IS THERE anything Paul Mercurio doesn't make look easy? Handling an early morning interview through a mouthful of toast, a brace of small but vocal daughters and a wife running late for her own rehearsals is achieved with the same grace as the leap the 29-year-old dancer has made from stage to screen as the male lead in Strictly Ballroom. This is the Australian movie which swept this year's Cannes Film Festival off its feet and which is predicted to do the same on August 20 at its Australian premiere in the inaugural Brisbane International Film Festival.

The movie is already being hailed overseas as another Crocodile Dundee, a low-budget ($3.5 million) Australian product with the right ingredients to turn both Mercurio and Ballroom director Baz Luhrmann into Hollywood hot properties and make a squillion at the box office for its backers, Ronin Films, M&A and the Australian Film Corporation. Before Cannes, few in Australia had heard of Strictly Ballroom or Paul Mercurio.

It was the film's phenomenal response after a low-key midnight screening in the arty "Un Certain Regard" category that turned it and its star into bankable commodities. Festival regulars say it was astounding, the most emotional reception for a film seen in 20 years. The Americans, no doubt with memories of Peter Weir, Mel Gibson and Paul Hogan in mind, agreed, and within 24 hours were lining up waving cheque books and offering deals sight unseen.

"After the first day, we threw the appointment book away," John Thornhill, the publicity director of the film's overseas distributors, Beyond International, said. "They were crawling over dead bodies to get to us. We were offered bribes, we were offered post-dated cheques, we were offered deals by people who hadn't even seen the film." Mercurio, who described his introduction to film stardom in Cannes as "a bit of a laugh, total chaos", takes his celluloid success in graceful stride.

Stardom, albeit on a different scale, was nothing new to him. He was already one of Australia's brightest stars of dance and choreography, and a principal of the Sydney Dance Company when director Luhrmann, a mate from NIDA days, cast him as Scott Hastings in Strictly Ballroom. The technical transition from keeping audiences safely behind footlights to the nostril probing of a camera lens would have fazed most performers.

"On stage, you're performing a role," Mercurio said. "On film, you're being a character. It's a case of finding that place where you can be the character. It's an awareness of the distance between you and the medium." Mercurio looked as though he'd been born to it, which in a way, he was.

Mercurio is the son of gravelly-voiced TV actor Gus Mercurio, who left home when his four children were still young. Paul, his two younger brothers and a sister spent their early childhood in a boarding school in Western Australia, which had "a big emphasis on dance-theatre training".

The experience of growing up without a father no doubt underlies Mercurio's determination to choreograph his own family and professional life more smoothly.

His wife, Andrea Toy, has danced with the Australian Ballet and the Sydney Dance Company, and the two plan to see a lot more of each other (and their children) now they've launched their own company, the Australian Choreographic Ensemble.

"I wouldn't say I grew up in a showbiz family, but we were all involved in theatre," Mercurio said. "When Dad left to pursue his career in television, we lived in a heavy suburb in Perth and, to get us out of the area, we kids were all enrolled in this dance-theatre school. All the teachers had been professionals and the quality of teaching was great."

In Strictly Ballroom his character, Scott Hastings, started dancing at six, pushed relentlessly by a stage mother (played harrowingly by the late Pat Thomson) chasing her dreams.

In real life, Mercurio started dancing at nine, but no one had to push him. The only pushing he experienced was from other boys giving him a hard time about being a "poofter ballerina"--which is as funny as it is sad when you watch the superbly macho Mercurio flex his rippling muscles in dance sequences which make an Olympic pentathlon look wimpish.

Young, lithe and laidback, he is a ready-made teen idol--which is great, because the film world's biggest market is the movie-going 15-25 year age bracket. Even more promising than its victory at Cannes was the fact that the youngest selectors also gave it their Prix de la Jeunesse.

"In my own life I had absolutely no pressure," he said. "Dad wasn't around and Mum totally supported us, within tough financial restraints, in whatever we wanted to do. I played rugby league, I played soccer, I surfed. I did ballet, but I never had to be the best. Mum was too busy looking after us to push her own dreams."

In 1979, he won a two-year scholarship at the West Australian Ballet, followed by a year at the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne.

His biggest break followed in 1982, when he was spotted by Australian dance great Graeme Murphy and offered a contract with the Sydney Dance Company.

The world was suddenly his oyster and Cannes came as no big deal to a guy who had already received ovations in the US, Italy, Greece, Singapore, Spain, Portugal, Britain, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Holland and New Zealand, both as dancer and choreographer.

The world of dance in all its aspects is equally familiar--and loved--terrain.

"When we were making Strictly Ballroom, a lot of the ballroom people were worried we would make fun of them and their desperation, their dreams," Mercurio said. "But why should we? Everything in life has its politics, and that's as true of rugby clubs as it is of the theatre world."

Strictly Ballroom, for all its satire, treats its subject with equal affection and respect. Cinematically, it is a wonderful Felliniesque visit to the world of modern ballroom dancing and the human dramas and surreal rituals played out there.

As the grandson of a Sicilian-born immigrant, Mercurio brings another unique insight to his role. Underlying the ballroom storyline is the theme of cultural alienation.

"Being a dancer in Australia made me an outsider, even though it's really pretty macho!" he said. "I copped a lot of flack when I was little, heaps.

"It was fairly consistent over years. I didn't go up to the local shopping centre in Perth where I grew up because the local gang was out to beat me up.

"Later on I copped a hiding at a disco for being a "ballet poofter'. But there was support too, in a strange way. It's like anyone in Australia doing something or being different. It's really one of our unfortunate traits."

He is determined to give his own children--Elise, who is nearly 3, and Emily, 8 months--support whatever they want to do.

"I'd like them to dance, sure, but also to surf, play sport, do martial arts," he said. "Whatever they like."

In the movie, his partner Fran, played by Tara Morice, is an outsider in typical Australian suburbia. When she introduces the Anglo-Saxon Scott to her Spanish family, it is he who finds himself discovering acceptance among people for whom dance is not a bizarre sub-cult but a way of life, the soul of a culture they take passionately seriously. When Scott dances with Fran's father (international flamenco star Antonio Varga), dance becomes a machismo rite of passage, which certainly wasn't the case when he was a little boy daring to do ballet in Perth!

"My father's side was Sicilian, my mother's side all Irish/Welsh," Mercurio said. "I fantasised a long time ago about becoming a flamenco dancer. It's fantastic, so passionate, completely the opposite of ballroom. Working with Antonio was terrific because he is world class as a flamenco dancer."

Mercurio enjoyed working with non-dancer Tara Morice, who starred in the original stage version of Strictly Ballroom in Sydney and at Brisbane's Expo 88.

"She taught me as much in my first film role as I taught her about dance," he said. "I hope I helped her as much as she helped me. We clicked straight off."

His acting on film has terrific sincerity, as the audience at Cannes certainly realised, giving Mercurio's performance thunderous applause throughout the movie and a standing ovation at its end.

"Cannes was crazy; I was jetlagged and there was no let-up," he said. "Every 20 minutes, from 8.30 to 6.30 they'd bring another interviewer up. It was a big sell, but I loved it. Great fun."

Mercurio admits he is also enjoying the movie's pre-release critical success at home.

"I've already been offered a couple more scripts. I really enjoy acting. Who knows, one day I might even be able to direct? I'd like to take my new company into dance as well. Not video rock clips, but taking contemporary dance onto the TV, video and film medium."

Given the spectacular success of his leap into the movie spotlight, that's no daydream.