Who would have imagined that one of Hollywood's loveliest actresses was making her way through life determined not to meet the right man, not to get married, not to have the children she wanted.

And all because of what her mama told her.

"She said: `Get it for yourself,' " recites Angela Bassett, her face stern in the moment. "She said: `You get your own. You get your own so you don't have to rely on anyone else.' "

So Bassett did just that. But then, just as she was ready to make her next move, Stella had to get her groove back.

Bassett delayed her wedding to actor Courtney B. Vance last fall to complete filming on the second of Terry McMillan's bestselling novels to be made into a movie. The first, of course, was "Waiting to Exhale," which also starred Bassett and Whitney Houston. It was an outsize success in that it did more business than expected with women, black women in particular, ganging up with their girlfriends to see it again and again.

"How Stella Got Her Groove Back," which opened Friday, is Bassett's movie-star movie. The role demands that she be beautiful, wear stop-him, drop-him clothes, while being romanced by a gorgeous man 20 years her junior.

Bassett is a classically trained, accomplished actress who plays pretty so well that she almost robs the movie of its central conflict. Looking as good as she does next to her co-star, young hunk Taye Diggs, it's hard to see why anyone would have a problem with their aesthetically perfect relationship.

"Yeah, I know," she says, with a laugh. "He is so good-looking that some people are going to come away asking: `How can you not be in a better state of mind just spending 24 hours with him?' "

But the plot dictates that Stella wrestle with the appropriateness of hooking up with someone so young she's 40, he's 20 while undergoing a career crisis she loses her job as a big-earning stock broker and suffering the loss of her best friend, Delilah (Whoopi Goldberg), to cancer.

Bassett has big, crowd-pleasing moments on-screen, but she drew the line at one that definitely would have thrilled the masses. The 40-year-old actress refused to appear nude. "I know what that's about," she says, with a snort. "It's always the girl who takes her clothes off. We're the objects. It's just not necessary."

As a result, the love scenes in "Stella" depict the intimacy as much as the act exploitation interruptus.

Not all that many people seek anonymity in stardom, but Bassett, who made her mark playing Laurence Fishburne's ex-wife in "Boyz N the Hood" and then Betty Shabazz in "Malcolm X," always has been wary of the ego-stokers.

"People will try to blow smoke up your bum," she told an interviewer in 1995, having crossed the threshold into certified stardom playing Tina Turner in "What's Love Got to Do With It" in 1993. "They will try to scare you into mistaking your presence for the main event. I check my motives. I try not to get into thinking that things aren't happening if I'm not there.

"I try to remember the reasons I got into the business."

Which begs the question, exactly how did someone so sane get into the business? After all, Hollywood doesn't usually draw from the ranks of the identifiably stable.

The short answer: What else was she going to do with her master's degree in drama from Yale?

The long answer has to do with growing up in the projects in St. Petersburg, Fla., and then traveling to Washington at 15 and seeing James Earl Jones onstage and in that moment, "finding my passion." And Mama had something, or everything, to do with it.

"My mother has a little drama in her," Bassett says in a tone that declares she is making a huge understatement. "So I came by it quite naturally. I got it legal."

Betty Bassett raised Angela and her sister, D'Nette, on her own Angela has seen her father only twice putting herself through night school to qualify for her eventual secretarial job with the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. Her girls were very much part of the effort. "I remember us on the bed at night, quizzing her with flash cards," Angela recalls.

And her mother always pushed to better herself and her daughters. "She didn't want life to be as difficult for us and that's the reason she stayed on our tails. With my mother, you just knew for years and years and years you were going to college. There was no alternative."

College, yes, but the Ivy League?

Bassett was the first black student enrolled in the National Honor Society from Boca Ciega High School. She had the smarts. But it was a local director of the federal Upward Bound program who, having moved on to another job, sent Betty Bassett a letter a year later suggesting Angela might think of applying to Harvard or Yale or . . .

"Schools like that. Talk about someone seeing something in you that you don't see in yourself," Bassett says. "I'd had no exposure beyond St. Petersburg. I didn't know about those options."

Bassett vaguely recalls being somewhat intimidated by all "those brainiacs from prep schools" who were now her classmates, but she established herself as the crazy one, the one who was going to be an actress.

"Right, she's going to make a living at that," she says, good-naturedly mimicking the derision. "But thing is with Mama, with me, it was `You go to college, that's good enough.' You do that, you have choices.

"I knew it was going to be difficult. But life is difficult. You expect it to be."

And after Yale, it was really hard for 10 months.

They were long months, or they seemed so to young Angela. She was living in a New York City studio at 105th and Central Park West, doing monologues in the mirror ("I had to keep acting chops up") while working as a receptionist in a beauty salon. The people there just didn't understand the job was only a means to the end and coming back late from lunch was the price of making it to auditions.

"I mean you had to go crosstown, then uptown, and sometimes the people you had to see weren't there on time," she says, laughing now at the girl who on those days would pull out her black wool dress with its prim bow tie and show up "looking like no role anyone was casting."

But then, while working as a photo researcher for U.S. News & World Report, Bassett got a boss who was so encouraging, she was actually upset when she got her first job in theater, playing Jean Anouilh's "Antigone" way off-Broadway. "I cried because I was going to have to leave these nice people. Then I stopped crying in about 10 seconds. I tell you, getting onstage after 10 months away, I tore up the scenery."

She toured with the Negro Ensemble Company and then scored a role on the soap opera "Guiding Light" in its waning days. There was also a major part in August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." She was successful, but . . .

"In New York, being successful means you've got an apartment that's not an illegal sublet. I wanted more. It's just part of my makeup to want something more."

In 1988, she moved to Los Angeles. Her ambition was to land a television series. "Then my family could rest assured; they wouldn't have to worry. If they see you on a weekly show, they can say: `She's OK, you know they must be paying her.' "

There were guest appearances she did "The Cosby Show" among others but the TV thing didn't work out. So she ended up in movies instead. Playing the professionally driven single mother who turns her son over to his father with the instructions "teach him to be a man" in John Singleton's "Boyz N the Hood," got her both noticed and connected.

"Back then, Spike Lee was John's mentor and before that I hadn't been able to get an audition with Spike," she explains. "But with it working out that way, well, if I had a choice of any of his pictures, it would have been `Malcolm X,' as opposed to the ones I thought I wanted at the time."

The very last time she had to audition was for "What's Love Got to Do With It," which earned her an Academy Award nomination. And what an audition she gave. During the screen test, playing out one of the several scenes of violence in the movie, she fractured a bone in her hand. Having secured the role, she knew so little about starring in a movie that she drove herself home nights after pulling 14-hour days on the set. Her co-star Fishburne put a stop to that.

"He went to the producers about it. Honestly, I didn't know I was entitled to a car and driver. But it certainly made it easier."

In 1995, she starred in two movies that went nowhere, "Vampire in Brooklyn" with Eddie Murphy and "Strange Days" with Ralph Fiennes. This could have put her in a precarious place, being a newly minted star, but then "Waiting to Exhale" opened and she was solid.