In her personal and professional life, Mena Suvari is on a winning streak.

  Ironic, then, that she is starring in a movie called Loser.

 The romantic comedy, which opens Friday, is the brainchild of Amy Heckerling, who created the classic youth comedies Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless.

 For Loser, Heckerling has graduated to college.

 Suvari plays Dora Diamond, an ace literature student who is having an affair with her English professor, played by Greg Kinnear.

 What Dora doesn't know is that a shy fellow student named Paul Tannek is smitten with her.

 Paul is played by Jason Biggs, who starred opposite Suvari in American Pie, last summer's hit youth comedy.

 Between American Pie and Loser, Suvari played the title role in the Oscar-winning drama American Beauty.

 "Please don't call me a movie star. I don't feel like a star and I don't want to be a star," protests Suvari.

 "I just want to have fun and be happy with my work. I don't want any of that elevated celebrity thing that goes along with being a star."

 Suvari started off this year getting a hint of what stardom means.

 She was filming the comedy Sugar and Spice, in which she plays a mean-spirited cheerleader.

 "We were filming at the same time the Golden Globe and Oscar nominations came out. People started coming up to me asking for autographs.

 "With the success of American Pie and American Beauty, my recognition factor has gone way up. I'd prefer it hadn't."

 Suvari turned 21 in February. The following month, she eloped with Robert Brinkman, the 37-year-old cinematographer on Sugar and Spice.

 There is a 25-year age difference between Suvari's parents, but she insists she "isn't repeating something.

 "I wasn't looking for an older man. I wasn't even actively looking for a serious relationship.

 "It happened and I'm grateful it did.

 "In many ways I still feel like a kid, but in love. I think women know when they meet the right man. I know I did."

 Suvari says her parents gave their blessing for the engagement, but were disappointed the couple eloped.

 Suvari had her agent issue a press release announcing the marriage.

 "I've been criticized for that move, but it was all my idea so I can't pretend that bit of publicity wasn't something I wanted."

  Suvari is the first to admit fate has been more than kind to her.

  "There are days I don't feel that I deserve everything that has happened so quickly for me. There are so many people my age who are studying and struggling and hoping to get a small role in a TV show or film.

  "Everything seems to have fallen into place so quickly and so easily for me."

 Heckerling says there is a reason casting agents and directors are drawn to the young actress.

 "I interviewed a lot of girls for Loser. Your heart has to go out to Dora even though she is making some questionable life choices.

 "Mena is not a shark inside a beautiful body. She has an innate sweetness about her that shines through."

 Suvari was raised on an estate in Rhode Island. Her father is a psychiatrist and her mother a psychiatric nurse.

 "Our house was haunted," says Suvari. "We all heard the noises in certain rooms and in the grounds outside.

 "When I was nine, my parents sold the Hilltop House and we moved to the Virgin Islands and then to Charleston (South Carolina)."

 By this time, Suvari was 13 and a modelling school offered students in the area classes in makeup and runway technique.

 Suvari enrolled and the next year she signed a $70,000 US contract for Rice-a-roni.

 "We didn't see too much more opportunity in South Carolina for modelling or acting, so my parents moved us to Los Angeles where I started attending cattle-call auditions."

 One such audition nabbed her a role in Carrie 2: The Rage and the following year, she found herself auditioning for the role of the shy choir student who steals Chris Klein's heart in American Pie.

 "When I met the directors for American Pie, they asked if I could sing. My heart soared because I'd been in a school choir for three years. It was another incredible stroke of luck."

 Suvari was thrilled to be cast opposite Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, but she admits she "never had any idea it would become such a box-office and critical hit."

 Suvari says she is vicariously reliving her youth through the roles she has accepted.

 "In Sugar and Spice, I play a cheerleader. It's something I would like to have done in high school, but we'd already moved to L.A. and I never really connected with the school I attended.

 "I only had a few close friends. I never even attended my prom."

 Suvari is currently in France filming D'Artagnan.

 "Justin Chambers, who starred in Liberty Heights, plays the Musketeer. I play his love interest. It's a big costume romantic adventure and we're filming in the south of France.
 "It's another reason to count my lucky stars."

If places like Rhode Island didn't breed them and if high schools in Southern California didn't finish them off nicely, Hollywood moguls would have to invent sexy starlets such as Mena Suvari.

 It's easier this way. With a background in child modelling, with a minimum of muss and fuss, she showed up fresh and ready to go with just the right blend of beauty, limited education and wide-eyed innocence. The paradoxical addition of Lolita-esque sensuality, something she of course denies either having or exploiting, just clinched the deal.

