Kate Bosworth

With her flaxen hair and freckled cheeks, 17-year-old Kate Bosworth might be the epitome of the American-as-apple-pie teenager--except that she's a working actress who's already made films with people like Robert Redford and Denzel Washington.

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Hollywood was never likely to miss a face that brings memories of a young Lee Remick or Tuesday Weld to mind, but it seems to have been Bosworth's athletic ability that first won her a movie role. A real-life horseback riding champ who led a privileged life in the small town of Cohasset just outside Boston, she made her movie debut at 14 as Scarlett Johansson's ill-fated chum in Redford's The Horse Whisperer. ("I'm a pro at taking spills because I've done it so, many times in real life.") More recently she won the role of the football captain's haughty girlfriend in this month's Remember the Titans, which stars Washington, and she's played Bella, a small-town girl all the rich prep school boys lust after in the WB's blueblood-vs.-bluecollar series "Young Americans." "I hate to say it, but I'm a blueblood," she says. "That's just the way I've been raised." Perhaps despite that, Bosworth has man-aged to navigate Hollywood well so far. "Robert Redford told me, 'If you really want success, you can have it,'" she recalls. She took that advice to heart, along, she says, with what she's learned since: "There's always a girl waiting to take your place."

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Wolf Schneider