choose characters based on their likability or nobility. She didn't become an actress to fill a void in her life with audience approval and she doesn't, as Judy Davis once said of American actors, "butter the butter" with excess and sentiment.

In New York, where it opened two weeks ago, "Sorry, Haters" was predictably scorched by the critics. "If we are to believe 'Sorry, Haters,' " wrote New York Times reviewer Jeannette Catsoulis, "the worst threat facing the United States today is not Islamic extremists but lonely young women with low self-esteem."
"Ultimately disconnected from reality," Newsday echoed. "I didn't buy any of it for a second."

"I understand that perspective," Wright Penn, 39, says during an early-morning phone call from her Marin County home. While making the film, which writer/director Jeff Stanzler shot in 15 days on New York locations, she also questioned on a daily basis the film's plausibility -- the likelihood that a Muslim immigrant, trained as a chemistry professor, could be conned by an obvious nutcase.
At the same time, she's exasperated that people are taking the film so literally. "This is like a metaphor. Post-9/11 is a backdrop for it and that metaphor is how desperate and lonely a human being can become. This is what lovelessness breeds in society."

"Sorry, Haters" is the riskiest movie Wright Penn has made, but it's hardly inconsistent within a career marked by curiosity and resistance to easy, commercial choices. Unlike most female stars of her generation, she isn't desperate to look half her age. She played a religious zealot in trashy clothes in "White Oleander," a battered waitress in "The Pledge" and a haggard, very pregnant woman in the underrated "Nine Lives."

"I just feel like it's all part of the opera," she says. "When you think about it, our craft is pretty silly. We dress up like other people, we act like other people." Playing the widest variety of characters is "more fun," but she also suspects there could be a price for not playing the Hollywood game: "I'm sure I only have four or five years left in my career because I'm not going to get Botox and a face-lift."

She's turned down blockbusters such as "Batman Forever" and "The Firm" and signed on for films that paid her next to nothing -- only because they offered a strong role and a chance to explore new terrain. One of her films, the unseen "Virgin," was made for $50,000. "Sorry, Haters" was shot for $200,000 on digital video and Wright Penn was paid $100 a day -- the same as every actor and crew member.

Her husband Sean, conversely, is recognized everywhere. "It's really a drag, because nothing feels private. ... It's kind of like you're being robbed every day -- to be approached all the time. You're being asked to open that boundary and let somebody else in, and if you don't you're an -- hole. If you don't take a picture while you're sitting there trying to have brunch with your kids, you're a jerk."

Ever since she was carjacked in Los Angeles in 1996, and soon thereafter moved to Marin, it's been Wright Penn's wish to give her family a "normalcy" that Hollywood makes impossible. Her daughter, Dylan, is interested in acting but Wright Penn doesn't want her working until she's 18. Instead, she's encouraged Dylan to join Penn as an observer on the set of "Into the Wild," the movie version of Jon Krakauer's 1997 book that he'll direct this summer.

Wright Penn chuckles when asked about her husband's high-profile travels -- the fact-finding trips to Iraq or Iran, the one-man rescue effort in post-Katrina New Orleans. "That's his mission, that's his calling," she says. "You just have a fear for his safety, mostly."

The Penns are adjusting to the sudden death in January of Sean's actor brother, Chris Penn, who died of an enlarged heart. "It's bizarre, death. Nobody really prepares you for it. Nobody can. And there's waves that come and go. But it's a process of life, definitely, and you can't fight it."

Wright Penn has two movies in the can: Robert Zemeckis' film of the Old English epic poem "Beowulf," in which she plays Queen Wealhtheow, and Anthony Minghella's "Breaking and Entering," a thriller that casts her opposite Jude Law. But the film she most wants to make is one that goes back to her childhood dream of helping others: a drama about relief workers in West Africa, "The Last Face."

"We've been trying to get financing for four years now. It's about two doctors, played by me and Javier Bardem, who work for a company like Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), but have opposing ideas about how we should save."

- Edward Guthmann (San Francisco Chronicle) March 16, 2006