winning ways; Hope Davis makes the leap from indie favorite to Hollywood star.

Byline: Robert Sullivan

There are movie stars and there are actors, and sometimes there are people who are both. The only attributes of the typical movie star that Hope Davis lacks are perhaps in the areas of vanity and overseriousness; dressed in pink capris and a tank top by Claudie Pierlot, Davis is nice enough to make even down-to-earth seem a little pretentious. "Aren't you glad you're eating this?" she says, enjoying a little bit of chocolate at her neighborhood French cafe one afternoon. "What if we were just having water?"

Davis may have to do some work on her high-powered-movie-star demeanor soon, however, because the brilliant lead of indie films like The Secret Lives of Dentists has started appearing in some very non-indie productions-beginning with Proof, a film based on David Auburn's Pulitzer-winning play and directed by John Madden, in which she acted alongside Gwyneth Paltrow. And then there was The Weather man, a black comedy in which she plays the wife of Nicolas Cage, a weatherman who realizes that while his life looks good on the eleven o'clock news, it's raining at home. Davis is a suburban housewife from hell, delivering with spine-chilling verite such ...