That's the operative word tagged to Claire Stansfield, who plays lean and leggy Alti, an evil sorceress who often bedevils XENA, WARRIOR PRINCESS. In person, the former model rises to an imposing 6'1". With an athletic frame that weighs-in at 140 pounds, the sultry actress seems an unlikely choice for a role described in script form as an "old hag, bag of bones." She recounts that the series' producers reformed the less visionary prototype of a witch: "I had auditioned for HERCULES. I didn't get it, but I guess I made an impression on [producer] Rob Tapert and they sent me a XENA script." Stansfield was offered Adventures in the Sin l , a two-part episode tale that capped the third season and opened the fourth. In regard to Alti, the actress acknowledges, "It's a lot of fun to do a role where I don't have to worry about how I look. I have to be physically in shape to play her but you would never call Alti sexy, so I don't have to worry whether anyone is checking out my ass."

An avid athlete, Stansfield tapped into her dance background to marshal XENA's de riguer sword fighting scenes. "It's done by number," she explains. "It's all choreographed like a dance routine. Parry 1, stab 2, spin/slash 3 and duck." Claire does admit that no amount of training can prepare one for that maiden fight sequence: "Suddenly, there are these six huge, screaming Maori guys running at me. I just lost it. I told the director, 'They're screaming,' and he says, Yes, Claire--and you should be, too.' We had to do it a couple of times because I would just break down laughing. It was so silly."

Between her two-part XENA debut and the recent, alternative world episode, Between the Lines, Alti has made three appearances on the syndicated series, with three more shows in the offing. The exposure has wrought Stansfield an unexpected dividend: celebrity. 'XENA fans are the best, she grins. But the actress confesses that she was more than "a little nervous" about her first appearance at a Xena convention. After all, as a last-minute substitute for popular Hudson Leick (Callisto), Stansfield speculated upon a hostile reception: "I go out on stage and they're all expecting 'Alti the hag,' and there I am in heels, dressed as pretty as I can. There was a moment of silence and then they just cheered. I felt like a rock star. I've done mostly film and TV, I'm not used to having the chance to experience that kind of response to my work. I was having so much fun that I didn't want to leave. I never thought I would be sucked in by the whole convention thing, but I've done two more and am looking forward to the next one. It's an amazing experience."

Raised in Canada, Stansfield modeled for several years in both the U.S. and Europe. Following a stint at London's Central School of Drama, she dreamt of a bohemian life-style as a New York. stage actress, but, instead, joined her father when he moved to L.A.: "I had enough money from my modeling that I could support myself for a couple years, while I took more acting classes and landed a few commercials. That's been eight or nine years ago, and I've been able to support myself as an actress ever since. I've been very lucky."

Luck was critical to Stansfield's first break, which suspiciously sounds like a derivative Hollywood success story. But I'm hardly going to provoke an altercation--regarding her credibility-with a woman whom I'm pretty certain could kick my ass. Judge for yourselves: "I was at a party and Oliver Stone just came up to me and said he'd like me to be in a movie he was doing." The movie was THE DOORS (1991). Cast as a "Warhol Eurosnob," Stensfield spent five weeks shooting a role that would be trimmed in the cutting room to a few seconds. While her screen time was minimal, Stansfield describes the experience as "great because I had so little to do that I could just stand around and watch. I learned more about film acting in those five weeks than in any of my acting classes." Her association with a Stone project facilitated the search for an agent and manager.

Stansfield was subsequently cast as Sid, a law clerk on David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS television series. She also performed guest roles on THE FLASH (as "cyborg Alpha") and TWO OF A KIND. One of Stansfield's most memorable performances was as a primitive beast-woman in The Jersey Devil episode (10/8/93) of THE X-FILES. "David Duchovny's brother is a commercial director," recalls the actress about her series involvement. "He had cast David and me in a commercial together, and we became friends. Chris Carter [X-FILES' creator/producer] was having some trouble casting this part, and I think David told him he knew someone who could do it." Only a few months after glamorously gracing the pages of GQ & and Details, Stansfield was racing through a Canadian forest clad only in a G-string and dirt. Compliant with her characterization of a mute, nude denizen of the wilderness, Stansfield "had to become more feral. I spent a lot of time watching my dog, and going to the zoo to watch animals. A lot of it has to do with a shifting of the senses. You have to react differently. You are instinctive in tune with what is going on around you."

Duchovny, who moonlighted as host of RED SHOE DIARIES, may have also influenced Stansfield's casting on that series' 1992 Bounty Hunter episode. But, for reasons she would later elaborate upon, the actress was reluctant to discuss her participation in a cable show fueled by overt eroticism. Our conversation shifts into BEST OF THE BEST II, a chop-socky saga released in 1993 ("I did it mostly for the chance to work with Eric Roberts, whose work I really respect."). Returning to her native Canada, Stansfield was cast in THE SWORDSMAN, which offered Lorenzo Lamas as the unlikely reincarnation of Alexander the Great. "It was my first lead, and I was very green," shrugs the actress. "It's a bad movie...but not terrible, I guess." Nevertheless, the film turned a profit, inducing the producers to grind-out a sequel ludicrously titled GLADIATOR COP (1994). "I get a call from them on Thanksgiving Day," sighs Stansfield.'" They wanted to send me a check for a couple thousand dollars so they could use some footage of me from the first film in a dream sequence. Like an idiot, I didn't check with my agent or anyone--I just take the money. The thing comes out and they had taken out takes--busted shots, blown lines, anything they could from the first film--and made me the female lead again. Now, it was probably illegal, but the worst thing is that I look like the worst actress in the world in those shots. I'm not even in the same room with the people in the film. Hell, I'm not even in the same year. They would shoot Lorenzo saying a line, then cut to me in an outtake from a whole other movie. It's outrageous."

