When it comes to Lindy Booth, it's best to expect the unexpected.

In her short acting career, the 22-year-old from Oakville has been a martial arts action star, a ditzy secretary, Lana Turner, and now, within one film, Century Hotel, a 1920s flapper and a black and purple-haired modern goth.

Naturally, she's another thing altogether in person.

Booth comes for coffee with her hair dyed a bright auburn that makes her big blue eyes pop in her porcelain, heart-shaped face. Her blond hair needed to be camouflaged because she looked too much like Cheryl Ladd, star of her recent Lifetime TV cable movie Her Best Friend's Husband.

Too young to experience any nostalgic awe over being around the original Charlie's Angel, Booth was bowled over instead by her on-screen mom in the movie, Bess Armstrong from the teen angst series My So-Called Life.

"I just didn't say anything to her for I think the first two weeks and then finally I was like, 'You're my all-time favourite TV mom.' That was really exciting to me. She said, 'I was the all-time worst TV mom.' But I loved her in it."

Booth is a bundle of contradictions: Tall but tiny, womanly but slim. She chainsmokes, can't sit still, fidgets with her hair and her sleeves, laughs easily and a lot and speaks in a soft, breathy voice.

When Century Hotel director David Weaver was casting the dual role of 1999 cyber-surfing chick Supergirl and 1920s flapper Sylvia, he expected to find a tough, modern Supergirl type and have to turn her into Sylvia. Instead, in came Booth, a sweet-natured girly-girl with a blond bob and a penchant for dressing up in pretty things -- in other words, a Sylvia.

"I can still see David going, 'This girl is never going to be tough. There is just no way.' But we got the tattoos and the hair and the makeup and somehow made my face into this really ugly snarly thing. I look at pictures of it and I think, 'I look like I dislocated my jaw or something.' It doesn't look like me."

Booth doesn't use a computer and can't even type. She thinks they ended up using a hand double for Supergirl's 'Net surfing scenes because she looked so bogus.

There were no hand doubles for Rub & Tug, an upcoming indie flick about the erotic massage business.

"I'm one of the massage girls. I'm a rubber and a tugger," says Booth. "We learned some massage techniques. I mean, obviously there's none of that in the movie, the actual tugging part. But we did some rubbing."

Booth had an itch to act since grade school. When she was 18 and about to graduate T.A. Blakelock High School, her drama teacher helped her find an agent. Two months later, she was cast as a recurring character on the TV series Eerie, Indiana.

"It turned into a bit of a whirlwind. I thought, 'It's supposed to take a year. I'm supposed to have a year of learning the ropes.' I was just sort of thrown on this series and I was so nervous. I had never been on camera before. I'd never had any film acting lessons and I had no idea what I was doing."

She's been to L.A. for auditions, including for teen series Felicity, Roswell and Popular, but for now, prefers life north of the border. Her roommates are her Mom and her 19-year-old sister because she likes the "total girl house" atmosphere and because she's been waiting more than two years for her downtown condo to be ready.

Subsequently, she's co-starred in two other series, Relic Hunter as Tia Carrere's air-head secretary Claudia, and in The Famous Jett Jackson, as butt-kicking Riley/Hawk. Other TV and movie work includes The Skulls, Strange Justice, Mr. Music, Twice In A Lifetime, PSI Factor, Big Wolf On Campus, Traders, Darkness Comes, Frog Pond and Me And My Shadows: The Judy Garland Story.

"The more I do, the more I want to happen," she says. "The goals keep getting bigger." (Review of: Century Hotel).


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