January 29, 1997 HOLLYWOOD -- Chris O'Donnell is the brash young Hollywood star playing the brash young teenaged Ernest Hemingway in the new film In Love And War.

But it was hardly the most obvious casting. O'Donnell's main claim to fame, after first getting noticed as the naive acolyte to raging Al Pacino in Scent Of A Woman, is playing Robin in the Batman movies. And -- horrors! -- O'Donnell admits that, when he was in school and roughly the same age as Hemingway in the film, he could have cared less about the literary giant he portrays.

"I was a business major," the preppie 27-year-old actor with the close-cropped hair remembers of his years at Boston College. "I stayed away from reading the books because ..." His voice trails off, almost in shame. The because is implied: Because business majors didn't want to be intellectual geeks, because O'Donnell was more intrigued by future $uccess than by culture.

Now he is getting interested, after the fact, especially now that he's both rich and in the cultural industries.

"Yeah, I mean, I'm amazed at the life that this guy lived. I mean, it's exciting all the stuff he did, going to Spain and going to Cuba. And he went to the bullfights and he was a deep-sea fisherman and a hunter. I mean, he really got out there and lived life. I mean, it's a shame that he ... well ... he took his own life.

"But I'm actually anxious to go back and read some of his books. Especially, well, I haven't read A Farewell To Arms yet. I think it's going to be great."

Richard Attenborough's In Love And War is a loosely historical version of a doomed love affair between Hemingway and an American Red Cross nurse named Agnes Von Kurowsky (played by Sandra Bullock) just behind the front lines in Italy during World War I. Hemingway fictionalized the experience in his novel A Farewell To Arms.

The odd thing is that playing the irascible Hemingway -- whose bullying, bitching and self-absorption is depicted by O'Donnell in the film -- is unlikely to change O'Donnell's image as 'the safe-sex symbol of the 1990s.'

"It's a Mr. Nice Guy reputation, or something," O'Donnell chortles about his Hollywood public image, which he has done nothing to smear in his known private life.

He just enhanced it in December, announcing his engagement to his long-time girlfriend, 23-year-old Caroline Fentress, the kid sister of his college roommate and the daughter of sports agent Lee Fentress, who shows the money to athletes such as basketball's David Robinson and tennis star Steffi Graf.

"I don't really care one way or another," O'Donnell claims, without much conviction rising in his soft, mumbling voice. "That's fine," he continues about being Mr. Nice Guy. "It's better than people thinking I'm a jerk, you know."

Meanwhile, he continues his stint as Robin, with TV star George Clooney replacing mercurial Val Kilmer as Batman.

"George has been great," O'Donnell avows. "I mean, it was a little strange the first week, you know. But it's been excellent. I really get along well with George. You know, smooth sailing.

"He goofs around a little bit more on the set and we have kind of like an on-going banter. Val was kind of ... (again the thoughts are unexpressed as Mr. Nice Guy censors his words) ... he's a little more serious, a little more intense and a little more focused with his acting. George and I kind of hang out."


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