From Meal of Flowers to Golden Globe : Actress: Piper Laurie looks back on progress from starlet roles to ‘Twin Peaks.’

Rosetta Jacobs, a beautiful, auburn-haired 17-year-old aspiring actress, got the message from the studio in 1950: She would share a meal of flowers with Ronald Reagan. Universal Studios press agents decided that the snapdragon snack would provide a photographic boost for her first movie, “Louisa.”

Reagan went on to other things. Rosetta, who changed her name to Piper Laurie, found her picture emblazoned in newspapers and magazines delicately nibbling marigolds, pansies and other garden fare.

Overnight, she became a celebrity. But that wasn’t her goal when she left her native Detroit for Hollywood. She had dreamed of becoming a great actress. Starlet status was the fate of dozens of other beauties. It was a dead end.

She was doomed to sex and sand epics with Tony Curtis--”The Prince Who Was a Thief,” “Son of Ali Baba,” “The Golden Blade”--and dumb comedies, “Francis Goes to the Races” with Donald O’Connor.

In the beginning her take-home pay was $40 a week, but she was 17 and at least she was in the movies.

Now, with two Academy Award nominations under her belt and a supporting actress Golden Globe she won Saturday for her role in ABC’s “Twin Peaks,” Laurie looks back on her starlet days with humor.

She is also co-starring with Gregory Peck and Danny DeVito in “Other People’s Money,

“At the time I felt demeaned,” she said. “But I was young, naive and frightened. I knew someday I would be a serious actress, but I didn’t know how. I was too shy to assert myself.”

After more than 20 pictures as a Universal chattel, Laurie married film critic Joe Morgenstern and moved to New York. Just before pulling up stakes, she made one good picture, “The Hustler,” with Paul Newman.

She worked in theater and live TV in New York for 15 years, honing her craft and learning technique.

It wasn’t until her Oscar-nominated return in “Carrie” in 1976 that Laurie began getting consistently serious roles in good movies. She won another nomination in 1986 for “Children of a Lesser God.”

Last year in several “Twin Peaks” episodes she played the most bizarre role of her career, an overweight, mustachioed Japanese businessman.

“Until then, I played a rather nasty woman named Catherine who disappears from the plot and then reappears as the Japanese man,” she said, laughing. “For six weeks I was Fumio Yamaguchi. No one in the cast recognized me. Neither did viewers.

“Jack Nance, who plays Catherine’s husband, did several scenes with me as Yamaguchi and never recognized me. It was eerie. The rest of the cast thought I had been dropped from the series.

“It was horrible. I couldn’t tell my friends or family what I was doing. Our producer, David Lynch, insisted it be kept a tight secret. When Yamaguchi’s identity was finally revealed everybody on the show, except for the six or seven in on the plot, was totally astounded.”

Now, about that diet of flowers?

“I really did eat flowers for newsreels and still photographers,” she said.

“They didn’t taste so bad. The Universal publicity department checked carefully to make sure the flowers weren’t poisonous. But, of course, I never put a flower in my mouth except for publicity purposes.”