Zooey Deschanel

The last time we saw the ukulele, Tiny Tim was driving it into irrelevance on Laugh-In. Since then, zip. Nada. So at the very least, we have to love rising actress Zooey Deschanel for trying to resurrect the thing. "It's a beautiful four-string instrument," says Deschanel, who plucks the uke when moonlighting with her band, If All the Stars Were Pretty Babies. "It's a sound the world misses." It's also the exact right instrument for this twenty-two-year-old with constantly mutating hair color - goofy, odd, funny, and unexpectedly beautiful. We first noticed Zooey (the name is from the Salinger book) when she played the big sister/music guru in Almost Famous, and this fall she's got a role in the Ivy League thriller Abandon. But she really got to us in The Good Girl (which also features out cover lady, Jennifer Aniston) as a sarcastic, black-haired clerk - the vibe is somewhere between Janeane Garofalo and Drew Barrymore - who makes absurdly inappropriate announcements over the in-store PA system. (Her monologue about products that clean women's pipes comes to mind.) Because if there's anything better then a woman playing the ukulele, it's a woman talking dirty into a microphone.