NOT WHAT SHE APPEARS TO BE : YEAH, KUDROW'S A VALLEY GIRL BUT, FER SURE, SHE'S NO DUMMY.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Film Writer

Olive Oyl-thin, bleached blond and stylish, comedian Lisa Kudrow is a Valley Girl with a Vassar gloss, an Ivy Leaguer from Tarzana who's made a career playing sunny, empty-headed ditzes modeled after the girls she knew in high school.

``Not even!'' she exclaims, using Val-speak to deny that she's very much like Michele, the blissfully clued-out clothes rack she plays in the upcoming movie ``Romy & Michele's High School Reunion,'' or Phoebe, the guitar-strumming masseuse she plays on the hit TV show ``Friends.''

Because, unlike the movie's Michele, whose lack of acquaintance with the word ``motivation'' has led her to a startling plateau of nonachievement by the time her 10-year high school reunion rolls around, the real-life Kudrow was the kind of teen who set her mind on her goal and knew for sure she was going to get there.

The funny thing is, her career path has turned out to be so different - and quite a bit more glamorous - than what she planned.

``All I thought about in high school was, let's just get through this and get to college, because then I would actually be around people who didn't mind studying,'' said Kudrow, who set out to become a doctor like her father, Lee Kudrow, a renowned specialist in treating migraine headaches.

In elementary school and junior high, Kudrow had done some performing - ``just skits and sketches, the funny kids getting together to put on a show'' - but by the time she entered Taft High School in Woodland Hills, she'd put all that aside to get serious.

``I was headed for medical school in the East,'' she said. ``I guess I was also thinking, if you want to get a good guy to marry you, then you've got to be a quality woman; so you have to work on your brain, and be the kind of person your kids would be proud to call their mother.

``Actors seemed really messed up to me, and I didn't want to be one of them.''

Then, somewhere along the way, she discovered that she wasn't cut out for organic chemistry, that physics made her nervous, and that calculus was ``pretty tricky.''

And she found herself developing an off-center comedy monologue about a biology teacher who speaks in incomprehensible laboratory lingo and cracks herself up with her own jokes while her students stare at her, clueless.

After graduating from Vassar with a degree in biology, Kudrow decided that ``maybe I didn't need to be a doctor after all.''

At home, she announced her decision to pursue an acting career - a choice the typical family would view as a calamity. Not hers. ``They were all, `Oh thank God,' '' Kudrow remembers. ``They were so supportive and so excited.''

After some improvisation studies with a teacher, she was accepted into the Groundlings, the well-known comedy performance troupe based in West Hollywood.

It was there that Kudrow first played Michele, who along with lifelong best gal pal Romy (played by Mira Sorvino) is half of the ditsy duo featured in ``Romy and Michele's High School Reunion.''

At the time, both of the bubble heads were minor characters in a play by Robin Schiff titled ``The Ladies Room,'' which was inspired by some hilariously banal conversations the writer overheard in the ladies bathroom at a trendy L.A. singles bar.

``We had this exchange where Romy says something to me, like, `I just hate throwing up in public,' and I say, `Me, too!' I thought it would be funny if I said it like that was just the most huge coincidence in the world, and that's why we're best friends,'' recalls Kudrow.

It was her very first audition, and Kudrow got the part. The play became a hit, running for eight months at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood before moving to New York for an off-Broadway run. Plenty of casting people caught Kudrow's act, and as a result, ``I started playing a lot of dumb girls,'' she says.

Years later, the crowd-pleasing characters of Romy and Michele have become the basis for the new movie, a kind of female ``Wayne's World'' about a couple of fun-loving airheads who suddenly realize that they're not going to impress anyone at their high school reunion unless they concoct some achievements for themselves.

It's all going fine, until a wiseacre who knows the real story (Janeane Garafolo) shows up and blows their cover.

``What I love about the movie is that it really makes fun of itself,'' says Kudrow. ``The things these characters do are so lame, but they think they are so cutting-edge.''

Her true research laboratory, it turns out, was probably Taft High School and the years she spent observing her classmates there.

``Michele was definitely inspired by the girls I knew in high school who were so superficial, and what I imagined they'd be like 10 years later if they hadn't changed,'' says the actress.

Five years after her 1981 graduation from Taft, Kudrow did go back to attend a reunion.

She found the gathering ``just depressing.''

``No one seemed to have any promise. One guy came to the reunion straight from jail. He literally got out, got on his motorcycle, came to the reunion, and decided that he needed to meet me. He was very proud of himself, too. `Yeah, I just got done, I just got out of jail.' He was a popular guy in high school, and I really got the sense that he thought he was giving me some kind of reunion thrill, 'cause I got to talk to him.''

``I know that Taft wins academic decathlons all the time, and there were some really smart kids there, but maybe I only knew the idiots. I remember taking the SAT, and I only got like 1,150 out of 1,600, and people were like, `You're a genius!' I think maybe some of them really wrote their names in the wrong box and lost 500 points.''

Now married, not to the East Coast college man she once envisioned, but to Michel Stern, a Frenchman who works in advertising, Kudrow, 33, is wrapping up her third season on ``Friends'' and contemplating a real hiatus this time.

With her recent movie appearances in Albert Brooks' comedy ``Mother'' and the forthcoming independent film ``Clockwatchers,'' a comedy about life as a temp worker that premiered at Sundance, Kudrow joins fellow ``Friends'' cast members Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer and Courteney Cox, all of whom have been busily racking up movie credits in vehicles that (with the exception of the ensemble fright fest ``Scream'' in which Cox appeared) have so far all done modest business.

``I don't think any of us in the cast is trying to become a movie star - we're just trying to be actors and work,'' says Kudrow. ``With the show, we've got four months off, and actors only feel safe when they're working. I think it takes a long time to get it in your head that you don't have to do that all the time.'

``I'm trying to teach myself that it's all right to slow down.''

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4 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Valley Girl

But Taft High grad and `Romy and Michele' star Lisa Kudrow is no airhead

(2--3) Lisa Kudrow, who graduated from Taft High School in Woodland Hills in 1981, says, ``All I thought about in high school was, let's just get through this and get to college, because then I would actually be around people who didn't mind studying.''

(4) After performing some work on stage, Lisa Kudrow became a prime-time celebrity with a starring role on ``Friends,'' pictured with Chris Isaak.