Zooey of Oz

Deschanel's yellow-brick Hollywood road

Like many a precocious preschooler, Zooey Deschanel had a "thing" for The Wizard of Oz.

But like not so many precocious 3-year-olds, Deschanel's "thing" never quite went away. Instead it manifested itself and ultimately evolved.

"I told my mom I was going to go into the tape. I was all set to jump into the tape recorder, and she told me that was impossible," says Deschanel, now 24 and the star of the just-opened black comedy Eulogy. "I was like, 'This can't be. I have to go there! It looks so fun, and lions can talk,' and it was a whole thing.

"Then I realized you can pretend all those things are happening. I've gotten to work on some really fun movies. It really starts out as playacting and then turns into something you get paid for."

Deschanel's dream likely took nobody in her family by surprise. Her father is Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. Mom Mary Jo and big sister Emily are also actors. The elder Deschanels never discouraged Zooey (named after the title brother of J.D. Salinger's "Franny and Zooey") from a life in performance. The musical-theater-trained actress made her film debut at age 17 in Lawrence Kasdan's Mumford.

She spent less than a year at Northwestern University before landing the role of teen journalist William Miller's older sister (the flight attendant) in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, which signaled the end of her college career.

"(School) was fun, but I just felt it was like choosing between doing it or training to do it," says Deschanel. "The thing is, acting is very much something where you learn so much by doing it. I figured I'm not going to turn down an opportunity to work with Cameron Crowe and Frances McDormand to go back to stay in school. I was faced with an opportunity that was too good to refuse."

Subsequent movies include All the Real Girls, Abandon, The Good Girl and Elf. And in case you can't fit the person to the name - which, admittedly, is not an easy name to forget - the dark-haired, blue-eyed Deschanel is usually the cynical or offbeat one.

So the talking lions may like her, and the Wicked Witch might find her a formidable adversary, but this is no Dorothy Gale.

"I was a kid when I started, and people really didn't know what to do with me at all," she says. "People were like, 'Uh, you're not a cheerleader, but you're not a goth.' Basically you need to convince a few people they should change their idea of what the part should be for you, which is hard."

For Deschanel, however, that happened right out of the gate. Kasdan, the writer director of Mumford, was looking for an overweight high-school girl to play the character Nessa Watkins.

Deschanel didn't exactly fit the character description, but she won the role anyway.

"It sort of ended up being more interesting with a girl who thought she was overweight," says Deschanel. "(Kasdan) changed his idea of what he thought the part should be. I'm forever indebted to him for that."

In Eulogy, Deschanel (the name is pronounced deh-sha-NELL) finally gets to play it straight. Kate Collins is the only level-headed member of a family of nut jobs. Where Kate is selected to eulogize her newly deceased grandfather (played by Rip Torn), her assembled relatives (among them Hank Azaria, Ray Romano, Kelly Preston and Debra Winger) ignore the business at hand to engage in a dysfunction derby. There's also Kate's budding romance with a former childhood friend (Jesse Bradford) that keeps getting short-circuited by some rather twisted family shenanigans.

First-time director Michael Clancy built the $6.5 million film around his more celebrated players. But when Deschanel came along, the writer-director knew he had his Kate.

"I had seen her in a couple of films, but from the moment I met Zooey, I just thought, 'I don't want anyone else near this role,' " says Clancy. "She's unique enough that she could be related to all these lunatics and sane enough that she could sort of tell this story and be a life raft for the audience to hold on to."

And after so much previous on-screen angst and quirkiness, the chance to play things straight was enticement enough, according to Deschanel.

"She was so normal, and it was such a funny script," says Deschanel, who will reteam with her Elf co-star Will Ferrell in the upcoming Winter Passing, and appear as Trillian in the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "I was interested in playing someone normal to see if I could do it, especially playing a character that was very observant."

In person, Deschanel is wry, disarmingly funny and forthcoming but careful. When not filming, she often performs in her cabaret act, the Pretty Babies, with actress Samantha Shelton. Deschanel has a boyfriend, actor Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore, I Heart Huckabees,) but isn't about to be part of an "out on the scene" Hollywood couple anytime soon.

"I don't really like to go out very much. I'm not scandalous. I'm not, like, in this to be famous," she says. "I also find it so embarrassing when you read about people and it's like they were so trashed at Skybar and stumbling around. I don't want to be that person. That's just so embarrassing to have that written about you."