The state of the American ingenue these days is not good. There are far too many perky sexpots - doe-eyed and big of hair and bosom but thin of voice. Can you imagine the gals of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" wrapping their souls around a truly tragic role?

So Industry watchers rejoice at the promise of Leelee Sobieski. At 16, she's still a kid, like her character in Deep Impact. But in last years overlooked Merchant Ivory drama A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries she showed evidence of an inner fire that recalls the very young Ingrid Bergman.

Like Bergman, she has a naturalness and a throaty voice tinged with wisdom beyond her years - which will definately come in handy when she, like Bergman before her, plays Joan of Arc (her saint will be confined to the small screen on an upcoming television miniseries). Sobieski's current inspiration is not Bergman, though, but Barrymore - Drew, with whom she stars in Never Been Kissed.

"Drew's a little angel," she says. "She's beautiful inside and out." Barrymore plays a journalist going undercover in high school and Sobieski is the school's head nerd. It's unlikely casting for a willowy beauty.

"They wanted me as the popular girl," Sobieski says with annoyance. "But that was so uninteresting."

Expect far more provocative things from Sobieski this summer when she plays opposite Tom Cruise in Kubrick's sex-themed Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick had never seen Sobieski before her audition tape, but the tape seems to have had quite an impact.

"What he told me," says Sobieski, speaking only with reluctance on the topic, "was that in my audition, I was talking about something I hadn't experienced in real life, but I made it seem like I had experienced it. He said the other actresses who were up for the part were just faking everything. You couldn't see any process in their minds - nothing was going on up there."

When she finished the film, she says, Kubrick sent her seven boxes of chocolates. "I got down to the last piece, and thought, 'Should I finish it - or keep it for eternity?'" Well? "I just ate it!"