By Stephen Saban, Portraits by Spicer

ennifer Love Hewitt is the prototype for the PG-13 actress with the NC-17 body, and everyone calls her "Love." But now that she's in England, where everyone is called "Luv," "it's very confusing," she says with a giggle. She's on the phone from Bristol, where she's about to shoot a movie with Dougray Scott, a romance called The Truth About Love, and, no lie, she plays the Love.

After the lovely box-office successes of I Know What You Did Last Summer,its sequel and Can't Hardly Wait, her career has taken a strange course, zigzagging from adult to kiddie fare and back. She played the hard-bodied half of the hardhearted mother-daughter team of gold diggers in Heartbreakers (her mommy was Sigourney Weaver); voiced tiny Thumbelina in the animated The Adventures of Tom Thumb and Thumbelina (her fellow adventurer was Elijah Wood); accessorized Jackie Chan like a not-too-shabby set of cuff links in The Tuxedo; played Satan with Anthony Hopkins in Alec Baldwin's ill-fated directorial debut, The Devil and Daniel Webster, which may never see the dark of theater; and now she's talking about the June release of Garfield: The Movie, about an orange housecat, in which Hewitt's the veterinarian love interest for Breckin Meyer's Jon Arbuckle.

The plot, ripped from the pages of the Sunday funnies, involves the high jinks of Garfield, a CGI creation voiced by Bill Murray (wasn't he just Oscar-nominated for Lost in Translation?), as he searches for his runaway nemesis, Odie the dog, and hilarity ensues, as it will. "I mean, it's really simple," she says of the story. "It's a family movie. Adults will like it. Kids might not know who Garfield is but they'll want to see it because he's animated and cute and funny." And I'm thinking it's more a case of kids will like it and adults might not know who Garfield is but they'll want to see it because Hewitt's animated and cute and, well, Hewitt.

Because of her role as Sarah on Party of Five, the Fox drama that smelled like teen angst, and the distressed damsel in those slasher pix that smelled like tartar sauce, as well as that unattainable paragon of high-school dream-girlness in Can't Hardly Wait, Hewitt became a kind of totem teen back in the '90s, representing all that is inherently good in today's youth, in lush slo-mo wholesomeness. And that was okay with her. "I'd make a good role model," she said then. Her face was on the covers of scores of magazines, including the premiere issue of Teen People. She recorded three underpromoted R&B albums ("People say I sound like a cross between Mariah Carey and Toni Braxton"), hosted issue-oriented specials for MTV, and contributed to the book Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. At the time, the unflagging, unflappable Hewitt tried to singlehandedly claw the "X" out of Gen X...

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