Zooey Deschanel

Age 23 Why Her? She defied Ubermom Frances McDormand in Almost Famous and gently broke Paul Schneider's heart in the delicate, devastating All the Real Girls. And she has the power to seduce a magazine journalist in the course of a brief telephone interview. How She Handled Her Improv Audition for Girls "I'd heard the story about Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando during On the Waterfront - how Brando kept...improvising, and Steiger just went right back at him. And I was like, "I'm not gonna be no schmuck. I'm gonna be Rod Steiger.'" When She's Not Acting... She's in a band, If All the Stars Were Pretty Babies, which plays "old standards: Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, that sort of thing. It's a side project: a garage big band. We have nine pieces.... We do country songs, too." Most Important She plays the ukulele. But don't make a fuss about it. "Everyone keeps making this big deal out of it, but it's not my main thing." And So Modest! Might She Marry a Lovesick Journalist? "Hey, I'll think it over, okay? Next Mourning a dead Italian patriarch in the dark comedy Eulogy, due in October, and finding common ground with Will Ferrell (she's a department-store elf, he was raised by real ones) in the November romp Elf.