WWW – Bettie Page, the 1950s pinup model and fetish style icon, has inspired everything from a hairstyle (the signature brunette bangs-and-bob ‘do) to a 1980s comic book character in “The Rocketeer” (played by Page look-alike Jennifer Connelly in a 1991 movie), to numerous magazines, books and Bettie-worshiping Web sites. Now a new biopic, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” uncovers her career before the cameras – and reveals the hypocrisy that led to her being called before a Senate committee on juvenile delinquency.

Gretchen Mol, the actress who plays her, first encountered Page’s enduring image when she was a New York City drama student in the early 1990s. “To me, Bettie was one of the ideal beauties of that era,” says Mol, 33, tracing an hourglass shape in the air with outstretched hands. “I didn’t know much about her then. I saw all the memorabilia, stickers and 8-by-10’s alongside the Rita Hayworths and Marilyn Monroes. But I’d never heard Bettie speak.”

Few people had, until an “E! True Hollywood Story” included a rare audiotaped interview with Page, who is now 82 and living in California. “An earthy, lilting, wise, wonderful Southern voice,” is how Mol describes the real Page’s accent. And that’s precisely the tone that Mol, wearing a wig and not much else, captures in “The Notorious Bettie Page.”

In one of the movie’s sexiest, silliest scenes, Mol re-creates Bettie’s transformation from a 25-year-old Tennessee teachers college grad to novice sex siren as she steps into sky-high heels and nearly breaks a leg in the process. “I didn’t have to fake that stumble,” says Mol, laughing. “I could hardly walk. Those scenes were the most fun we had, doing the photo shoots. The photographer [Paula Klaw, played by Lili Taylor] is saying, ‘Look mean!’ And Bettie’s figuring it out, thinking, ‘Mean about what? In what way?'”

Page’s playful attitude contrasted with some of the snarling pinup queens of her time. “Bettie was laughing in a lot of her pictures,” says Mol. “She was happy in front of the camera.”

There’s an irony there, for Mol, too, looks delighted in front of the camera, but she, like Page, got a hard lesson in the power of image. In 1998, Mol, having just completed work on three movies – “Rounders,” Woody Allen’s “Celebrity” and the corporate-intrigue thriller “New Rose Hotel” – appeared in a revealing gown on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. Trouble was, those films weren’t blockbusters-to-be but smallish art house pictures with ensemble casts, and the magazine’s cover line (‘Is She Hollywood’s Next ‘It’ Girl?’) was a question only the next Julia Roberts could answer in the affirmative.

Only 25 and not long out of drama school and summer stock, the then-unknown Mol had, through no fault of her own, landed in a public relations snafu. Asked about the magazine cover now, she merely shrugs.

Since then, she has been consistently singled out for critical praise in more interesting roles, including Neil LaBute’s drama “The Shape of Things” (on both stage and screen) and in the A&E movie of “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Just before auditioning to play Page, Mol had done a run on Broadway in “Chicago,” playing murderess Roxie Hart, a raunchy song and dance role in direct opposition to her demure image.

“People don’t realize how funny Gretchen is,” says Mary Harron, the director of “The Notorious Bettie Page.” “I admit, I didn’t even have her on my original list of actresses to consider for the role. I thought of her as having kind of a delicate, blond 1920s look – which she does, in real life. But all wrong for Bettie Page.” Mol stunned Harron and her casting director by showing up in a Page wig (“a bad one,” Mol admits).

Mol got a handle on the 1950s world-view by simply wearing the undergarments of the era. “It’s funny what clothes can do for you,” she says. “Sure, the models of that era had something to put in the clothes: curves! But when you wear clothes that confining and you eat, your body takes on that shape. Where else is it going to go? Up here, down there. The underclothes, the outer clothes were all shaped that way.”

“Gretchen had what my husband called a ‘sunlight on water’ quality: darkness underneath a sunny surface – a sparkling quality, with sadness beneath,” says Harron. “She showed that in the very first reading, which was perfect for Bettie’s story. She was, and is, a complicated person.”

Discovering that “inner Betty,” though, was difficult, even though Page has been written about at length. During the resurgence of her fame, a rival film project produced by Martin Scorsese had secured Page’s cooperation as a consultant. That project never materialized, but its existence meant Harron’s team was unable to speak to her.

Instead, Harron and her co-writer, Guinevere Turner, interviewed photographers, optioned the rights to biographies, and used material from the public record, including transcripts from a 1954-55 Senate subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency. (Summoned to appear during a furor over horror comics and racy magazines, Page never had to testify – but some of the photographers she’d worked for were destroyed by the uproar.)

A life-long Baptist, Page has never disavowed her modeling career and has been pleased to be recognized even when evangelizing as a lay preacher. In a March 2006 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Page said, “Being in the nude isn’t a disgrace unless you’re being promiscuous about it.” Yet her girlhood was extremely harsh: she was molested by her father and sexually assault by two strangers.

Neither Mol nor Harron share Page’s faith, but they do express it in the film: “The church is where she turned in her darkest times,” says Mol. “From the time she was a child, she felt this: When you’re down, you can look to Jesus, and that’s where she turned after she was raped. Not to her mother, not to a friend. She couldn’t tell anybody. She could not make sense of what had happened.”

Listening to Page’s audiotaped account of the assault, Mol admired her frankness. “It was interesting to me the way she told it,” says the actress. “For a woman of her age, her background, at that time, she just kind of put it out there. She was talking to a young interviewer and what she seemed to be saying was, it was good that nothing worse had happened. Yet she seemed to be at a kind of a remove from things, as horrible as they were.”

To Harron, these revelations were important, but somehow unshocking. “In biographies, in lives, the deep secret is [often] molestation. In this case it was true, and we could not ignore it.”

Both Mol and Harron were fond of the film’s working title: “The Ballad of Bettie Page,” which suggest a long, complicated tale. Says Mol, “So many biopics seem to announce, in every scene, how a person’s life goes from A to B to C – everything has cause and effect. But life is not like that. We wanted to be more ambiguous.”

Mol has gone back to her natural blond hair and on to new roles – a romantic comedy called “Puccini for Beginners” debuted at Sundance, and she’s now filming a drama in New York. But she can’t leave the mysteries of Bettie Page behind. “Every new thing I learn about her, she’d throw me a curve,” she says.

“The difference between naked and nude, in photographs, in art, that’s something I didn’t think of before,” says Mol. “Naked, suggests shame. Nude, the photos that she did with Bunny Yeager, the ones we most enjoyed re-creating, were more artistic and more joyful. Bunny calls her the ultimate naturist – Bettie felt comfortable taking those pictures. She was liberated and in her element. There’s a spiritual connectedness there, with nature and herself.”