Months after that solemn Thanksgiving, Stansfield was served another turkey. "Sometimes you do a film and, somewhere in post-production, it becomes a totally different film than the script you read," she explains. "And sometimes that happens while you're filming it [laughs]. The actress signed-on for THE OUTPOST; the film's title, however, mutated into MINDRIPPER, which had been pitched as the premiere installment of a Wes Craven series developed direct-for-video. But the end result was so demoralizing that it was the first and last movie produced for the very short-lived franchise. Snared in the deja vu plot were Stansfield and Lance Henriksen as scientists who are trapped in a subterranean research facility with their lethal genetic experiment. 'It was the best cast and the worst script," recalls the actress. "What can you do? The whole thing was us running around in some underground hallway, holding a stick with a syringe scotch-taped to it and chasing a long-haired body builder with this phallic thing that comes out of his mouth. It was just so silly."

Her painful memories include a radiation technician who was constantly checking the cast with a Geiger counter, a precaution to preclude the risk of radioactive contamination from the underground location. "But the biggest challenge was trying to keep a straight face," she says. "Before every take, we would chant 'Monster movie, monster movie, monster movie.' It was our own little mantra to psyche ourselves up to get through the scene without laughing."

But a positive rapport with BEST OF THE BEST It's producers and star sparked a reunion with Eric Roberts in SENSATION, an erotic thriller with a super-natural streak. "It is what it is," says Stansfield. "I liked the character. She's strong and independent, and I liked being the killer. I worked very hard at making that come off as a surprise, but it's basically designed to show off Kari Wuhrer's beautiful body and it does a heck of job of that." While nude scenes of the SLIDERS star indeed dominate the film, I reminded Ms. Stansfield of her own rare appearance-au-natural-during a steamy love scene with Roberts. "I was so uncomfortable doing that," she relates. "It's not that I'm uncomfortable with my body. I love doing sexy pictures, but I'm not comfortable with nudity at all--I might have been more successful if I had been."

She notes another drawback to nudity: "SENSATION plays on cable all the time, and I've had guys come up to me in the gym and re- peat intimate lines from my love scene. I went in to pick up my cleaning one day, and my dry cleaner gives me this smile and says, 'I see you on TV last night...' These are people I barely know, yet they know something very intimate about me and it makes me just want to go and hide. I've done my share of B-movies, but I really don't understand that 'Here come the tits' approach where they just parade them on and off screen every 15 minutes. That's not sexy. It's just a way to keep the audience awake during a very bad movie."

DROP ZONE afforded Stansfield the luxury of working in a big-budget action thriller. Unfortunately, the studio brass applied more emphasis to Wesley Snipes' tryst with Yancy Butler. As a consequence, the running time of Stansfield's liaison with bad guy Oary Busey was chopped. The controversial Busey, whom the press had once pegged as self-destnrctive, earns laudatory reviews from his co-star: "Oary is just the sweetest man. He was very supportive of me and protective. I guess I saw that very passionate, slightly crazy side that he seems to vent in some bad ways sometimes. But I never saw anything but the good side of him, and I liked him very much."

DROP ZONE's high profile should have propelled Stansfield into the A-bracket. But two other features, THE FAVOR and a black comedy called NERVOUS TICKS, spent several years on the shelf due to a studio's financial problems. The actress opted to perform in sitcoms: "I love comedy and I loved doing FRASIER and CYBILL. They were like well-oiled machines, and it's impossible not to be good when you're opposite Kelsey Grammer. But being a guest on a half-hour show can be very stressful. I'm not particularly good at cold script readings, but they are constantly rewriting and fine tuning the scripts on those shows so it's always like a cold reading. I did the NED AND STACEY series on the Fox network and they literally didn't know, from one day to the next, if the show was canceled or not. Everyone was in a bad mood, on edge and you come into this and immediately feel it's you."

In addition to her work on XENA, Stensfield recent gigs include DARK DRIVE, a sci-fi thriller tailored for the video market. Once again, it was the role-this time "Tilda," a cold and mercenary virtual reality superbitch--that appealed to her. "I did that movie below scale because I thought it was a good chance to play around with that kind of character, and maybe use it as a stepping stone to other roles," says Stensfield. She has also conceded to be cast in an actioner called SWEEPERS: "It's a Dolph Lundgren film, so it'll be 'Cut to Dolph, cut to an explosion' and probably cut the hell out of my part. But I got to go to South Africa to do it and it's another strong female character, an FBI agent, so it was another step in this direction I'm taking with my career."

Equally at home as either XENA's witchy nemesis or a high-fashion model in prime time, Stansfield has strayed from stereotype: "For years, I struggled to fit into a particular mold, that 5' 7", cute, sweet, sexy, girl-next-door image that they clone in this business. But that's not who I am. I'm a big, powerful-looking woman. I've only recently come to embrace that side of me. If I'm going to stay in this business, I'm either going to play the villain or the hero, and what heroic parts there are for women are usually superhuman. I'm very lucky to be working at a time when companies like Renaissance [producers of XENA] are bringing that kind of character to live action...because I really feel that's what I'm destined to do."

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