ARTICOLO ORIGINALE TRATTO DA IN STYLE MAGAZINE

Milano's Place

Melrose denizen Alyssa Milano is sexy, succesfull and comes from a happy family.
So what's missing from this almost perfect picture?

By Margot Dougherty
Photographed by Paul Jasmin

 

Don't even think about heading off to Alyssa Milano's Los Angeles canyon house without explicit instructions. You'll find yourself pulling consecutive U-turns on a narrow mountain road riddled with twists and curves. Hair-raising. But once inside the new Milano abode and past her Teacup Yorkies, Stella and Hugo, and her Akita, Ripley, visions of head-ons quickly clear from one's head. The five-bedroom, six-bath plantation-style home is a two- story tranquilizer. A large light-filled atrium with potted ferns and wicker furniture forms its center, and a profusion of artwork in the form of Madonnas, cherubim, crucifixes, statues and rosaries suggests a certain amount of protection within its walls.

"I'm obsessed with religious art", says Milano, friendly and softspoken, at the outset of a house tour that will prove her point. The fixation is a relic from childhood. "I was raised Catholic and grew up on Staten Island with the Virgin Mary in all these front yards. It gave me a really peaceful feeling". Milano's mother and co-manager, Lin, agrees. "Alyssa grew up with crucifixes and church and stuff", she says. "But", she laughs, "she's taken it to a new level".

Milano, who also grew up on a TV soundstage during the eight years she played Samantha on Who's the Boss?, has been a home owner since she was 19. "I'm a nester", she says. "It comes very naturally". But this house, which she bought in June, is significant. First of all, she moved out of the Valley: "That was big". Second, this happens to be the house that her best friend's father built. "It's a crazy story", says Milano, in a long blue T-shirt dress and chunky sneakers. It goes like this: When actress Kathryne "Kat" Dara Brown, Milano's roommate in Poison Ivy II, heard that the house she had once lived in with her father, Georg Stanford Brown (The Rookies), and mother, Tyne Daly (Cagney & Lacey), was up for sale, she made an appointment to see it. Milano joined her. "I just fell in love with it", she recalls. "I said, 'I have to buy this house'". So she did. Brown, whom Milano describes as "my soul sister", was looking for a new place to roost, and moved in too.

In 1992, after the last episode of Who's the Boss?, "I wasn't really sure if I would work again", says Milano, who got her start at age 7 in a touring production of Annie. "I was on TV when it wasn't cool to be on TV". She made a few movies - Commando, Embrace of the Vampire, Fear - and some telefilms. But these days, work is hitting a high note. Milano recently starred in the cable-released comedy Hugo Pool with Sean Penn and Robert Downey Jr., and executive-produced and starred in the thriller Below Utopia with Ice-T. Next year she'll star in Gold Rush, for The Wonderful World of Disney. "She's only 24"; says Lin. "Hopefully she'll step up to a lot of different things now".

Like her new show, Melrose Place. Last season the petite Milano got the gig as Jennifer Mancini, the scheming younger sister of the scheming Michael (Thomas Calabro). "I love it", she says, making herself even smaller on a plush couch in the downstairs "phun room", which features an aquarium, a pool table and a sauna. "It's the most emotionally stable job I've ever had in my life". Was it daunting being the new kid on the apartment block? "Even though I never went to one", says Milano, "it felt like the first day of highschool. I didn't know who to sit with at lunch, so I just went into my trailer. But they were great". Calabro claims Alyssa "checked right in. Everyone wonders what sort of attitude there's going to be, especially if someone's had a measure of success, but Alyssa is a doll".

Milano was 10 when she made the pilot for Who's the Boss? and 12 when the family moved to L.A. for her career. Her father, Tom, is a film music editor and her brother, Cory, 15, is a scholarship ice-hockey player at a Minnesota boarding school. She talks to him three times a week, lives eight car-minutes from her parents, and sees them about five times a week. In other words, the family is very tight. "Alyssa is so much fun", says Lin. "She invited us over to watch the season premiere of Melrose Place with her friends". Mom loves the house. "I feel like I'm on vacation here", she says. Apparently. One night when Alyssa and Kat had some seventies' music on, "I saw this hand fly by the kitchen", Alyssa remembers, rolling her eyes. "I looked, and my parents were dancing in the atrium".

It's the family bond, says Milano, that allowed her to blossom within a business that can wreak havoc on the most resolute of psyches. "You have to have two parents and a really, really major comfort zone when you walk in the door at night", she says of being a child star. "My parents hired a guardian for me at work, and they always had dinner on the table when I came home, letting me be a daughter". As far as missing out on normal schooling, "being tutored on set was really important to me academically", Milano says. "I was never good in a classroom; I was an odd, creative, loner child, and I dealt better with adults. I think being in this business gave me the childhood that fit me best".

That childhood hasn't been completely left behind. Milano points to her Madame Alexander and Barbie doll collections, as well as the phun room, marked by a brass plaque at the entry. An inflatable guitar and bat and other toys lie heaped in a corner. "I'm a dork", she concedes. The black-tiled pool is another potential play area. "I'm trying to get into the pool thing, but I'm from New York", says Milano. "We have fire hydrants". Says Brown: "Alyssa won't go-in unless it's 86F. My niece calls it the bath".

There is one small gap in Milano's full-to-bursting life. She has been single for a year and a half since breaking her engagement to actor Scott Wolf. "It's driving me crazy", she says. Finding a suitable suitor isn't easy for a gal with almost everything else. "I'm going to be 25 in December", Milano points out, "and it's hard to meet a guy my age that will walk into this house and feel secure about himself. It takes a really strong man to be able to deal with it". Her mother has proposed a nice gentlemanly import from Italy. "Great", Milano says. "A mail-order husband". Probably not necessary.