Like the title of her second movie, Almost Famous, 22-year-old actress Zooey Deschanel is on the verge of stardom. Raised in Los Angeles and on film sets around the globe, Deschanel has Hollywood running through her blood. Her father, Caleb, is an Oscar-nominated cinematographer (Being There) and her mother, Mary Jo, is also an actress (The Right Stuff). Even Deschanel's name has dramatic flair -- she was named after the character in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Leading the crop of celebrity offspring to recently hit the big screen -- including Tom Hanks' kid Colin, Robert Redford's daughter Amy, James Caan's son Scott, Sissy Spacek's daughter Schuyler Fisk, not to mention the Kate Hudson and Liv Tyler crowd of a few years past -- Deschanel was groomed for stardom. Her childhood in L.A.'s tony Pacific Palisades served as a prep course for a career on the big screen. She even acted in school plays alongside Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn's daughter. "I went to private school and basically the whole school was famous people's children, so that's what's normal to me," she recalls. "The weird thing about growing up in L.A. is that at your school plays, people send talent scouts." As a tot, she was already accustomed to hanging around movie sets while her father worked all over, from London to the Seychelles to Yugoslavia.
Now Deschanel and other Hollywood legacies are jumping in front of the cameras. In the last year and a half, Deschanel has shot five films, including The Good Girl opposite Jennifer Aniston, David Gordon Greene's All The Real Girls, and Barry Sonnenfeld's ensemble cast extravaganza Big Trouble. Still you might not recognize her. The actress has the uncanny ability to change her appearance from project to project. She is able to go from playing a painfully shy mental patient in the indie flick Manic to a charismatic college student in Abandon. After watching Deschanel in various roles, you're left wondering, Who's that girl? "I can change the way I look and seem like completely different people, and it's not necessarily on purpose," she says. "I think it's a gift. I think that's what's allowed me to be cast in a lot of different roles."
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