Martha Plimpton

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Actress Martha Plimpton might come from a show-biz family, but she never decided to follow in their footsteps. It just happened, she says.

The daughter of actors Keith Carradine and Shelley Plimpton, Martha always had a mind of her own — and still does.

"I didn't really rebel against it. I maybe didn't get as much enjoyment out of it as I could have when I was younger," she says, slipping into a chenille chair in a lounge here, as she clutches her ivory high-heeled pumps to her chest.

"When you're younger you take yourself kind of seriously and you think highly of yourself before you have a right to," she says.

"I'm glad I'm still doing it. I'm very lucky and fortunate to have been doing it as long as I have. And the fact that I get to do a musical on Broadway or a Tom Stoppard play on Broadway or play a lawyer on television or a grandmother on a comedy with Cloris Leachman, I could not ask for a better life."

Though she's been in more than 30 movies like "The Goonies," "The Mosquito Coast" and "I'm Not Rappaport," dozens of TV shows and scores of theater appearances, Plimpton says she was never ambitious.

"I'm a very disorganized, undisciplined, unfocused person. When I'm working, obviously I'm very, very focused, but I don't have this voracious need to be extremely wealthy or famous. ... I'm not an actress because I want to become something. I'm an actress because I want to have fun. It's what I want to do with my time, and there are things I want to accomplish doing it that bring me pleasures and hopefully people who watch, pleasure. But there's no other person I want to create, no other person I want to make out of myself."

Because she never surrendered to the Hollywood mythmakers, Plimpton has spent most of her life in New York, where she was reared by her mom.

"My mother is a very intelligent woman, and she was always determined that I should understand the difference between celebrity or show-business and being an actor. She said you can't choose to be a star, stardom chooses you. But you can choose to be an actor. And she's right."

Plimpton is wearing a white, sleeveless dress dotted with flowers and is barefoot because her shoes are too big, she explains. With her short cropped hair she still looks like a coed, but she's playing a grandmother in Fox's new comedy, "Raising Hope," premiering Sept. 21. She doesn't mind playing a grandmother — she's always been what she calls a "character actor."

"We usually use that term to describe someone quirky or not typically attractive, older. I think of myself as a character actress because I like to play all different kinds of characters and leading ladies and ingenues are great, but unless you're working in the theater you're not getting asked to do much except live in the context of your male counterpart. So character acting is more fun, you just get more to do."

Despite the ease she feels in her work, she's considered quitting many times, she says. "Not because I wanted to stop acting, but because I just didn't want to deal with the people anymore, or whatever, that feeling of powerlessness that you get from dealing with crazy people.

"Show business is full of crazy people, and I'm probably one of them. There have been times I wanted to do something else with my life. And I think that's normal. When you've been working in the same field for as many years as I have, for most of my life, it would be weird if I didn't want to try something else."

At 39, Plimpton has dated a gallery of men including actors River Phoenix and John Patrick Walker, but never married. "There's too many other things that I needed or wanted to do," she confesses. She and her current boyfriend (not an actor) just returned from India.

"I would like to settle down and get married and have a family, and I probably will very soon. But for me, I guess, other things always seemed more important."

She's learned her lesson, as far as actors are concerned. "Even if I weren't in the relationship that I am now I probably would try not to date actors. One is enough. One's plenty. I have my hands full with my own career, I don't need to deal with somebody else's. Also because I'm interested in other things in life and I like somebody who appreciates what I do and then can have a creative conversation with me about what they do."