Alicia Silverstone, star of the new film, Clueless, is tipped to be the "next big thing" out of Hollywood. Paul Fischer spoke to her in Los Angeles.

She's hip, young, gorgeous and loads of fun. Alicia Silverstone is also a star in the making as her latest movie, the irreverent and hysterical Clueless, is proving.

In between mouthfuls of cereal, the 18-year-old beauty talks about the many trips she made to the West End in London as a young girl. "I was just fascinated with the stage -- my brother wanted to buy souvenirs while all I wanted to do was see a stage show."

While Alicia admits that she revelled in the world of theatrical make-believe, she insists that she had a very down-to-earth upbringing.

"To me what an actor really is, is somebody who is just dealing with life. I was a really perceptive little girl so I really understood what people were thinking and feeling when I met them. I think that really shocked people because I was, maybe, just a little girl of three or four, and I just found an outlet for all that reality."

I tell her, that with all that insight into the human condition, its surprising she didn't end up a psychologist.

"That's what I think acting is -- dissecting the human brain and the human heart and getting it all out," she says.

Alicia may look like your archetypal Hollywood starlet -- pert, blond and built -- but she certainly doesn't act like it. Perhaps it's because her parents are English. Her father, Monty, a real estate investor, and her mother, Didi, a former airline stewardess, raised Alicia and one of her two older siblings in the suburbs of San Francisco but they "summered" in Britain.

And, despite the image she acquired as a naughty school girl in one of her earlier films, Crazy, Alicia grew up a good Jewish girl. "I had, and loved, my Batmitzvah," she recalls. But it wasn't the presents that made the day so memorable -- "I remember being disappointed when I opened them" -- it was the service that she recalls with much fondness.

"My service was three hours long. It happened to fall on May 6 and I ended up with this long Torah portion so the ceremony ended up being better than the party."

Alicia describes her parents as "they'll-do-their-best Jews, if you know what I mean." When I say "No, not really", she elaborates. "Well, my Dad likes to keep certain holidays and services and tries to do the candles every Friday night. I used to feel very religious when I was growing up and went to Temple like four or five times a week."

And now? "Well, now I tend to go to Temple about three or four times a year and mainly in San Francisco, because that's where I grew up. I mean I love to go and sing the hymns and all that, but I feel my religion in life is just knowing who you are - that's my definition of religion. Knowing who you are, who you believe in and going with that."

Despite the fact that her accent is very definitely Californian, Alicia feels a very close affinity to her British ethnicity. "I'm definitely a product of my family."

Not long after Alicia's batmitzvah, the then San Franciscan joined her Bay Area acting troupe on a trip to Los Angeles to perform in a talent showcase where she was spotted by Carolyn Kessler.

Kessler, who is now Alicia's agent, said in a recent interview: "She has a very genuine quality and a soul that comes out at you."

Although she has been working at her craft from a young age, and working hard, Alicia's approach to the world of movie-making and her new-found stardom is modest. "The truth is, I never had an intention of being a movie star, nor did I have any intention of being famous or successful. What I wanted was to act and that's what I really loved. What happened was, when I started to audition, I realised I had to make a commitment.

"This is the most competitive business there is, and every single mother and father in the world wanted their kid to be a movie star."

Alicia began auditioning for parts when she was 14. After gobbling a pepperoni pizza in a Domino's Pizza advertisement and appearing as Fred Savage's dream date in an episode of the hit TV series The Wonder Years, she landed the lead role in the psycho thriller The Crush. This time it was Liroff, a talent scout who 10 years earlier had cast Drew Barrymore in E.T., who saw the light.

"She had to be a very sweet and seductive Lolita type -- a young girl on the brink of being a young woman," Liroff says. "Alicia was right at that point. She was 15 1/2. Its very young, but she's an old soul."

There was just one hitch. "She'd done virtually nothing," the film's director recalls, "and my big fear was 'If I don't find the most incredible girl, like Sue Lyon was in Lolita, I'm gonna look really stupid.'" Fortunately for him, "[Alicia] just went for it."

This eerie tale about a teenager who hankers after an older guy, leading to murder and mayhem, was never released in Australia, but, nevertheless, The Crush became the prototype for Alicia's career.

Being the star of your first movie would, for most teenagers, be a daunting experience. And to play a nasty version of Lolita on top of that ... how did Alicia handle the pressure?

"I didn't think about all that stuff. The truth was I was 15 and just happy to be there; I didn't know any better. Can you imagine being 15 years old and getting a movie, knowing that they went everywhere around the country to find this girl and I'm the one they got? It's a pretty weird, overwhelming thought, and even now I can't get that out of my head."

Even though her first part was that of a sexy but conniving young woman, Alicia said she had a ball playing her. "I loved being that character; she was awesome. In fact, I'd love to do her again, being older and more conscious of what I was doing."

