Classically-trained actress Marina Sirtis is out of this world

Marina Sirtis cooked "rivedosoupa" the night before and now she's cleaning the kitchen and putting the dishes away while she talks about playing Deanna Troi from another planet for several seasons on the TV phenomenon Star Trek: The Next Generation and now in feature films.

"I'm a real homebody," the classically-trained actress pauses to admit while dishes clatter in the background. "Can you hear me? I'm finished now, though."

A homebody is the last thing her galaxy of fans would consider the London-born actress who trained with the Royal Shakespeare Company, played Ophelia in Hamlet her first job out of drama school, starred as Elizabeth in Richard III, and hopes to tackle Medea, Phaedra and Antigone. She did a performance a few years ago in Hartford and the audience was packed with Star Trek fans who had come from as far away as Boston and New York to see their favorite empathic, half-Betazoid ship's counselor in the flesh.

"Yes, I will always be Deanna Troi," she admits. "But the fans are not just fans of your character, they're fans of you as a person. They love you and they want to see you and they want to see you do more things."

Which suits the work ethic she learned in British theater ("British actors have the attitude that work is work," she declares) and suits the survival skills she learned growing up in genteel poverty as the daughter of an East End tailor. She remembers earning five pence as a teenager to pull basting out of jackets and being fitted at eleven for a school uniform that would have to last her until eighteen.

"We never starved, we always had food, lots of food on the table, being Greek," she insists. "But it was a real working-class, blue-collar upbringing."

And her parents were "hugely disappointed" when she passed up admission to the university and chose drama school instead, though being an actress was her only ambition since she was old enough to pose in front of the mirror as a ballerina and other guises.

"I think I was lonely, because I had a really strict Greek upbringing," she explains. "I wasn't allowed to go play out in the street with the other kids, I was very sheltered. And so I watched television."

Graduating drama school, she did theater and television in England and the continent, including a tour in the Rocky Horror Picture Show ("I can sing in tune," she maintains), but she was also denied parts because she was considered too "exotic" ("I didn't look like the girl next door," she says). So she followed another British acting tradition and sailed for America.

"The reason that a lot of British actors end up in America is financial," she admits. "You get to a certain point in your life and you think, 'Well, I better start thinking about my old age and how I'm going to support myself.'"

Five days after landing in Los Angeles she got a part on TV that supported her for three months. She stretched it to four and auditioned for Star Trek, where her exotic looks suited her otherwordly role.

And the role promised job security.

"We were guaranteed a year on the air, we were guaranteed 26 weeks, which at that point would have been the longest job I've ever had on television," she still enthuses. "And that being the only criteria, that I was going to be working for a year, it was a great job. I was delighted with it."

So were her parents, who finally reconciled to her career, though her mother always wanted her to be a lawyer and still wants her to settle down.

"My mom, if truth be known, would like me to be married with five children," she laughs, dishes finally put away and kitchen in order.