Idgie Grows Up

When did Mary Stuart Masterson get breasts?!!

She's both sinewy and voluptuous in the Kennedy Center's rendition of the modern classic play, "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" by Tennessee Williams.

The gamine actress, memorable as the tough-but-tender tomboy, Watts, in the 80's film "Some Kind of Wonderful" and another tomboy, charismatic Idgie Threadgoode, in "Fried Green Tomatoes," vamps it up as the sultry, sexually-frustrated girly-girl Maggie - a character Elizabeth Taylor memorably seared onto celluloid in the 1958 screen version of "Cat."

Masterson's Maggie has a muscular feline grace. When she turns and slinks to the back of the stage, the muscles on her back undulate and ripple underneath the thin slip she wears through most of the play. Her slender arms are defined, as are her legs.

You'd have that body after working night after night, as she did, in Broadway's physically-exhausting musical "Nine" last year. (Note to self: Must work out tomorrow.)

But about the breasts: Did Masterson heed the Hollywood siren call and go silicone? If you've seen her other films, you'll remember her as a waif of a woman, with narrow hips and a girlish chest, not one with va-va voom proportions. Ah, well. I'm sure it was a career decision.

She's wonderful, by the way, in this play, critics be damned.