The Crush was a big success and put the young actor on the map as the new Drew Barrymore. But unlike the former E.T. star, she hasn't had to pose for Playboy or do the obligatory nude scene. "I think sex is incredibly overrated anyway", Alicia says, laughing.

After The Crush, Alicia landed a very different gig. A veteran video director named Marty Callner was hunting for the perfect woman for a new Aerosmith video. While staying at a hotel in Atlanta, he got a call from a friend with a tip: see The Crush. Callner went across the street to the multiplex. "After about 20 minutes," he says, "I knew that was the girl I wanted to use."

Alicia was quickly signed up to appear as the bungee-jumping runaway in Cryin', the fantasy cyberbabe in Amazing and the tartan-skirted giggler in Crazy, a video that had her romping in a hotel room with Liv Tyler, the daughter of Aerosmith front-man Steve Tyler.

She became the darling of the media and a bone fide music video star. And, although the legend of her "hot" appearances in the Aerosmith videos lives on, Alicia simply recalls "that it was a blast doing them, even though I was tagged 'the Aerosmith girl' for a long time after that."

But things are changing. Alicia's latest movie Clueless, an hysterically funny send-up of the Beverly Hills shopping mentality, has established the young actor as a real star.

Cher (played by Alicia) is the film's beautiful but superficial young heroine. She is a spoiled Beverly Hills JAP who lives in a world where every teenager has a charge account and where an alien language is spoken; a language peppered with pop-culture references, most of which date back no further than the late '80s.

In the world according to Cher, Hamlet is that guy played by Mel Gibson, making love in a car is "Jeepin'," a moment of anxious weirdness is summed up by the confession, "I'm having a Twin Peaks experience", and being a female virgin is known as being "hymenically challenged."

Cher strolls through the school halls gossiping on a cellular phone and wearing skirts so short they'd shame Madonna. She and her friends are children of the consumer-media culture. What matters to the kids in Clueless is looking good and hanging out with other kids who are looking good -- in this movie, anorexia has practically been turned into a fashion.

"I'd never heard of her," says Wallace Shawn, the eggshell-domed playwright and actor who plays Alicia's debate teacher in Clueless. "I don't have MTV and I don't know who Aerosmith is. I figured she was so young, how could she be famous?"

He soon learned just how popular she was. During a shoot at a Los Angeles High School, scores of teens -- guys Amy Heckerling described as "semi-conscious" -- clung to the fences outside the trailers, yammering: "Can we see her? Can we see her?" And, when she attended the Hard Rock Hotel opening in Las Vegas, she was mobbed by fans seeking an autograph.

In Clueless, Alicia wears an assortment of dresses that highlight her stunning figure, but when the discussion turns to her looks, she proves to be very modest, insisting she is not beautiful. "This is very weird for me, that people would even think of me as being pretty," she says. "When I look in the mirror, sometimes it's very sad because I feel like this ugly, fat blimp, you know? And then I have to go be this beautiful girl."

So what about this strange teen she plays so effortlessly in this movie about being "clued in". "Cher knows she's the most beautiful, most obviously important person in the world -- her world -- yet she doesn't really know about the rest of the world. She evolves in the film and sees there's more to life than her wardrobe. Cher realises she's beautiful because of who she is inside and not because of her appearance."

In addition to appearing in The Crush and Clueless, Alicia has also had roles in such movies as The Babysitter, True Crime, Le Nouveau Monde and the up-coming Hideaway in which she plays Jeff Goldblum's daughter.

The past four years have been hectic for the young actor. In that time, does she think she has evolved, just like Cher in Clueless? "I'm just taking everything one day at a time. I'm learning every day, like we all do. I'm just doing what I love to do, and not thinking about any of that stuff."

Alicia is determined that any reputation she develops is based on the strength of her work and not anything she does in her personal life. "Like, the way Shannon Doherty got famous," she offers by way of contrast. "She's famous because of all the bad things people read about her, right? I would die if that was me."

Coincidentally, Alicia turned down a spot on Beverly Hills, 90210 on the grounds that: "There's no reason to get locked into a television show when you might be able to do a movie with somebody like Al Pacino."

The one thing Alicia has lost as she catapaults towards stardom is the connection she once had with her childhood pals. "I still talk to those people, but when I talk to them I realise we have nothing in common," she confesses. "It's so frustrating to have a conversation with them because they really don't understand what I'm going through. They don't start working until they're, like, 24."

Yet, as she sees her friends heading off to college, Alicia admits that she wouldn't mind a highbrow challenge herself."I want to do more classic things," she announces. "I would love to do period pieces. I would love to do Helena Bonham Carter's roles. I've heard her say in articles -- and I don't know if they're real, because I don't believe articles anymore -- but I've heard her say that she would like to do contemporary things. So, maybe we could swap."

Maybe this post-teen stunner is not as clueless as some might think.

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