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I was talking with my father last night, and he told me men are much more simple than I make them out to be," says Samantha Mathis. I was brought up with my mother. So the whole male-female thing is a great mystery to me." And yet, as Amy March in 1994's Little Women, Mathis was entirely believable stealing Winona Ryder's boyfriend, as she was in her 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume, when her character, Nora, the "eat me, beat me" lady, single-handedly cured Christian Slater of his onanism.

After nearly disappearing from the screen for a spell, she's about to come back in a major way. She's the romantic lead, opposite Richard E. Grant, in next month's Jack and Sarah. And later this spring, Mathis again meets up with Slater, in John Woo's action-adventure picture Broken Arrow, which stars John Travolta. That movie has been written and produced by the same people who did Speed, and so it is hoped that her role as Slater's sidekick will catapult her to something near Sandra Bullock-size stardom. "The irony there is that Sandra is a friend of mine," says Mathis, laughing. "And everyone keeps saying, 'You're going to be the next Sandra Bullock.'" Not us, though.