NEW YORK -- In a world where actresses of 19 are already lying about their age, Neve Campbell is happy to let you know she is 26 years old.

Locked into the public consciousness as a perennial teenager -- courtesy of her role in TV's Party Of Five -- Campbell says goodbye this year to the dual mainstays of her career. Party Of Five ends this spring, and the Scream trilogy of movies has shrieked its third and final time.

Miss Campbell is ready to be perceived as an adult, which, ironically, she has been since the age of about 15.

Essentially self-sufficient since adolescence, Campbell has nonetheless played the ingenue many times. She has had various forays into feature film, but a new movie called Drowning Mona might finally show her fans her comedic abilities.

Who knew?

Drowning Mona, which opens Friday, is a giddy ensemble piece about murder in a small town. Campbell co-stars with Bette Midler, Jamie Lee Curtis, Danny DeVito, William Fichtner and Casey Affleck; somebody, or possibly everybody, wants bitchy Mona dead, and for good reason. Sporting a down-market wig in the role of Ellen, Campbell plays a ditz intent upon getting married, even if her fabulously dense fiance (Casey Affleck) is a murder suspect. So who isn't?

And Casey Affleck, her Drowning Mona co-star, calls Campbell a pro. "She's cool," he says. "Poor Neve. She's been perceived like this teen star, but she's really great.

"And she'll prove it."

Campbell has been busy proving one thing or another since childhood. The only daughter of Gerry Campbell and Marnie Neve, she is a Guelph native who made her first stage appearance at age five in Aladdin, a production of her father's theatre group.

Her parents divorced while she was still a tot, but both were involved in the performing arts. Today, her yoga-teacher mother also runs Campbell's fan club. Her father is a drama and media teacher at a suburban Toronto school.

After her father took her -- at age 6 -- to a performance of The Nutcracker, Campbell determined to make ballet her life.

It is difficult to adequately convey the hard work and single-mindedness involved in Campbell's (or anybody else's) pursuit of a career in dance.

Much of who Campbell is probably can be attributed to her early education as a ballerina at The National Ballet School of Canada -- Toronto's world-renowned institution that accepts one in a thousand hopefuls. The training and discipline involved are awesome, and they last a lifetime.

Campbell is, as an adult, an anomaly in Hollywood -- bright, well-spoken, polite and generous -- and even though her career has meant that much of her growing up has had to take place in the public eye, she has handled great change with even greater grace.

As Wes Craven, her director in the Scream movies once told Entertainment Weekly, "There is just no bulls--t about Neve." That pretty well sums her up.

Campbell is on record about her eventual unhappiness with the world of ballet, though she says that until she was 18 or 19, she defined herself, first and foremost, as a dancer.

Having lived briefly in Mississauga, she moved into residence at the ballet school in Toronto at the age of nine. Talk about your early independence. (By coincidence, this year's auditions for the National Ballet School take place a week from today, just as the school's famed alumnus hits theatres in Drowning Mona; curiously, according to school officials, no previous training is required for dance applicants under the age of 12, which suggests that whatever special qualities Campbell has, she's had them since childhood.)

At the National Ballet School, Campbell distinguished herself quickly for her hard work. She was identified as special for her beauty, strength and energy, and eventually danced in Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.

Says Laurel Toto, one of Cambell's former teachers at the school: "We were very impressed by Neve's tremendous charisma as a performer and her diligent work habits. We are thrilled that she has found such great success in the performing arts world."

The actress has said she didn't have a lot of friends at the school, though her success there suggests that jealousy from other young women might have been a factor. She welcomed the discipline, but Campbell did not enjoy the pressure. At 14, she left school, moving in with her older brother Christian, who also is an actor. She got acting work in commercials (Eatons, Tampax). Then, on a whim, she auditioned for and won a dancing role in The Phantom Of The Opera when it debuted at the Pantages Theatre in Toronto in 1989.

At 15, Campbell was 10 years younger than anybody else in the dance corps for Phantom. She would never finish high school.

During her two years with the musical, she met an aspiring actor named Jeff Colt, whom she married in England in 1995 during filming of the TV-movie, The Canterville Ghost. They were married for about two and a half years and are now divorced.

A Canadian series called Catwalk was one of her first acting roles for television. You can spot Campbell in old episodes of Are You Afraid Of The Dark? and Kids In The Hall, and she also appeared in the film Paint Cans and, for TV, I Know My Son Is Alive.

