The VOGUE Top 5.

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

fine and dandy

Speeding through the streets of London in a chauffeured car, wearing a faceful of makeup, Dominic Cooper is rushing from a photo shoot to play a grungy game of football with friends on the other side of town. "I'm going for a reality check," the 30-year-old British actor jokes. "These guys are going to attack me for wearing eyeliner, but it's good. Otherwise, I might start thinking I'm the kind of person who gets driven around in a limo all the time."

Cooper has shown the same good-natured flexibility in his career, whether starring as Dakin in the stage and screen versions of The History Boys (a performance that won him a 2006 Drama Desk nomination) or appearing opposite Keira Knightley in the upcoming costume drama The Duchess. Although he built an impressive resume, Cooper concedes he wasn't always certain he'd be a success. The actor recalls being asked (tactfully, of course) not to participate in the annual musical his senior year at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. "They thought I was lacking in rhythm and musical talent," he says drily.

This month, Cooper proves them wrong again in the film adaptation of Mamma Mia! --in a role he did not immediately want to play. "All I could think was, How much spandex and ladies' platforms will this involve?" he admits. After some prodding from his agent, he agreed to audition--and quickly found himself in Greece with an all-star cast including Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, and Colin Firth. "Let me tell you, Meryl's Greek Step was not up to scratch, and Pierce Brosnan showed up in loafers on the first day. Everyone had two left feet, so we ended up just laughing at each other." --CAROLINE PALMER

spider woman

"What did I want? To pursue my own journey," the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, now 96, says in Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach's screen portrait, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine, opening June 25 at New York's Film Forum. She's certainly done just that. Surrealist, shaman, postminimalist, mother of three sons, and widow of art historian Robert Goldwater, Bourgeois has sewn, carved, and cast her way through nearly a century's worth of psychosexual explorations and formal innovations. Her retrospective, arriving at New York's Guggenheim Museum this summer, traces her astonishing transformation from couture-clad French child to wizened art icon, arrayed in her own wild rubber creation on the steps of her Manhattan brownstone. --LESLIE CAMHI