Only in Hollywood: Two young show-biz talents who have gotten the breaks of a lifetime are profiled by Los Angeles correspondent SHELI TEITELBAUM. Israeli actress Mili Avital went in one week from waiting tables to co-starring with Kurt Russell in the sci-fi blockbuster StarGate.' Director Boaz Yakin, whose background includes an Orthodox education, won critical acclaim for his debut film Fresh,' about the mean streets of the black ghetto.

One day last autumn, 22-year-old Mili Avital was serving lunch specials in a Manhattan diner, saving her tips to pay for her acting-school tuition. Ten days later she was in Arizona, performing alongside Kurt Russell and James Spader as the female lead in the recently released $ 55-million science-fiction blockbuster "StarGate."

Hers is the classic Hollywood rags-to-riches story, with a special twist: Avital is an Israeli actress with a less-than-perfect command of English, who'd been in the U.S. barely a year. What's more, she has had starring roles in two countries without ever auditioning.

"It's weird," says Avital with genuine modesty and puzzlement. "I still can't figure it out."

Born in Jerusalem, Avital grew up in Ra'ananah, north of Tel Aviv. Both her parents are graduates of Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Art and Design; her father, of Moroccan descent, is a package designer. As a teenager, Avital studied theater at the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts, where she demonstrated a precocious talent for the stage. She was studying for her high school matriculation exams when a teacher recommended her to Tel Aviv's prestigious Cameri Theater for the role of the young seductee in the stage version of "Les Liaisons Dangereuse."

"I never thought anything would come of it," recalls Avital. "It was the hottest show in town, all the big actors wanted parts, and I had performed in nothing previously. But the director just met me. I never auditioned, I never read for it."

The production proved a hit, critics raved over Avital's performance, and she missed her high school graduation party because she had to go on stage. She also missed army service; the Cameri received numerous deferrals to keep her in the play, and finally the army exempted her.

"Liaisons" closed after a year's run, and Avital went on to TV and the movies. A starring role in the 1991 TV-film "Yael's Friends," a portrait of a spoiled Israeli teenager, broke the ice for Avital.

"From that day on," she says, "it was one role after another." First came "Across the Sea," a comic look at a 1960s Israeli family planning emigration to Canada. It won the 1991 Israeli "Oscar" for best film, and Avital, who played the family's rambunctious daughter, won a best-supporting-actress award. Two years later she starred in "Groupie," a feature film about a 16-year-old Tel Aviv girl who runs off after her idol, a foreign rocker stopping briefly in the Jewish state.

"By then," says Avital, "it was talk shows and interviews and there was nowhere I could go and just study my craft. I had to distance myself. I spoke to Noam Semel, director of the Cameri, who was then consul for culture in New York (and currently once again the Cameri's head). He suggested I go there to study at the Circle in the Square acting school."

And so she did - for a year, making ends writing about theater for the Israeli daily Ma'ariv's New York supplement. After a brief return to Israel to promote "Groupie," she began waiting in a diner opposite her Manhattan apartment. "After the promotional tour," she says, "I was just desperate for some real work with real people. I liked the idea of setting a table, feeding them, being thanked for my efforts and getting paid for them."

Then fortune smiled on Avital yet again. A woman walked into the restaurant and asked for the specials: Avital prattled them off with sufficient verve for the woman, who introduced herself as talent scout Myrna Jacoby, to say that Avital must surely be an actress. Did she have any clips of her work she could bring by Jacoby's office the next day? Avital did, and Jacoby invited Avital to sign with her. "I didn't think enough about it to even tell my parents," she says.

Jacoby thought enough of the film clips to send them to director Roland Emmerich, who had been trying for six months to cast the female lead for his sci-fi epic "StarGate." Dean Devlin, Emmerich's co-writer, recalls receiving the tape. "It was in Hebrew; I mean, we couldn't understand a word. And yet, in an instant we all knew she was the right girl."

On Rosh Hashanah eve, Avital returned to her apartment at 1 a.m. to find her answering machine crammed with calls from Jacoby. "Come to my office at 7.30 in the morning," she was instructed, "and bring your passport, your clips, everything you'll need for the next four months. You're the new lead in a big-budget movie with Kurt Russell and James Spader."

Shooting began the following Monday, but when Avital arrived in Arizona she informed the director she wouldn't be showing up for work on Yom Kippur. Emmerich took it well.

"StarGate" is a science-fiction action epic in which a team of American scientists step through a "matter transporter" that whisks them off on a transdimensional roller-coaster ride to a planet we are told gave birth to earth's Ancient Egypt. Spader, an archaeologist, finds his true love in Sha'uri, a comely space Beduin demurely portrayed by Avital.

In the film, Sha'uri speaks a kind of proto-Egyptian patois only slightly less alien than Klingon. In her childlike determination to understand and be understood, she is never less than convincing. "It was certainly an interesting intellectual challenge," says Avital, "to impart genuine emotional meaning to gibberish."

Avital, now represented by the William Morris Agency, has already been cast in yet another film: "Dead Man," a Western directed by cult favorite Jim Jarmusch ("Down by Law"). In the film she will get to stretch her linguistic

talents even farther than in "StarGate," in her role as a prostitute from the deep South with a faintly discernible foreign background.

If Avital attains any measure of lasting success in American movies, it will be a unique achievement. No Israeli actor except Haim Topol of "Fiddler on the Roof" fame has ever gained any real international renown. Avital could end up being compared to Daliah Lavi, an Israeli starlet who achieved brief Hollywood celebrity during the 60s before fading into early retirement.

Avital is doing a good job of keeping her good fortune in proper perspective. "I suppose it would be easy for this to go to my head," she says. "I'm just trying to remain a good person, not someone who is spoiled or vain. The struggle I have is to be grounded to keep the same values I grew up with, to be good before God. When you live in Israel you understand that life and death are the paramount issues. I knew one of the women who died in the Tel Aviv bus bombing. When you have something like that in your background, the rest of this Hollywood stuff seems silly."