As her poised and articulate acceptance speech demonstrated, Mira Sorvino is a far different woman from the air-headed hooker she played to the Oscar-winning hilt in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite. In fact, Sorvino almost wasn't allowed to audition for Allen because the film's casting agents deemed her too refined to play a tacky call girl. Their concerns were not unfounded, as nothing on the actress's résumé spoke to her ability to fulfill the demands of the role. Raised in New Jersey, far from Hollywood's glittery distractions, Sorvino spent much of her childhood with her nose in a book. Her father, a character actor whose many credits include roles in Goodfellas and Nixon, had always discouraged Mira and her two siblings from acting professionally because he wanted them to grow up without the psychological strain of child stardom_the so-called "Danny Bonaduce Syndrome." So Mira concentrated on her studies and, after high school, she was accepted at Harvard University, where she earned a degree in East Asian Studies. During a year abroad, in Beijing, she learned to speak fluent Mandarin.

Despite her father's anxiety about his children following in his professional footsteps, Mira had been in student productions throughout high school and college. Now, as an adult, she moved to New York and tried to act professionally. She spent the next three years doing the struggling actress-waitress thing and working as a production assistant for Robert De Niro's Tribeca film company. In 1992, Sorvino landed a job as third assistant director on her director friend Rob Weiss's independent film Amongst Friends. During the course of production, Sorvino was promoted first to casting director, then to associate producer, and, finally, to the film's female lead. Her performance as an ex-con's devoted girlfriend marked her auspicious feature-film debut and generated positive notices during its screenings on the film-festival circuit.

Directors Whit Stillman and Robert Redford were among the industry figures whose attentions were piqued by the budding actress's screen presence. Stillman tapped Sorvino's facility with languages by casting her as a translator in Barcelona (1994); Redford directed her in her first studio film, Quiz Show (1994), in which she played Rob Morrow's brainy, long-suffering wife. Next up, Sorvino again relied on her proficiency with accents (and dye jobs) in her star-making turn as Linda, the kindhearted prostitute and biological mother of Woody Allen's adopted son in Mighty Aphrodite. She succeeded in stealing the spotlight from her co-stars, Allen, Helena Bonham Carter, and F. Murray Abraham.

In 1996, Sorvino gave stand-out performances as Matt Dillon's love interest in Beautiful Girls, and as the blonde Marilyn to Ashley Judd's brunette Norma Jean in HBO's Norma Jean and Marilyn. The following year delivered up roles in the bubble-brained comedy Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, with Janeane Garofalo and Lisa Kudrow, and the horror flick Mimic. Her star on a steady ascent, Sorvino banked $2 million to star opposite Asian action star Chow Yun Fat in the 1998 thriller The Replacement Killers. 1999 dawned with a starring role opposite Val Kilmer in the romantic drama At First Sight, and later in the year, she rounded out the ensemble cast of Spike Lee's Summer of Sam .