New generation of rising stars

Since 1992, Vanity Fair magazine does Vanities section featuring a full-page portrait of a promising young star. Here are the latest women in film industry who have it all to make it to having their names on the Walk of Fame. Here is a fastidious pick of four girls out of Vanity Fair’s 24.

Kristen Stewart

Age: 17

Provenance: North Hollywood, California.

You first glimpsed her as … Jodie Foster’s doppelgänger daughter in Panic Room (2002). “[Director] David Fincher does a lot of takes,” Stewart says:

There was this one scene we must have done, like, 80 times. I didn’t know that it wasn’t the norm. Now I wouldn’t be as chill with it … “

Because now she’s a prolific industry veteran, with four films due out this year. Namely, In the Land of Women, The Messengers, The Cake Eaters (the directorial debut of Mary Stuart Masterson, with Stewart in the lead role), and Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, based on the Jon Krakauer book. But is this the life for her? Not necessarily:

I want to go to college for literature. I want to be a writer. I mean, I love what I do, but it’s not all I want to do—be a professional liar for the rest of my life.”

Still, Kristen’s no brooder: “I love big-band music, and I’m taking swing classes now. I can’t wait till I’m going to be able to be tossed up in the air.”

Emily Blunt

Age: 23

Provenance: London.

You know her as … the cold-eyed young Brit who stole The Devil Wears Prada, delivering the performance most comically evocative of what editorial assistants are really like at … oh, certain publishing companies we’ve heard of. “I kind of knew that girl—she’s a total impersonation of various people whom I would find personally excruciating,” says Blunt, who is also a 2007 Golden Globe winner for her performance in the BBC drama Gideon’s Daughter.

But what I liked about that character was that there was the opportunity to glimpse something beyond sarcasm. There’s a vulnerability that’s transparent to me, when someone defines herself just by having an association with someone else.”

And you’ll know her better still after you see her this year in … Wind Chill, a thriller produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh (“I literally went from wearing Manolos to huge snow boots covered in blood and mud”); The Great Buck Howard, with John Malkovich, Tom Hanks, and Colin Hanks; Dan in Real Life, in which she gets to “have a dance-off” with Steve Carell; and The Jane Austen Book Club, an ensemble piece in which Blunt plays “a total nerd—a different part for me, because I often play the fast-talking, manipulative sort of character.” Extraordinary, considering that …

I had a really bad stutter as a child. It never occurred to me that I would want to be on the stage, because I couldn’t even bloody talk. My parents tried everything: I had speech therapy, I had [recordings of] dolphins squeaking at me at night to try and relax me, cranial osteopathy, everything you could do. And then I had a rather wonderful teacher who encouraged me to do the class play when I was about 12. I think he had the faith in me that I’d rise to the occasion. Or maybe he just had the smarts to say, ‘Why don’t you be someone else?’”

And now she’s smooth-talked her way into a relationship with swingin’ singer Michael Bublé: “It’s wonderful. I love him. We met at some awards ceremony and I was a bit of a fan and I told him, and he liked compliments, obviously.”

Hayden Panettiere

Age: 17

Provenance: Rockland County, New York.

Currently serving humankind as … Claire, “the Cheerleader,” on NBC’s breakout hit Heroes. “[The show] just sort of plopped in my lap,” Panettiere says:

I was walking out of a general meeting with NBC, and they were like, ‘Oh, hey, by the way, read this’—this script with a cockroach running across the front of it. And I read it, and it was amazing.”

Look out, Mandy Moore: Panettiere’s debut album, for which she co-wrote most of the songs, comes out this spring.

My [day] job is to portray people who are not myself, and this is sort of getting to portray a little bit of me.” What happens to college plans when you have a hit series at 17? “I’ve got 15 alumni from Duke University in my family. I absolutely want to go to college, but I don’t know if it’s going to work out with this series. [To her mom, Lesley] How long are we on contract? [Mom says, "I think it's six years."] Oh my God, I’ll be 23!”

And finally the hottest pick. She is the one from Mamma Mia!

Amanda Seyfried

Age: 22

Provenance: Allentown, Pennsylvania.

You know her… as the coming-of-age teen in everyone’s favorite polygamy-motif’d TV show, Big Love. But you’ll see her next as Meryl Streep’s daughter in the screen adaptation of Mamma Mia! “She’s the coolest human being ever,” says Seyfried of her on-camera mom. She didn’t treat me like I was younger. She respected me. I couldn’t ask for anything better.” Diablo rising: Next up for Seyfried is Jennifer’s Body, the latest project from multi-tattooed Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody.

I play the nerdy best friend of Jennifer, who becomes a zombie. I’m like the heroine of the movie. I have to try to save the small town we live in.”

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