ARTICOLO ORIGINALE TRATTO DA AMERICAN WOMAN

Chatting with Charming Alyssa

The former Melrose Vixen and current star of the series Charmed talks about her tattoos, the type of men she likes and the importance of sex in her life.

By Nancy Marchetta

In recent interviews, not to mention thousands of web sites dedicated to her, Alyssa Milano's tattoos seem to be the subject of huge amounts of interest. Just to set the record straight, here's what she had to say about them.

"I have a fairy kneeling in grass on my hip, rosary beads on my back, an angel on my left ankle, and a garland of flowers around my right ankle". And the fifth... a sacred heart in a much more personal place on her famous bod. Definately not Tony Danza's innocent daughter anymore. But then again, if you're a Melrose fan, you probably knew her more as the not-so-innocent troublemaker Jennifer Mancini. Or if you're hooked on her new serio Charmed, you've seen her as the youngest of the three Halliwell sisters, probably the sexiest witches to grace the small screen since Elizabeth Montgomery twitched her nose in Bewitched.

But the acting bug bit Alyssa long before Who's The Boss? At age seven, after seeing the Broadway show Annie, Alyssa looked at her parents and said, "I can do that". A year later, her showbiz career began with a role as "July" (one of the orphans) in the very same Broadway musical. She spent over a year on tour in Annie before returning to New York to appear in several off-Broadway productions.

At age 11, Alyssa got her big break when she made her television debut as Samantha Micelli, with Tony Danza as her "housekeeping" dad, in the ABC sitcom Who's The Boss? During the eight-year run of the show, fans saw Alyssa grow up and eventually graduate to made-for-TV movies and films. Some of her more notable roles were as Arnold Schwarzenegger's daughter in the 1985 hit Commando and as the promiscuous teen Margo in the 1994 thriller Fear with Mark Wahlberg and Reese Witherspoon.

One little known fact about Alyssa is that she even had a successful stint as a pop star. As a teenager, she recorded four albums in Japan, all of which went platinum. In fact in Japan she's better known as a singer than an actress.

But one of Alyssa's best career moves came in April of '97 when she joined the cast of Fox TV's Melrose Place, her first regular TV series since Who's The Boss? She was introduced during the '97 season as the new-vixen-on-the-block Jennifer Mancini, and spent the '98 season causing all sorts of trouble for the Melrose residents.

Her popularity on Melrose led to a new opportunity to star in Spelling Television's latest creation, Charmed, Melrose fans were disappointed, but curious about Alyssa's new project when she left the show to play the young, free-spirited Phoebe in Charmed. The show co-stars Holly Marie Combs and former Beverly Hills 90210 trouble maker Shannen Doherty. No sooner had Alyssa joined the cast, than rumors started flying about Alyssa and Shannen's "rocky" relationship. One paper will say they're best friends, while another calls them bitter enemies. Who knows what the real story is.

One thing we do know for sure, is that Alyssa seems to have had quite a "charmed" life so far. She's beautiful, smart, funny, ambitious, but believe it or not, very single. In 1995 she dated and was engaged to Scott Wolf of Party Of Five. The two met and were soon inseperable while they were both working on the film Double Dragon. Wedding invitations were literally in the mail, when it fell apart six months later. Alyssa described the sudden split as "an awful heartbreak for me," and was very hurt that Wolf spoke about the whole situation so openly in interviews Maybe she's taking things a little slower now, but Alyssa is definately not hung up on limiting herself to a particular "type".

"I've dated the sweet mama's boy, the musician rocker, the struggling artist -- basically a lot of people without jobs", she joked.

In an interview with Maxim magazine, Alyssa said a guy that makes her laugh is key. "To me, laughing is the best thing in the world. If I can laugh with the guy I'm with, I'm happy. As far as looks, I'm into the 'man-child' guy. Like George Clooney who's 40 but still looks much younger than he is and has that boyish twinkle in his eye".

One thing Alyssa says she would like in a relationship is some sort of "creative stimulation". She says she hopes that's not too much to ask for in a man. "I need to have that conversation at three in the morning that really makes you think", says Alyssa.

Alyssa has what guys would find an extremely attractive, sensual attitude towards sex. She's not the kind of woman who feels the need to hide her sexuality "I was brought up in a house where sexuality and your own body were beautiful, normal things", Alyssa told Maxim magazine. "I feel a lot healthier when I'm having sex -- physically I feel all these jitters when I wake up in the morning. Just energy jitters... When I'm having sex, I don't have that". Another well-kown quirk about Alyssa is her penchant for wearing men's underwear. This small idiosyncracy has come up in several interviews. Alyssa always laughs it off good humoredly, insisting that while women's underwear may look sexier, it just doesn't fit as well as men's.

All this talk about Alyssa in her underwear doesn't mean, however, that she's exactly tickled pink about all the nude pictures of her that have been circulating on the Internet in the past few years.

"My mother has a company now that is working to get nude celebrity pictures off the Internet. A lot of them are totally fake".

And on the subject of Alyssa's many sex-crazed Web site fanatics, one very hot on-line topic is whether Alyssa and her once TV-dad, Tony Danza, ever did the deed. Everyone wants to know the real dirt on that one... exactly what went on behind the scenes at Who's The Boss? The answer... according to Alyssa, absolutely nothing!

"This is why I never go into my Web site", Alyssa laughs. "Tony and I had this father-daughter relationship, and it always drove me a little crazy, because I had an Italian father of my own. I certainly didn't need two".