FILM; The Many Screen Ethnicities of Mira Sorvino

HER COMBAT BOOTS, FISH-NET stockings and cut-off jeans freshly packed, Mira Sorvino arrives at the bar of the Royalton Hotel elegantly dressed in black. The teen-age-punk attire she folded away was for an afternoon audition; the bags she carries are for an evening flight to Los Angeles. In heels she is just shy of six feet tall and stands in that private orbit inhabited by long, lean women, already contemplating her next costume change. "You caught me in the middle of three screen tests," Ms. Sorvino explains.

After her recent appearance as a free-spirited woman who speaks with a perfect Catalan accent and pokes the mores and beliefs of two conventional American men in "Barcelona," directed by Whit Stillman, Ms. Sorvino is beginning her move from short films and independents to more visible work and major studio productions. Four years after graduating from Harvard (she won't give her exact age in print because she still plays 17-year-olds), she is also taking on a variety of personas with remarkable ease.

In "Quiz Show," directed by Robert Redford, which opens Sept. 14, Ms. Sorvino plays Sandra Goodwin, the wife of a Congressional investigator looking into whether a popular 1950's television game show is rigged. In a small but significant role she voices the conscience that often eludes him.

A short while back, Mira's father, Paul, the character actor, best known for his roles in the film "Goodfellas" and the NBC series "Law and Order," was the only Sorvino familiar to most television and film viewers.

Ms. Sorvino is sensitive about being a second-generation actor but is building confidence as her body of work increases. "I almost changed my name early on to my mother's maiden name," she says. (Mira's mother, Lorraine Davis, was an actress but didn't pursue her career after marriage.) "It certainly had a more American ring, but I felt this is my name, I'm proud of my heritage, and I'm not going to change it." Still, at this incipient career stage, Ms. Sorvino struggles to maintain her separate identity, bristling at the comment that she was recommended to Whit Stillman by John Thomas, the cinematographer for "Barcelona," who had worked with her father and her on "Law and Order." "I would like to have my work define me," she adds.

If a single characteristic currently defines Mira Sorvino, it's the range of voices and accents she creates. Mr. Stillman says he was having difficulty casting the role of Marta, one of the young Spaniards in "Barcelona," until he heard Ms. Sorvino audition. "She came into a casting session and wanted to do the reading with an accent," says Mr. Stillman. "Normally I find people trying to wing accents kind of embarrassing. But she was really good. It was convincingly like someone who was not American, which for me was the big hurdle."

Ms. Sorvino tucked her long, dark hair into a platinum blond wig as Ben Gazzara's young girlfriend in the Showtime movie "Parallel Lives," which had its premiere on Aug. 14, and added some native New York notes to an otherwise properly voweled cast. In the recently completed BBC mini-series "The Buccaneers," based on Edith Wharton's unfinished novel, she plays a spirited Brazilian woman who gently taunts the English aristocracy. This spring she dons a Bronx Italian-American accent as the wife of a crack addict in the independent film "Sweet Nothings." In "Quiz Show," she's Jewish.

In the future, Ms. Sorvino says, she would like to play someone without a distinctive ethnic identity, perhaps testing her strengths in a role a bit closer to home. "I'm interested in doing something that would bridge the gap from innocence to experience, a young woman discovering life," she says. "And I think this is the time to do it."

Photos: Mira Sorvino with Rob Morrow, top left, in "Quiz Show" (Barry Wetcher/Hollywood Pictures); bottom left, with Chris Eigeman in "Barcelona"; right, in "Barcelona" (Bob Marshak/Fine Line Features) -- Convincingly not American.