She had a lead role in the teen thriller, The Craft.

Campbell moved to Los Angeles when she was 20. These days, she lives in Hollywood, where her closest friend is probably her brother, Christian. A few years ago, the two collaborated on a low-budget film called Hair Shirt, which they produced.

Campbell showed the world what she could do when she accepted Wild Things, the 1998 black comedy/psychosexual thriller that co-starred Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon and Denise Richards. At the time, director John McNaughton said that Campbell used her working-class background -- which, at ballet school, had always made her feel like "a kid from the wrong side of the tracks" -- to flesh out her portrayal of a drug-using, former inmate and all-around trailer-trash type.

Although she can probably play any role, Campbell in real life makes it obvious why Canadians are always depicted as polite and shy. She is polite and shy, though not icky.

As Amy Lippman, one of the creators of Party Of Five, said of Campbell, "There's a lovely calm about her."

And Campbell is brave. Where other actors claim to do work for this charity or that, Campbell puts her money where her mouth is by appearing in public-service announcements on television for the Tourette's Syndrome Association.

These ads feature Campbell and her younger brother Damian, who has Tourette's. They address the need for understanding and compassion for those who have the physical or vocal tics associated with the neurological disorder. The ads are shown in Canada and the United States, and Campbell and most of her family work tirelessly for the Tourette's Association on both sides of the border.

Campbell's own teen following ensures that the message will reach the right audience, making her participation particularly important.

"He's a computer genius," she says of Damian, explaining that her brother is trying to help her become computer literate. Asked to sum up her own computer skills, Campbell says at once, "I suck."

Meanwhile, as her ingenue roles draw to a close, Campbell is looking forward to what comes next. Making Drowning Mona helped her overcome fear of comedy. Fear?

Dubbed "Andy Griffith On Acid" and described as a white-trash version of Murder On The Orient Express, Drowning Mona is the sort of movie that lets actors go waaaay out there, and right over the top, in the name of comedy.

"I was terrified," Campbell says of this foray into laugh territory. "It's always scary to try new things, but you want to pull it off. The character is ridiculous. The film is absurd. I decided to be as ridiculous as I could."

Campbell, it turns out, can be pretty ridiculous. And it works.

That she has a manic giggle and a full-out laugh that got her nicknamed Foghorn make it no surprise that Campbell is adept at comedy.

"I think Neve is a comic genius," Drowning Mona director Nick Gomez says. "Her timing is impeccable. She made us laugh."

In her spare time, Campbell says she likes to take ballet class, hang out with her friends and family and just play. "I tried surfing in Hawaii," she says, smiling. "It was so much fun. I think I'm going to be a surfer chick."

Was she good at it? Yes. "I think, having been a dancer for so many years, it's a question of balance."

She knows from balance. Campbell wants to take time off. She speaks French and is currently learning to speak Spanish in anticipation of a trip to South America this summer.

She's going to try to relax, though it might not be constitutionally possible. "I think it will be easier to spend time with myself," she speculates.

"I just hope to continue growing. I've been extremely careful about all my decisions. Doing Scream 3 was difficult," she says, talking about the worry of doing another sequel when the first two were so successful.

Campbell says she feels "bittersweet" over the end of Party Of Five this spring and the last instalment of Scream.

"But I've worked 15 hours a day for six years as Julia. I've spent more time being Julia than I have myself, which is scary."

The NEVE CAMPBELL File

MORE GIRL KISSES: Campbell, yet again, kisses another woman in Drowning Mona. It gets laughs on several levels, but mostly because fans know that Campbell has kissed Olivia D'Abo on Party Of Five and Denise Richards in Wild Things.

The actress describes the reaction to Drowning Mona from co-star Danny Devito's adolescent son: "He was like, 'Dad -- why do we still have to see Neve kissing women?'''

ROMANCE: Campbell says she and John Cusack are just friends. She's been saying that for some time, actually.

GROWING PAINS: A self-described geek as a kid, Campbell toyed with the punk thing by shaving the back of her head, even though, as a ballerina, her hair had to be up in a bun. Okay, so she had a bun on top of a shaved head. Cool.

GIRL TALK: Courteney Cox, her co-star in the Scream movies, says, "Neve has such a great heart."


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