he may be TV's hottest young villainess and an admitted former wild child in real life, but Anne Curtis is as smart and spunky as she is stunning

“REFRESHING” must be the most overused adjective to come out of a typewriter when describing the newest beautiful face in Philippine showbusiness, but in the case of Anne Curtis, it still applies. Not because she's all sweetness and light, but because she's not afraid to admit she's having fun, both in front of the cameras and in real life. Take that scene in ABS-CBN's blockbuster soap opera Hiram , where she competes with an achingly sweet Heart Evangelista for the affections of a befuddled Geoff Eigenmann . When Anne's character Margaret, with her pastel ponchos and perpetual tears, has won Geoff's heart, Stephanie doesn't lock herself in her room and sob into her teddy bear; the girl puts on a mini skirt, buys a drink and parties . Yes, even after the entire cast goes into the disco to set her straight, Stephanie doesn't deny that she's hurt, she's mad, and yes, she just wants to misbehave for a while.

“I'm not choosy with roles,” Anne declares. “If something is offered to me, and I know I'm capable of doing it, whether it's a small role or a kontrabida , I'm not afraid of it. Yes, I'm the kontrabida in Hiram. I don't want to be typecast as sweety-sweety.

But isn't it natural for a young star to be afraid of looking evil so early in her career? “Everyone has their own personal opinion. For me, this is acting. It's nice to have a clean image, but that doesn't mean you just have to stay with one role. It's not nice if you're always getting api .” Anne admits she thought long and hard about accepting the role of the problematic but infinitely more interesting wild child in Hiram. “After this, I thought, I will look sooo bad,” she says, laughing. “But I also thought, well, this is acting. And it worked. If I'm being bad, I want people to be inis with me. I want that to happen!”

But Anne already knows that this is the Philippines , and fans tend to carry their emotions even beyond the boob tube. “If I'm being bad to Heart or Geoff, they get mad at me. There's one of the new stars on the show, Aaron, and Stephanie is fighting with him, so one of his fans came up to me and said, ‘Wag mo naman awayin si Aaron ! ' I had to say, ‘Hindi po, sa script lang po yon , but behind the camera we're all friends.'”

The Australian-born 20-year-old (she marked the milestone just last February 17) with the luscious lips and the beautiful lash-fringed brown eyes has taken it all in stride, however. “I can't please the fans, I've expected that. Especially since there's competition between Heart and me when it comes to fans.” The contrast is striking, we must note. “I guess it's also the imaging,” she says candidly. “Heart has the clean, mabait image, and me, I've been through all the bad publicity. The characters worked for both us. If you made Heart play Stephanie or I played Margaret, I don't think it would have worked for both of us. If you made Heart play Stephanie or I played Margaret, I don't think it would have worked.”

And why not, we push. “I went through quite an adolescent stage!” Anne says with a roll of her eyes and an occasional, very cute “ Ay nakuuu ! ” “I've made mistakes, and I don't regret anything, but that's part of life. I've been called a rebelde , a playgirl, whatever. What I was doing wasn't that wrong, though—making friends, staying out late, disobeying my dad's curfew. But I think everyone goes through that. It just happens that I'm in showbiz, and everybody's watching.

Speaking of watching, well, everyone is watching Anne these days, especially her growing numbers of male fans, who have noticed how she has suddenly, grown up. The pretty little 13-year-old who debuted as a princess in the fantasy movie Magic Kingdom after being discovered in Jollibee with her parents is now quite a lady; just check out any of her vamped-up magazine covers, including this one. There have been more grown-up-roles, including one as a suicidal young Japayuki wife in Maalaala Mo Kaya episode, and Anne herself admits “I like to experiment more with the way I dress—no more pigtails, obviously.” In her personal life, that means managing her own finances, investing her own place, and being open to more mature and sexy roles. “Well, not that sexy,” she clarifies. “Remember what Dawn Zulueta did in Hihintayin Kita Sa Langit, kissing on the beach with Richard Gomez ? That's how far I want to go. That, and Dyesebe l.” She still cringes a bit at the idea of being a universal sex object, though. “I don't want all that just yet. I don't think I can make that big a jump.” She doesn't mind the male attention, she says, “as long as people's perception isn't altered that much, and people don't think I'm really cheap in real life.”

As for those lips and the inevitable comparisons to Angelina Jolie , Anne says they actually bother her. “Only because people keep noticing my lips. They're really big, especially when I wear a red lipstick! I even read in newspaper once, someone wrote about how I had changed from a sweet girl into someone with collagen lips in a liquor commercial (she endorses Ginebra San Miguel). Collagen! If you look at all my early pictures, those lips were already there.”

Don't get us wrong; none of this is said in an overtly bitchy manger, cigarette in hand. In fact, Anne walks in sans makeup, wearing a wide smile and a simple T-shirt and skirt, accompanied by boyfriend Paolo Araneta , whom she openly talks about when asked, and who kisses her goodbye with an un-self-conscious. “See you later” before her goes. She's accompanied by a yaya whose main job is to look after the adorable Buddy, a four-month-old Maltese puppy in a pink dog bag who was Paolo's Christmas gift to her, and Anne's very first dog. “People say I have to discipline him so he'll learn, and sometimes I can't,” she wails in the most little girl of voices, those eyes rolling again. “So I just flick him a bit on the nose. And he knows, he's a good dog.”

The “refreshing” part is that Anne has never bothered to be irritatingly coy about the showbiz guys she has dated, from Oyo Boy Sotto (who reportedly got into a fight with Cogie Domingo over Anne) to Richard Gutierrez and Paolo, and we commend her for that. “What's the point of denying something when you're going to be seen out together anyway? The only time I've ever had to lie was with Richard, because he had a love team. That's why I'm glad I'm not in any love team, my name isn't tied to any one guy.” Paolo is her first non-showbiz boyfriend, Anne explains, she loves it that when she is with his friends, “I can be really normal, because they don't know who I am, and I like that!” They've been together for five months, and he has taught of her the finer points of wakeboarding, which they try out when they're in Lago, Batangas. “I love the beach, Anne says.

The beach was also the setting for one of the wildest things Anne admits she's ever done, when she was partying hard in Boracay, “and I had a bit too much drink, and got into soooo much trouble! My dad trusted me when I said that was with my girlfriends, and one night during a birthday party I had too much and I fell over, and I came out in TV. Of course my dad found out, and he said, ‘How dare you do this, young lady!' He doesn't mind me drinking, but not too much.”

It helps that dad, Australian lawyer James Curtis-Smith (mom is a Filipina, the former Carmencita Ojales ) keeps the reins just loose enough. While he is far from being a stage father (though he goes over her contracts as a lawyer), he lets his eldest daughter make her own decisions; he is ever encouraging her to eventually move into her new home when construction is over. When Anne, signature model for the youthful clothing line Petit Monde, was asked to do the GSM (Ginebra San Miguel) liquor commercial, it was dad who said it was okay. The ad is young, fun and generally benign—she's just having fun at a bar, despite being alone in a crowd of hunks and babes—but Anne adds just the right bit of oomph, especially in the last shot, when she smiles beguilingly for the camera, poised to take a sip. “He told me, ‘What have you got to lose? It's not like you're going to be sitting on a horse in a bikini, Anne!”

“He always says, ‘I trust you, Anne,' and I don't want to do anything to betray that.” Anne Curtis sighs, and she is both such a little girl and such a beautiful woman at the same time. “I guess I'll be a daddy's girl all my life.” - -