SHE'S WORKED WITH EVERYONE FROM MERCHANT IVORY TO STANLEY KUBRICK AND HAS TWO MOVIES OUT THIS FALL. BUT 18-YEAR-OLD HEAD TURNER LEELEE SOBIESKI IS JUST HITTING HER STRIDE - NOT TO MENTION STRUTTING HER STUFF IN THIS SEASON'S SLEEKEST STYLES A FACE LIKE A RENAISSANCE MADONNA - PALE SKIN, WIDE BLUE EYES, A NOSE WITH THE HINT OF A GALLIC CURVE - IS FRAMED IN CLOSE-UP ON A MONITOR. LEELEE SOBIESKI, ON LOCATION ON THE SONY LOT, IS PLAYING A TEENAGE GIRL NAMED RUBY WHO IS sitting in her lawyer's office appealing for help: Her parents died recently in a car wreck, and now the guardians with whom she and her younger brother have been living are behaving suspiciously. "Something is not right," she says pleadingly. * In this psychological thriller, The Glass House, 18-year-old Sobieski is portraying a young woman her own age, not older, for the first time in her career. Director Daniel Sackheim stands behind the camera, studying his leading lady intently. At first, Sobieski underplays her helplessness and fear. "More eye contact," says Sackheim. He shoots several takes in quick succession, interrupting her repeatedly to ask for more emotion. "Good," he encourages. "Now stronger." At one point, the actress becomes frustrated, tossing back her hair and furrowing her brow. "Let me do that again - it sucked," she says. "Can I start from the beginning?"

Once Sackheim is satisfied, Sobieski bounds off the set to take a break in her trailer. Still growing at five feet ten, she carries the top half of her body with regal grace, while her bottom half moves more awkwardly, as if she's still getting used to how long her legs are. But when she starts to speak, she radiates preternatural poise and confidence beyond her years. How did the scene feel? "Good," she says lightly. Was she nervous? "Sure, but being nervous is good. It adds a little bit of a pulse, some adrenaline. If you're not nervous, it means you don't care if you fail."

Sobieski is best known for saving France in CBS's 1999 hit miniseries Joan of Arc, which buried the theatrical version starring Milla Jovovich and earned her Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. This fall, she costars with Paul Walker and Steve Zahn in the offbeat slasher-road movie Squelch, directed by John Dahl (The Last Seduction); in My First Mister, she plays a Goth mall rat with multiple piercings who has a crush on Albert Brooks. And she's raking in $1 million to carry The Glass House, her first mainstream studio picture, supported by impressive veterans like Bruce Dern, Diane Lane, Stellan Skarsgard, Michael O'Keefe and Rita Wilson. In little over a year, Sobieski has rocketed to the top of Hollywood's teenage A-list.

There is no other teen actor quite like her: a mesmerizing--at times disconcerting--screen presence, a woman-child who combines intensely analytical intelligence and sophistication with a dewy face and voluptuous body. Sobieski is on the fast track to inherit the Jodie Foster mantle but exudes more warmth and humor; with a dash of Streepish gravitas, she's got the heft to shoulder heavyweight roles. It's hard to imagine contemporaries such as Liv Tyler, Christina Ricci, Sarah Polley and Anna Paquin, engaging though they may be, wielding a sword as France's greatest heroine.

The main question surrounding Sobieski's future is where her creativity will lead her. She's an accomplished painter, a passionate poet, and, oh yes, she wants to direct. She states her aspirations with the black-and-white certainty of a dreamer whose theories have not yet been tempered by life. "I might be an actor for a while," she says. "I am certainly going to be a director. That's a fact. I'm certainly going to be a painter. And I'm certainly going to be a mother. And I'm going to write something. One of the great things about acting is that it opens up so many doors. Because you've created this bizarre thing called a name for yourself, it lets you do so much other stuff."

In The Glass House, Sobieski must conjure the vulnerable emotions of an ordinary girl whose experience is limited. For her, that's a stretch. "The challenge," says Sackheim, "is how to take a young woman who carries herself with such comportment and maturity and break her down in a way that allows the little girl to come out. I tell her, `This isn't Leelee Sobieski; this is a young girl without your experience.'"

Although she still has one year left of high school, Liliane Rudabet Gloria Hsveta Sobieski has already lived a life as expansive and exotic as her name. Before she turned 17, she had burned at the stake, tempted Tom Cruise in her skivvies (in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut), had her first screen kiss (in Merchant Ivory's A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries) and survived a meteor crash (Deep Impact).