 "It's kind of going okay, I think," she offers now about her career to date.

 At about 15 or 16 (she can't remember exactly), Suvari made a never-released B-movie called Live Virgin. Calling it "a very adult comedy," she assures us we need not worry, despite tentative plans to finally release the sucker.

 Even though her Live Virgin character cuts a deal with a porn producer (played by Bob Hoskins) to lose her virginity on the Internet, "It doesn't get to that because I get back to my boyfriend, so you really don't see anything." Nevertheless, it tells you something about how filmmakers visualize young actresses as playthings.

 Meanwhile, her official film debut came in a more respectable manner in Gregg Araki's Nowhere. Roles in Kiss The Girls, Carrie II: The Rage and Slums Of Beverly Hills followed. So did last summer's trashy hit American Pie.

 Teen tease

 More critically, in every sense, American Beauty came along next. And Suvari was 'the beauty,' the teenaged tease who became the willing object of sexual desire for her best friend's testosterone-driven daddy.

 Kevin Spacey won the best actor Oscar for his on-screen lust. The movie, which made its world premiere at the Toronto film festival last September, won as best picture and emerged as the clear-cut overall winner of the Oscar parade. Box office soared.

 Which brings us back to Mena Suvari. Her celebrity comet is heading skyward. Her next film, Amy Heckerling's latest teen comedy, Loser, opens across North America on Friday. Despite nearly insurmountable odds, the filmmakers hope Loser will be to this decade what Heckerling's Fast Times At Ridgemont High was to the 1980s and her Clueless was to the 1990s.

 In the movie, Suvari plays the petite college princess bedding down in secret with her English lit professor (Greg Kinnear) while a gentle doofus (Jason Biggs, another refugee from American Pie) tries to overcome his hick ways and start a romance with her. Entertainment Weekly magazine recently named both Suvari and Biggs as two of the young actors most likely to still have careers when they turn 30.

 As for the present, the 21-year-old Suvari once again co-stars in a movie in which she is caught up in a troubled relationship with an older man.

 "It's just a coincidence," Suvari offers when pressed about the common theme. "It isn't what I look for. It's just the fact it's age, just the fact that it's somebody younger and somebody older. It means nothing else."

 In life, the older man/younger woman arrangement is a private matter, according to Suvari. "Age is just age. If you're really happy, then that's all that matters."

 Although she talks little about it, Suvari is married to cinematographer Robert Brinkmann, a man 17 years older than she. She only mentions her marriage in a separate part of the conversation when she waxes enthusiastic about being named in that Entertainment Weekly article.

 "That is such a nice compliment," she says of the honour, "and I hope it comes true." Not that she is filled with confidence. "God, I have no idea," she says of what things might be like for her at age 30.

 "I really live my life day by day and try to work really, really hard and see what comes my way. I think really the most important thing for me about success is happiness. So I hope that I'm still with my husband and married and happy and maybe have some kids. That would be nice, if my career kept going."

 And if it didn't? "I didn't go to college. I could always go back. Who knows? All I can do is keep working hard and be motivated. That's the only thing I can do right now."

 Suvari, an American of Estonian and Greek heritage. Mena, named for her Egyptian godmother, comes from a family in which you are as old as you feel. Her dad, psychiatrist Ando Suvari, is 24 years older than her mom, nurse Candice Suvari.

 Nice things to say

 They must have raised Mena to be polite and say nice things about people. She is a veritable gush-aholic when talking about the cast and crew of Loser.

 On Jason Biggs: "Jason's great. He's the best. I would work with him again in a split second. We had so much fun. I felt like I had known him a long time. I think he's so talented and so down-to-earth and so willing to just give you what you want. He works so hard. Fun! Really fun!"

 On Amy Heckerling: "It's really funny because, when I think about Amy, I just get goosebumps. She's just got 'It.' She's got something."

 And so it goes, on and on. Not bad for a girl who still insists she was "a loser" in high school in California, where she and her family moved after a stint in South Carolina and, before that, Rhode Island.

 Suvari didn't even get to go to the prom. "American Pie gave me the experience I needed, the high school experience," she says of missing out in real life. "I guess I was a dork, right?"

 Hardly. But that self-deprecation and the gushy 'Look how lucky I am' attitude are winning her friends in Hollywood.

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Mena Suvari marries older man

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From Pie to Beauty, Mena Suvari is all-American