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It's one of those asthmathic, monotone guffaws. Imagine a machine gun that issues forth a staccato of wheezes. That's her laugh.
But it's not unwelcome. In fact there's something downright disarming about it. One senses God may have made a token effort to balance the 29-year-old actress's ledger. On the credit side, she's this gorgeous, versatile, tall, thin blonde with formidable acting chops.
And on the debit side: a laugh that sounds like it's coming from Urkel.
Fortunately, as titular secret agent Felicity Shagwell in the Austin Powers sequel The Spy Who Shagged Me, Graham's assignment is to get laughs, not give them.
In the film, which displaced The Phantom Menace as the number one box office draw during the weekend, Myers's swinging superspy travels back in time from the present to 1969 in pursuit of his arch-nemesis Dr. Evil (also played by Myers). There, his American spy liaison is Felicity, a mini-skirted '60s babe as sexually rapacious as Austin.
COMPILATION OF CHARACTERS
Like its 1997 predecessor, the movie is a mix--n--match of '60s spy/Carry On movies and TV shows. So it was with the character of Felicity, a compilation of the '60s greatest babes.
"When they wrote the script, they were thinking of Jane Fonda in Barbarella," Graham says.
"You know how her character in that movie, even though it was a ridiculous situation, she was concerned about wanting to save the world. It was that whole '60s political consciousness thing."
But Graham preferred to use a different role model: Ursula Andress's Honey Rider in Dr. No. (The film features an outright homage when Graham is seen walking from the sea in a white bikini.)
"There's something cool about her, as a Bond heroine, I just thought she was really sexy, you know," she says.
But even as she was paying homage, Graham says she enjoyed the way Austin Powers gently ridicules the Bond oeuvre
"There's something really sexy about them, but they're so ridiculous," she says.
"In every situation, the male is just on top of it and he's got the (funny) thing to say and every woman falls in love with him. So it's fun to make fun of that type of thing."
In August, Graham will be seen cutting up again in Steve Martin's comedy Bofinger, in which she plays an ambitious starlet.
"I play a girl from Ohio who comes to L.A. wanting to be an actress," she says. "I seem really sweet and naive ... and then I proceed to sleep my way to the top."
GEEKY DRAMA PERSON
That strategy wasn't neccessary for Graham, of course. Born in Milwaukee, the daughter of an FBI agent, she says she describes herself as a "geeky drama person" when she went to high school in Agoura, California.
"It was kind of like a John Hughes school, where you really had to be like a cheerleader or a football player, so I was kind of like a weirdo and people didn't really think of me as attractive," she says.
"It was kind of hard to get guys to go out with me at my school."
That's not a problem anymore.
Her current beau is actor-filmmaker Edward Burns of Saving Private Ryan. And, except for the laugh, you can drop the adjective "geeky" too.
After making an impression as a doomed junkie in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, Graham unequivocally wowed audiences as the disturbed young porn star Rollergirl in Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar-nominated drama Boogie Nights. That, she acknowledges, was a turning point in her career.
"Things have already changed in that I'm getting more offers and I'm able to go after parts that I wouldn't have been able to go after before," she says.