Zooey Deschanel, the daughter of famed Hollywood cinematographer, is ready for her close-up.

Movie star seems like the wrong occupation for Zooey Deschanel. Sitting up Emily Post-straight amid the blue and white Ming-style vases of Beverly Hills' La Conversation Bakery, dressed in a red trenchcoat with her cap of butterscotch-colored hair gleaming in the afternoon sun, Deschanel looks more like a heroine who's skipped out of a Colette novel than one of the prematurely Botox-ed starlets one tends to see plastered across billboards on Sunset Boulevard. Her eyes are the oversize, marbled blue usually reserved for kittens on Hallmark posters; her nails are bitten childishly short. Her hobbies include hunting for vintage dresses, perfecting her cabaret act (which she performs with fellow actress Sam Shelton) and playing miniature golf. Her favorite authors at the moment are Didion and Proust.
Nevertheless, thanks to her heart-stopping performances as a foul-mouthed cashier in Miguel Arteta's upcoming tragicomedy The Good Girl, and as the world-wise WASP in Steve Gaghan's Abandon, Deschanel is clearly billboard bound - and she's trying not to let that freak her out.
"I never get rocognized, thank God," says the 22 year old actress, who drives an unremarkable old blue Volvo and whose hair color seems to vary by the week. "But recently I've had to stop talking about where I live because I started getting these really freaky letters." Deschanel wrinkles her nose in distaste. "I hate having to be like, Oh, I can't tell you where I live, you know? But I guess it goes with the territory."
Actually, "the territory" is something with which Deschanel has been familiar pretty much since birth. The daughter of Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, Being There, The Patriot), she was born and raised in the Pacific Palisades, took family vacations on the sets of her father's movies and spent her school years at that progressive haven for Hollywood offspring, Crossroads. But in the Deschanel family, the household gods were not so much Spielberg and Spelling as Tarkovsky and Salinger (Deschanel is named for the title character in Franny & Zooey). "With us, it was always more about being creative than being famous," explain the actress, who was "kind of a misfit" growing up and was one of the rare teenagers who actually preferred the company of her parents to that of her peers.
She always, always wanted to be a performer. "I remember it was scary to me whenever anyone would suggest that I would do anything besides be an actress," says Deschanel (her sister Emily, 24, and mother, Mary Jo, both act as well). "It was like somebody telling you there was no Santa Claus." Deschanel's parents however, forbade her from auditioning professionally until she had a driver's license and could chauffeur herself to auditions. She eventually enrolled at Northwestern University, then left in the midst of her freshman year after nabbing a part in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. "From a really young age I felt more comfortable on stage than in real life," she says. "Everytime I got up on stage it was like, Oh, I'm home."
That level of comfort is perhaps more than anything what distinguishes Deschanel's work. "You don't see the seams in Zooey's performances," says Gaghan, who names the "utterly unique" Deschanel as his favorite actress - nay, favorite person - in the world. "She's like a Cassavetes actress; when you watch her, you don't think she's acting."
Deschanel attributes this phenomenon to obsessive rehearsal and an unwillingness to "show anybody anything until it's absolutely finished." Says Good Girl star Jennifer Aniston, "I remember seeing Zooey walking around the set, giggling and munching on a box of Fruit Loops and looking like she didn't have a care in the world, and then the camera would roll and suddenly she was the consummate professional."
"I'm a perfectionist," admits Deschanel, who in her free time last year wrote a script called Circus Girl (which "no one" has seen) and read Neitzche, ("because I'm not in college, so I figure I may as well educate myself").
Which is not to say that Deschanel lacks a frivolous side side. "I'm totally obsessed with clothes," she admits, citing Mui Mui and Marc Jacobs as current favorites. She also has a boyfriend - no names, please - and loves "doing girlie things like dancing and singing and riding on roller coasters and drinking champagne.
"Basically," she adds with a grin, "anything that doesn't involve sitting still for too long."