FOXXY LADY BEYONCE KNOWLES BRINGS MIDAS TOUCH TO 'AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER'.

Byline: - Bob Strauss

Train your whole life to become a show-business superstar and look like a million bucks, and you could get lucky, too.

That's the lesson Beyonce Knowles, the 20-year-old frontwoman of the singing supergroup Destiny's Child, learned when Mike Myers asked her to play the leading lady in his latest swinging spy movie lampoon, ``Austin Powers in Goldmember.''

``I was so shocked,'' Knowles recalls. ``When my mom told me Mike and Jay Roach, the director, wanted to meet with me, I thought maybe they wanted me to do a soundtrack song.''

Instead, they wanted her to play Foxxy Cleopatra, the time-traveling Austin's 1970s girlfriend. A spoof of the Pam Grier-style urban heroines from the old blaxploitation film cycle, Foxxy was not an unfamiliar concept to Knowles, although she hadn't even been born when the genre died out.

``Actually, I had seen them all; my mom was a big fan,'' she explains, then tells us how her Foxxy will top them all. ``It is a huge Afro she wears,'' says the singer with the signature long, straight blond hair. ``It was fun because I got to wear all different combinations: huge, small, medium-size and big puffs, all kinds of Afro things going on.''

Also a huge fan of the ``Powers'' series, Knowles admits she felt intimidated going into her first feature film, but that Myers and the rest of the cast made her feel right at home.

``The script was so funny, it wasn't really hard for me at all,'' the novice comedian says. ``My hardest challenge was trying to prevent myself from laughing; Mike had different jokes for every take, and everybody was really funny.''

Of course, it wouldn't be an Austin Powers movie unless some truly disgusting joke was played on the love interest.

``There's one scene with Mini-Me that's really, really. ... Ha ha, I never imagined anything like this would ever happen to me,'' she says of, well, something she does with the small but charismatic Verne Troyer. ``I had to mentally prepare myself, and he did, too. I think he was more embarrassed than I was.''

Whatever they did to her, Knowles loved it.

``I actually cried at the end of production,'' she admits. ``It became like a family. I'm not used to being around the same people for a long period of time. Usually I'm touring in a different city every day, and I was with them for five months.''

Isn't that longer than some people have been in her famously fractious group?

``Nooooo,'' Knowles responds, laughing, ``not true!''

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(color) Beyonce Knowles, left, and Mike Myers hope to strike comedy riches in ``Austin Powers in Goldmember,'' July 26.