Actress Zooey Deschanel leads a new crop of Hollywood kids into the limelight

Like the title of her second movie, Almost Famous, 22-year-old actress Zooey Deschanel is on the verge of stardom. Raised in Los Angeles and on film sets around the globe, Deschanel has Hollywood running through her blood. Her father, Caleb, is an Oscar-nominated cinematographer (Being There) and her mother, Mary Jo, is also an actress (The Right Stuff). Even Deschanel's name has dramatic flair -- she was named after the character in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Leading the crop of celebrity offspring to recently hit the big screen -- including Tom Hanks' kid Colin, Robert Redford's daughter Amy, James Caan's son Scott, Sissy Spacek's daughter Schuyler Fisk, not to mention the Kate Hudson and Liv Tyler crowd of a few years past -- Deschanel was groomed for stardom. Her childhood in L.A.'s tony Pacific Palisades served as a prep course for a career on the big screen. She even acted in school plays alongside Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn's daughter. "I went to private school and basically the whole school was famous people's children, so that's what's normal to me," she recalls. "The weird thing about growing up in L.A. is that at your school plays, people send talent scouts." As a tot, she was already accustomed to hanging around movie sets while her father worked all over, from London to the Seychelles to Yugoslavia.

Now Deschanel and other Hollywood legacies are jumping in front of the cameras. In the last year and a half, Deschanel has shot five films, including The Good Girl opposite Jennifer Aniston, David Gordon Greene's All The Real Girls, and Barry Sonnenfeld's ensemble cast extravaganza Big Trouble. Still you might not recognize her. The actress has the uncanny ability to change her appearance from project to project. She is able to go from playing a painfully shy mental patient in the indie flick Manic to a charismatic college student in Abandon. After watching Deschanel in various roles, you're left wondering, Who's that girl? "I can change the way I look and seem like completely different people, and it's not necessarily on purpose," she says. "I think it's a gift. I think that's what's allowed me to be cast in a lot of different roles."

Creating characters has long been Deschanel's passion. "I've always had to be the center of attention, since I was two," she concedes, sipping a vanilla Iced Blended drink at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Beverly Hills. "There's this story my parents love to tell," she recounts, spinning her enormous, electric blue eyes. "When I was two or three, my nursery school did a production of The Three Little Pigs. I was the third pig. The wolf was knocking on my door, but he was knocking the wrong way, so I wouldn't get up and open it. I was lying there, snoring away on stage. My dad turned to my mom and said, 'Dustin Hoffman.' They knew right then and there that I was an actor."

At 16, Deschanel made her professional debut at a small theater in North Hollywood where she played Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods. From that performance, she nabbed a manager and an agent, and was soon on the go-see circuit. "Auditioning is the hardest thing to learn how to do," she explains. "It took me a really long time to get that down. It takes a lot of bad auditions to really learn. How am I supposed to do a love scene with a casting director? It's like acting under the worst conditions, because you don't have another actor reading with you." Deschanel pauses and concludes, "I think it's a confidence issue more than anything."

She appeared in an episode of the TV show Veronica's Closet, and was then cast, during her senior year of high school, in Lawrence Kasdan's Mumford. "It's so scary to do your first movie," Deschanel recalls with an exaggerated shiver of her petite shoulders. "I was so nervous my first day. I was sitting there laughing hysterically, like some kind of loony. But the whole thing about being an actor is to deliver the goods when you have to -- and that's what I did." After Mumford she enrolled at Northwestern University. During her Christmas break freshman year, she auditioned for Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. When Sarah Polley dropped out as the star, Deschanel's old friend Kate Hudson replaced her. The part of the lead's rock 'n' rolling sister, which Hudson was originally supposed to play, was left open. Deschanel met with Crowe and got the part. Her small but memorable role generated buzz, and work started pouring in. In addition to Manic, The New Guy, and Big Trouble, Deschanel can be seen this year in Abandon, the eagerly anticipated directorial debut of Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan. Phew! Sounds like she needs a holiday.

But some directors don't want to give her that chance. "She's a natural," enthuses Gaghan. "It may be genetic. I don't know, but she reminds me of one of the Cassavetes actresses. She seems to act and operate according to some inner principle, where everything seems effortless.... What she does on screen is so specific, but it's still impossible to describe. She literally jumps off the screen. I'd like to have her in everything I do."

Deschanel is game. The actress says she is a workhorse and "can't vacation." "My dad is a workaholic, and I think I inherited that trait," she says. "I haven't been on vacation for three years. My mom recently made me go to a spa. I can only do nothing for 10 minutes. I can't relax. I'm never bored because I always have something to do. I sing, play the piano, write, and I just started playing the ukulele." Deschanel also just finished the first draft of Circus Girl, a screenplay she penned with her best friend Jackson Nash.

Don't look for Deschanel on the dance floor of the latest disco or at the bar of Moomba. She prefers to hang out with her Hollywood friends at home and play boardgames like Balderdash. Eschewing movie-star nightlife, she doesn't smoke or do drugs. "If I go out, I like to be in bed by 2 a.m., because then you've had fun, but it doesn't interfere with the next day." She is a huge fashion fan and collects oversized sunglasses ("the bigger, the better") and vintage coats. "I'm trying to quit shopping," she declares, only half convincingly. "It's an addiction. I love clothes. I like to go down Melrose and look in all the windows and I go to different flea markets. I have lots of costumes. You never know when you're going to have to dress up like a milkmaid from the 1600s."

Although she has her own apartment, which she refers to as a "glorified storage closet," Deschanel often crashes at her parents' house. "I sleep on an air mattress," she says. "I'm really close with my family. I like eating dinner at my parents' because they're good cooks."

Deschanel seems to be getting fidgety. She has slurped her Iced Blended to the last drop. Perhaps she wants to race home and chat with her agent or fine-tune her screenplay. Leading Hollywood's next generation can be a burdensome task. Whatever she ends up doing, one thing's for sure -- she needn't worry about being Almost Famous for long.