happy day; Bryce Dallas Howard was discovered the good old-fashioned way.

Byline: Sarah Kerr

You want making movies to be magical." So answers

director M. Night Shyamalan when asked how he chose 23-year-old Bryce Dallas Howard, an unknown with five minutes' screen time in a negligible indie under her belt, for the romantic lead in his upcoming The Village. The director saw her in a hip reworking of Shakespeare's As You Like It at the Public Theater last year and told his production team, "There's this girl, I don't want to audition her, I just want to offer her the part." To inspire gut-level certainty in a leading director is unusual. To do it on your own merits is even more remarkable when your father is director (and former child actor) Ron Howard. "He's very excited, and my mom as well," says Bryce, cheerful on the phone from Sweden, where she is shooting Manderlay, the next film from button-pushing arthouse director Lars von Trier. Her parents counsel her, she says, to "keep your head on your shoulders, don't freak out, and do your job really, really well."

You've heard of the erratic Barrymores, the restless, world-traveling Hustons. If this redhead with piercing green eyes makes her mark as ethereal Ivy Walker, in love with Joaquin Phoenix in a small 1897 town beset by unexplained ...