WHITNEY HOUSTON: NO MISS PRISSY

EVEN BEFORE HER ROLE OPPOsite Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard made her a movie star, there was something cinematic about Whitney Houston. Her life has been big time and big screen. The daughter of gospel and R.-and-B. singer Cissy Houston, she began at the top with her 1985 debut album, Whitney Houston, and has sold 80 million records worldwide since. Her sweet lyrics (Didn't We Almost Have It All) recall the classic romances of Hollywood in the 1940s; her adventurous vocals (in songs like her majestic megahit I Will Always Love You) have the grandiosity of a Spielberg epic. And her 1992 marriage to controversial hip-hop singer Bobby Brown--an unlikely pairing that has fascinated the gossip press--has some of the urban grit of a Hughes brothers film.

Interviewed recently on a beach near her getaway home in Miami, Houston, 32, projected the contradictions. As she arrived clad in a form-fitting purple dress, hand in hand with Brown--the two have reconciled after a recent separation--she seemed ready for a camera to swoop down for an adoring close-up. Yet she also flashed some feisty homegirl attitude. "People think I'm Miss Prissy Pooh-Pooh, but I'm not; I like to have fun," she says, jabbing a finger in the air. "I can get down, really freakin' dirty with you. I was born in Newark, New Jersey, with two brothers and a very strong father. It made me tough--perhaps too tough."

"Tough" is not a word usually associated with Houston or her music. "Safe" and "homogenized" are, though not always fairly. She has a towering, dynamic voice, but when she sings material that's too slight for her skills (such as Love Is a Contact Sport), it's an unseemly mismatch, like Grant Hill dunking on a fifth-grader. But when Houston takes on a tune worthy of her gifts (like You Give Good Love), the result is something winged, almost seraphic. What's more, with the huge success of 1992's The Bodyguard--the movie made more than $400 million at the box office worldwide, while the sound track sold 33 million copies--she's proved she has multimedia clout.

She's ready to prove it again. Just before Christmas, Houston will be seen in Waiting to Exhale, the movie adaptation of Terry McMillan's popular novel about the lives of four black women. The sound track, containing three numbers by Houston, has just arrived in the stores and is already racking up hefty sales. In January Houston starts shooting The Preacher's Wife, a remake of the 1947 Cary Grant--Loretta Young comedy The Bishop's Wife, co-starring Denzel Washington, and she's at work on a gospel sound track for the film. Meanwhile, in search of projects to produce as well as star in, Houston has signed a development deal with Disney. Her first acquisition: the rights to a biography of actress Dorothy Dandridge. Says Houston: "I heard Janet Jackson wanted to play Dorothy very badly. If I feel it in my soul, I'll do it. If not, maybe I'll let Janet do it."