Her bloodlines and education are privileged. Sobieski's great-great-great-great-uncle was King Sobieski of Poland (for whom the bagel was invented). Her father, Jean, is French, a painter who acted in spaghetti westerns and romanced Jean Seberg in his youth; her mother, Elizabeth, is an American writer who's just sold a screenplay, written with her daughter in mind. "I was brought up in a bohemian, artsy way," says Sobieski. When she and her brother, Roby, six years her junior, were growing up in Manhattan, their parents hauled them around to SoHo galleries and Shakespeare in the Park. Sobieski attended private school and spent summers on her father's family's ranch in the Camargue, the wild and romantic region in southern France. "It's like Texas with swamps and flamingos," she says.

Leelee always stood apart from her peers at school and was indifferent to what they thought of her. Brainy and opinionated, she wore frilly dresses when boys' boxer shorts were the rage and took flamenco lessons while everyone else played soccer. A late bloomer, she wrote poetry and drew, unperturbed by her flat-chestedness. ("They called me `the flat wall,'" she says.) She appeared as a maid in a school play only because acting was required. "I wanted to be a painter and a writer," says Sobieski. "Even at 11, there was no doubt in my mind."

Everything changed when she was discovered in the school cafeteria in 1994 by a casting agent for Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Although Kirsten Dunst won the bloodsucking role, Sobieski was handed parts in TV movies and made her feature debut as Martin Short's daughter in 1997's Jungle2Jungle. While most actresses her age forged careers in contemporary teen flicks, Sobieski distinguished herself in highbrow fare. Her complex performance in A Soldier's Daughter wowed the critics, one of whom called it "a quicksilver study in intellect vying with emotion." When she did make a high school comedy, Never Been Kissed with Drew Barrymore, she opted to play the nerd in glasses instead of one of the cool kids and became pals with Barrymore, although they are practically opposites. "Drew is just like Marilyn Monroe," Sobieski says. "Everybody wants to hug her."

Filming Joan of Arc was unspeakably difficult, and she earned her stripes as a trouper. She boasted that she was the first actress who was truly a virgin to play the virgin heroine on the screen. That was small consolation during a grueling three-month shoot that involved long days wearing 60 pounds of armor astride a horse in the snowy Czech Republic. "Physically, I was a disaster," she says. "Then, emotionally, the character went through so much stuff. It was tough. I cried almost every night. But I am thrilled that I did it."

Picking at a lunch of fruit and chicken in her trailer, Sobieski discusses career strategy with the nonchalance of an artist bored by the business; she grows much more animated talking about her love of Picasso and Louis Armstrong and Bulworth. Her trailer is decorated with only a few throws on the couches and a Maupassant novel in French on the table. Since her figure rounded out a couple of years ago, Sobieski has displayed her endowments in revealing clothing for magazine fashion spreads. Still, in true European style, she leads with her brain. Kubrick told her that he cast her in Eyes "because all the other actresses weren't thinking," she says.

Sobieski is remarkably precocious and charming when interacting with adults. For years she has been asking directors and other luminaries for locks of their hair, which she keeps in a private collection. Kubrick indulged her ("He was so debonair"), and she sent him one of her paintings before he died. She has also snared snippets from Peter O'Toole, Ismail Merchant, Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Kline and Regis Philbin. Tom Cruise promised her a lock, but she never got it and wonders if he feared she might try to clone him. "I'll get it one day," she says.

"Leelee is smart," says Michael O'Keefe, who plays her father in The Glass House, "but, like, way smart." Albert Brooks says he's "crazy about her. I know it sounds funny coming from an old guy talking about a younger woman, but when you spend time with Leelee, age doesn't hang around for very long. Pretty soon you're engaged and having a conversation, and it's just like two adults talking. Then her parents show up and take her home, and you go, `Oh, that's right.'"

TODAY THE GLASS HOUSE IS shooting at the Staples Center. Ruby is attending a rock concert with her godfather, played by Skarsgard, and is supposed to be awestruck by the musicians. "She's just kind of `Oh, my god, he's so cute'--that type of awful thing," says Sobieski before the cameras roll. In real life, the actress doesn't watch MTV, couldn't care less about 'N Sync ("not specifically my style," she says diplomatically), has never chased rock stars. Her idea of a transcendent musical experience is to lip-synch a torchy Nina Simone song or act out Monroe's "I Wanna Be Loved by You" in full vamp style.

As the crew sets up, Sobieski spies a tall, handsome silver-haired man in a straw hat. "This is my dad," she says, breaking into a big smile. "I didn't even recognize you from far away," says Jean, bussing his offspring and oozing French charm. "That's awful!" teases Leelee. They confer rapidly in French, and he quickly edges away, apologizing for interrupting her interview. "Out of the blue, my parents will pop by; it's wonderful," says Sobieski. "They are my best friends. I really enjoy their company. Like I am so, so, so, so lucky to love them so much and to be so close to them." She doesn't lay claim to any major bad behavior, doesn't take drugs and, until her last birthday, heeded their prohibitions on dating older men and staying out too late. They manage her career and accompany her on location. Whether in hotel rooms or rented homes, her father sets up a makeshift painting studio. "He takes over our living room wherever we go," she says.

