AGE AND OCCUPATION: 25, actor.

PROVENANCE: London.

SHE GOT HER START THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY: "I joined a modeling agency. All that skinny heroin chic had gone and they just wanted girls that smiled a lot and I was like, 'How much are you paying me?'"

BUT AMIS MADE HER FAMOUS: After a string of English indies, Guillory's breakout role came last year on television in a BBC production of Kingsley Amis's Take a Girl Like You. 

IN THE FUTURE: Guillory stars alongside Guy Pearce and Jeremy Irons in The Time Machine, a remake of the 1960 film based on the H. G. Wells classic and directed by Wells's great-grandson Simon Wells. "After six years of working on low-budget independent films of the too-weird-to-watch variety, being asked by DreamWorks to come and play with the big boys, it was like finding a unicorn in your sock drawer." 

REAL-LIFE FELLINI MOMENT: "I went out the other night for the first time in ages, just because I'd been so busy. As I came out of the cinema, I ran down the street to get cigarettes, and 30 guys followed me with cameras and shouted at me. It's all so strange. It's not a life I really live or understand."