mighty aphrodite; With a string of subtle performances, the radiant Robin Wright Penn has emerged as an actor's actor, writes John Powers.(Biography)

Byline: John Powers

Hollywood people are notoriously hard to shock, but early in her career, Robin Wright Penn found a way to do it: She turned away from stardom. After making herself a hot property in the 1987 hit The Princess Bride, she refused big-money roles in blockbusters like Batman Forever and The Firm.

"The studios thought I didn't want to work," she tells me one morning after driving her kids to school, "but this was precisely the antithesis of my feelings. I did want to work, but I wanted it to be real work."

Like her most famous character, the tragically driven Jenny in Forrest Gump, Wright Penn is a soulful searcher who has refused to settle for being ordinary. Not only did she wed a cultural lightning rod in Sean Penn, but over the years she has often played against her good looks, seeking out challenging parts like the born-again ex-stripper in White Oleander or the frazzled pregnant woman in Nine Lives (a brilliant turn). She embraced the role of the pathological bigot in the recent Sorry, Haters with such nuanced fervor that actress Catherine Keener (herself no slouch) told me it was the most amazing performance she'd seen in the last year.

"I've been trying to cast her forever," says writer-director Anthony Minghella (The En-glish Patient), who first noticed Wright Penn in 1990's State of Grace, the film where she

met her husband. In his new movie, Breaking and Entering, she and Jude Law play a London couple whose static relationship is shaken up by a burglary. "There's a delicacy and taste that informs everything she does," raves Minghella. "In terms of skill and attitude, she's like the acting sister of Philip Seymour Hoffman."

This point is echoed by Law, who ...