In the testimony of their firstborn, Jean and Elizabeth are so perfect that she hasn't had anything to rebel against. Has Sobieski flunked being a teenager? "There's always a period where you're like, `Oh, I hate you, Mom' or `I hate you, Dad,' but I just kind of listened," she says. "'I hate you, so what should I do?' We'd end up having a conversation, and I'd say, `Oh, my god, I agree with you.' I was just this pitiful teenager who agreed with everything."

She inherited her operatic temperament, as well as a chunk of talent, from Sobieski pere. In a state of shared rapture, father and daughter make paintings together, and they are aiming to have an exhibition of their work. "We'll start off on two different sides of the canvas, and I'll do my side and he'll do his," she says of the process, a daylong fugue. "And sometimes they just meet in the middle and that's it--we'll leave it like that. But most of the time I'll say, or he'll say, `Move over to the other side,' and we'll switch. And I'll mess up what he's doing, and he'll mess up what I'm doing. At the end, instead of having one center of attention, it's just kind of everywhere, but it has unity."

Jean swears that, as a painter, his daughter is far more developed at 18 than he was at 30. When they collaborate, "she will put violet or yellow over blue, and I say, `This is impossible, it will never work.' Then, by magic, it works, and it's full of life. The painting is alive." Jean and his wife support their daughter's acting career but, understandably, worry about the attendant hoopla. "You could get spoiled," he says. "But we are fighting against all this. And when Leelee does a great painting, I say, `Look, this is fantastic. This is what interests me more than anything else, because it's true. You don't need to smile--your painting smiles for you, eh?'"

OVER THE FOURTH OF JULY weekend, while everyone else in L.A. was enjoying barbecues and fireworks, Sobieski stayed home and studied precalculus. "It's a good thing; it's brain exercise," she says. She attends the Lycee Francais, Jodie Foster's alma mater, but, unlike Foster, is reluctant to disappear for four straight years of college. "It's hard to say of this thing I've been working at since I was 11, `Well, let's stop for four years and go away.' When Jodie did it, the times were different. The pace was a little bit slower. Everything right now is `Who is on the magazine this week? This-week-this-week-now-now-now-it-it-it.'" If she doesn't make the most of her present opportunities, she fears, they may never come again. So she plans to divide her time between college and movies and hopes to expand her repertoire. "I'd like to play a manipulative, mean, sadistic killer character;" she says. "And eventually a mom."

While the rest of the family gallops through the Camargue in August, Sobieski is spending the steamy month in Manhattan, taking the Princeton Review to prepare for the SAT. "I don't have as much time to do nothing or to read or paint as I would like to," she laments. "And the reading and the painting and the doing nothing and the seeing-the-friends thing, those all pretty much bother me quite a bit." Uncharacteristically, she refuses to answer an inquiry about her romantic status, smiling and looking down without uttering a word. But she finds her voice again on the subject of dating. "It's just bizarre," she says. "It doesn't make any sense, like, `Pick me up? What do you mean, Pick me up? I'll meet you there.' Because I want to leave when I want to leave, you know?"

Leelee's style counsel

On Taste
"I wear anything and everything - really elegant stuff and really crazy, wild stuff. I like all different things: Viktor & Rolf, and Allen and Susie's in New York; Vivienne Westwood; Christina Perrin, whose clothes I've been wearing quite a bit. I wore her stuff to the Emmys and to the Golden Globes."

On Integrity
"I hate this whole thing that you become part of the publicity for the designer. It's like, `So-and-so requests you to wear his dress.' `What do you mean, So-and-so requests? Is he going to give me the dress?' `Well, no, but he would realty appreciate ...' So they loan you the clothing, you wear it for the night, and it's `so-and-so wearing so-and-so,' and at the end of the night - they take it back! It's like Cinderella. At least give the person the stupid dress."

On Value
"I hate to buy things because of the labels. And I hate to buy things that are really overpriced - I really detest it. If something ends up being worth an extreme amount of money, it should be either because of a lot of handwork in it - like a lot of beadwork - or because it's old or one-of-a-kind. But when it's something that's reproduced millions of times, that's stupid."

On Cher's Wardrobe - and all that it implies
"Everybody is dressed by a stylist or a designer now, so you don't see their taste. It really drives me crazy. You know. I kind of enjoy seeing people like Whoopi Goldberg and Cher: No matter how extravagant, whether it looks really great or really bad, it's their real taste, what they would really buy with their money."