Wesley Snipes, Hollywood's hottest new star talks about: his divorce, his days on the streets and why he doesn't have 'jungle fever.' - Cover Story

SIX years ago Wesley Snipes was installing telephones in New York. Today, he has his own direct line to the power operators in Hollywood. With touch-tone speed, he's gone from unknown to unforgettable, from obscurity to celebrity.

Not yet 30, he's among the most sought-after actors in Tinsletown. Everyone wants the 4-1-1 on Snipes. Who is he? Where is he? How can we get him?

Film critics say he employs "a dizzying talent." You can't pass a newstand without seeing his face. The Washington Post called him "the most celebrated new actor of the season." Jet and Newsweek put him on the cover. Major studios fall all over themselves to sign him for their latest movies (since Jungle Fever wrapped, he's already shot The Waterdance in which he plays a paraplegic and White Me Can't Jump for 20th Century Fox.) And in the ultimate Hollywood litmus test f what makes an actor a star, women luuuuuuuuuuuuv him. So much so, in fact, that they appear ready to propel him into major league hearthrob territory. Leaving a Saturday night showing of Jungle Fever, in which Snipes stars as an architect having an affair with his White secretary, three teenage girls (all White) voice what is clearly the collective industry wisdom on Wesley Snipes: "He's young, hot and he's cool."

Exactly. And absolutely nothing like you'd expect a just-turned-29 suddenly famous ex-pool shark from the Bronx to be. For one thing, he's uncommonly centered--grounded in a way few people, never mind sudden celebrities, ever manage. For another, there's nothing affected about him--nothing pompous or put-on. In person, he wears his fame as casually as his gold hoop erring, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his career is in full ascension. Since 1985 when he landed his first film, Wildcats, after the first-choice actor didn't work out, it's been pretty much a roller-coaster ride to fame. He played a boxer in Streest of Gold, turned down a role in Do The Right Thing to play baseball speedster Willie Mays Hays in Major League and, last year, hooked up with Spike Lee to co-star in Mo' Better Blues, where his who-the-hell-was-that performance reduced women to confetti. No easy feat when you're playing opposite the lethally sexy Oscar-winner Denzel Washington. "I just wanted to go in, do a good job, and not let Denzel blow me off the screen," says Snipes of his role as saxophonist Shadow Henderson.

Not only wasn't he blown off the screen then, he was even mo' better the next time audiences saw him. As Nino Brown, the brilliant but ruthless drug lord in New Jack City, Snipes gave a chillingly real performance that turned the low-budget sleeper into a monster hit. Made for $8.5 million, New Jack City earned more than $20 million in its first three weeks and is the year's fourth highest-grossing picture.

Writer Barry Michael Cooper wrote New Jack City's starring role specifically for Snipes after watching his portrayal of the rival gang leader in Michael Jackson's Bad video. "Wesley's finger-in-the-face questioning of Michael Jackson's bravery was so realistic that I thought [director MArtin] Scorsese had hired a homeboy off the streets," says Cooper.

All of which brings us back to the "young" and "hot" and "cool" assessment of his three young fans. The young part is clear. But the hot and cool? It's just in him. It comes from the early years in, as he puts it, "the boogie-down Bronx." The intensity. The extremes. The hot passions, the frigid indifference of inner-city living.

Though not in the bad-guy gangster sense Cooper thought, Snipes will be the first to tell you that, in some ways, a homeboy from the 'hood is exactly what he is. His mother, a teacher's aide, and his father, an aircraft engineer, divorced before his second birthday, and he and his sister grew up in a third-floor apartment in the South Bronx. "We were oor. There wasn't any middle class happening for us . . .," he says. "I was raised in a single-parent household and my mom worked jobs on the side to provide for these two crumb snatchers. She was hard on me and, though we laugh about it now, I tell her sometimes she was unnecessarily hard with her punishments."

When, for instance, Snipes became a regular at the neighborhood pool hall ("I got real good--money good--so I started hustling and staying out later and later"), his mother packed up the family and moved to Orlando, Fla., ignoring Snipes' desperate pleas to stay in New York. "I was going to the High School for the Peforming Arts . . . and it was girls, girls, girls all over the place. I was a junior and coming into my puberty and my hormones were going like 'Ahhhhhhy.' I didn't want to leave that . . . . If I could have walked back to New York I would have."

An award-winning high school drama student when he graduated, he got his long-awaited opportunity to return to New York in the form of a Victor Borge scholarship to the State University at Purchase. There, the two seminal events of his life occurred. He became a Muslim. And he met his wife. Though neither experience worked out--he eft the Islamic faith in 1988 and divorced last year--both, he says, changed him in ways nothing has before or since.