Kate Bosworth

At first glance, you think you know Kate Bosworth personally. She’s a shoo-in for that unmistakable neighbourhood friend you grew up with. (You know, the one your mom always wanted you to be more like.) She pulls off that surprisingly cool girlfriend vibe all too well and you can’t even bear to be remotely jealous of her stunning looks because she seems too authentic to dislike—even a bit. Tinseltown calls it approachable (and marketable). But when you actually meet Bosworth, 23, all those basic clichés fly out the window and she reads as genuinely friendly—which is as rare to find in Hollywood as a soft-spoken agent. That affable demeanour has brought the girl the type of nice-girls-finish-first karma that has her moving toward the ranks of Julia Robertsdom. Racking up a mighty fine boyfriend (Orlando Bloom), a career working with A-listers and a nice little side job as one of Revlon’s spokesmodels, Bosworth has spun her wide-eyed sweetness into Hollywood gold.

Her story goes something like this: small-town beauty from Darien, Conn., the only child of a fashion-executive father and a stay-at-home mom, rides horses winningly through middle school, then, on a whim, sends her photo (a Christmas card, mind you; head shots are not yet part of her vocabulary) to Robert Redford and is cast as the ill-fated friend of Scarlett Johansson in 1998’s The Horse Whisperer. In 2002, after being accepted at Princeton, an honour she famously deferred, she moves to Hollywood and lands the lead role in the hit surfer movie Blue Crush, where she spends the majority of the film flaunting her hard teenage body in bikinis.

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When she reflects on the film from the patio of L.A.’s über-hip Chateau Marmont hotel, grey Tsubi tank top (one of her favourite lines, she admits) and Chloé camisole draped over her delicate frame, there is a twinkle in her eyes (one hazel, one blue). “It was so much fun to do. [Costars] Michelle [Rodriguez] and Sanoe [Lake] and I lived in a house right on Sunset Beach together. I felt like I got a true dorm experience.”

When Bosworth returned from Hawaii, Hollywood was waiting and a string of films roles followed where she played everything from a cocaine-snorting, porn-star-dating teenager in Wonderland to a small-town grocery-store clerk in the romantic comedy Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!, a character that is probably closest to the real Kate. Still, the role she seems most proud of is that of Sandra Dee to Kevin Spacey’s Bobby Darin in Beyond the Sea. “One of my favourite films is The Usual Suspects [with Spacey in an Oscar-winning role]. I saw that film when I was a kid in middle school and thought, if I could work with any actor, it would be Kevin Spacey.”

And as fairy tales go, it seems the admiration was mutual. After spending months together on location in Berlin, Spacey recommended Bosworth for the biggest role of her career: this summer, she will play Lois Lane in Superman Returns. So how does she feel about filling those iconic conservative pumps? “It’s so weird being on a film that big. You’re wondering when you’re going to be tapped on the shoulder and hear, ‘Thanks for being our stand-in, but you’re replaced with somebody better,’ ” she says, laughing. “You do feel the pressure. The size of it is overwhelming.”

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*For the complete article, be sure to pick up the May issue of FLARE!*