Red Storm Rising

There’s nothing like starting out your film acting experience with a simple, no-brainer part.

Just ask 13-year-old Mayim Bialik. All she had to do for her major feature film debut--Touchstone’s “Beaches,” opening Friday--is play red-headed Bette Midler at age 11, which is a lot like being asked to play a strengthening tropical depression.

It’s a mark of Bialik’s growing sang-froid as an actress that the assignment didn’t seem to faze her; she simply got down to the task at hand, which was to watch Midler at work for a day or so. And then just to do whatever was required of her.

“I don’t know how other people approach this job; I’ve only been doing it myself for a couple of years,” says Bialik, a slender girl with a just-about-to-change rasp in her voice. “But it doesn’t seem right to think about everything you’re going to try to do ahead of time, because then you don’t try anything new--experimenting, I mean--with your voice or hands or anything.”

Experimentation is a key for Bialik. As a much younger girl, she and her brother put on shows for amused parents and relatives, and those ventures were followed by more formal training in dance, piano and singing--all supervised by her film maker mother, Barbara.

But young Bialik seems a girl who prefers science classes to art classes and observation to intuition. She wants to study to be a marine biologist because, she says, she’s concerned about the health of sea creatures and the oceans themselves. (And getting work on films and in TV--Bialik’s a semi-regular on the syndicated series “Webster”--sure can help pay those college lab fees.)

“The only way I can learn something about Bette, or anybody I’m playing is to watch them, then be with them,” Bialik says. “Sure I get nervous (being an actor) sometimes. But if you think of it that way--as an experiment, something you’re trying to test out--being an actor’s a whole lot less scary.”