Hewitt crosses over into grown-up roles

The actress has spent her career identifying with many of her roles.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Jennifer Love Hewitt doesn't really talk to the dead. Nor does she give spirits snagged in the physical realm a tender send-off to the great beyond.
Despite starring on "Ghost Whisperer" as Melinda Gordon, a winsome antique-shopowner whose sideline is facilitating spooks, Hewitt doesn't fully buy into this ghost-whispering stuff.
"The hopeful part of me would really like to," she wavers. "The other part of me goes, 'Well, maybe not.'"
Either way, Hewitt feels a close bond with her character, though in this second year of the hit CBS drama (which airs Friday at 8 p.m.) not quite so close as before.
"The first season, it was very tough not to bring her home with me," says Hewitt, "especially the days we were doing the crossing-over scenes. I had to go, 'Wait a minute -- these are stories, and although Melinda is someone we all should strive to be, I can't on a daily basis -- and still make it through a work schedule.'
"Now, at the end of the day, I go: 'OK, Melinda, you're a wonderful person. Good night."'
Identifying with the characters she plays is Hewitt's style.
'Party of Five' days
In an interview seven years ago, she called Sarah Reeves someone who "has always been my best friend. I started playing her when I was 16, and everything that she's gone through, I've gone through."
Sarah, of course, was teenager Bailey's girlfriend on the Fox drama "Party of Five" who, in 1999, fled San Francisco for New York in search of her father on a spinoff created especially for Hewitt.
But "Time of Your Life" would be a single-season flop. And for Hewitt, whose professional debut had been at age 10 on the Disney Channel series "Kids Incorporated," her bid to clinch adulthood in the character of Sarah was cut short prematurely.
The specter loomed of Hewitt, then 21, as a teen ingenue past her prime, a fresh-faced siren with a celebrated figure who wasn't taken seriously as a grown-up.
"I hope that I'll be able to make the full transition into adult roles," she told me at the time, and indeed, she was already set to portray her idol, Audrey Hepburn, in an ambitious biopic she was producing for ABC.
After that, she appeared in a variety of features and TV films, including "The Tuxedo" (an action-comedy with Jackie Chan), "Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber" (as the title character) and the two animated "Garfield" movies.
How she did it
For Hewitt, whose 28th birthday is next week, crossing over was something she always meant to do "in a smart way, the right way for me, gracefully.
"Actors have done it lots of different ways," she points out. "They'll play a drug addict and completely change their image.
"Or they'll go and take off all their clothes and be like, 'Ohhh, I'm a woman!"' She chuckles. "THAT'S an approach -- absolutely."
Did she get offers to take her clothes off?
"I got lots of those," she says with a smile. "But I can't. It's just not me.
"I feel like there's still a world-full of people out there who think there's not much more to me than the girl who can wear tiny tops. So if I had actually gone and DONE those things" -- shedding the tiny top -- "to try to prove something, where would I be?"
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