tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

Not only are they capable of lighting up the silver screen, they are also some of today's most talented young actresses, commanding huge fees - in some cases, in the millions. Many have won multiple awards, while others have starred in some of today's biggest box office hits. In short, we're listing down the cream of the crop!

Just like our recent Top 50 hottest young actors, we've narrowed down our list from 88 to 50, and set an age limit. If you miss seeing some of your favorites, so do we - including Maggie Gyllenhaal (31 years old) and Amy Adams (34 years old). Definitely some of the names you'll see on the list are emerging talents - the ones you will see getting the big roles in the near future - and some of them already have, with awards and nominations to boot.

Here's the updated Top 30 list! The names are getting more and more "critically-acclaimed", fabulous and wow!

# 30 - Olivia Thirlby - I just love her performance in The Wackness! Even her small role in Juno, she was quite good! I think it must be the charm of this young actress that makes her quite a standout. I also think The Wackness (starring Josh Peck with Thirlby as his love interest) is one of the most underrated movies of 2008. It's about time she'll take the lead role, as she already paid her dues playing supporting parts to the likes of Hilary Duff and Ellen Page - another young actress we admire a lot. Perhaps her role in Parts per Billion might do that soon enough. I just wonder who play the role opposite Ms. Thirlby?

- - -

- - -

Reports the San Francisco Chronicle:

The 21-year-old rising star, who had a memorable supporting role in "Juno," appears in two movies opening a week apart, and, according to IMDB.com, she has seven films in various stages of production  - - Tough, smart and sexually curious, Thirlby's character in "The Wackness," shows a surprising amount of subtlety under Jonathan Levine's sensitive direction. Not every young actress could have pulled it off. But then, the only child of a Greenwich Village couple - her father works in construction - has always been mature for her age. At 18, encouraged by her parents, she moved into her own apartment and made another important decision: She skipped college to focus on her acting career.

"I got that advice from an acting teacher," Thirlby said. "The advice that he gave me was, 'If you really want to make this your job, you should try to do it as soon as possible and not take yourself out of the game by going to college.' [ read more ]

A rather heated discussion on Ms. Thirlby's IMDb board has started last year and still rages on.

I have no interest in becoming really famous. It's easy to forget sometimes that it's a fairly stupid profession. It's basically glorified make-believe. It's always been my passion, but let's face it: I'm doing the same thing I was when I was 3 years old and getting tutus.

The quote, I think, was quite true and I even find her views to be honest. While some may think it's her attempt at modesty, I think it's her way of saying, she'll rather do indie movies than concoct ways for the trashy celeb media sites to feast about.

Olivia resides in New York City where she was born and raised. She has trained extensively in classical Shakespearian acting in New York at the American Globe Theatre, and in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art

- - -

Malone progressed to professional acting with the 1996 film Bastard Out of Carolina. She was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Debut Performance and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance in a TV Movie or Miniseries for this role. From there, her roles have grown to include several Hollywood features. In 1997, she was nominated for a Golden Globe, Best Actress in a Mini-Series or TV Movie, for her role in Hope. After several years of home schooling, she briefly attended the Professional Children's School in New York. In January 2000, Malone won legal emancipation from her mother, to bar maternal interference with her career and earnings; Malone has said that her mother "mismanaged" some of her earnings.

Malone co-produced the 2002 film American Girl, a drama in which she also acted. She had her first starring role in the 2004 film Saved!. In 2006, she made her professional stage debut in the Broadway production of the Tony Award winning play Doubt.

In 2007, it was announced that she was releasing her first single on The Social Registry, a New York City experimental music label. A number of tracks were posted to her MySpace page, and the first single, a 7" vinyl record featuring two tracks, was scheduled for release in 2007. Pitchfork Media has described her music as "pretty out-there-- bedroom electronics, spaced-out keyboards, and Malone's spare vocals."

Malone appeared in the horror film The Ruins, which was released on April 4, 2008 and co-starred Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey, and Jonathan Tucker and played Lavinia in an off-Broadway revival of Mourning Becomes Electra in 2009.

- - -

Smet is the daughter of rock musician Johnny Hallyday and the actress Nathalie Baye. In 1986 Jean-Jacques Goldman wrote the song 'Laura' which Johnny Hallyday recorded. The daughter of such famous parents, she has said that she was unhappy at school, that she changed schools numerous times growing up, and that she was sometimes picked on - for example for the fact that at a time when rap music was the fashion, her father was an old-fashioned rock'n'roller.

She wanted initially to be a theatrical agent like her godfather, Dominique Besnehard. In 1999 she left school and followed theatre classes with Raymond Acquaviva.

In 2002 she began her acting career when Xavier Giannoli, on the recommendation of Olivier Assayas, cast her in the role of Charlotte in ' Les Corps Impatients.' She plays opposite French hearthrob Nicolas Duvauchelle in Les corps impatients, for which she received the Best Female Newcomer at Étoiles d'Or du Cinéma.

- -

- - -

She also played opposite another French star Benoît Magimel in The Bridesmaid (La demoiselle d'honneur), as shown above.

- - -

# 27 - Mia Wasikowska - Growing up she wanted to become a ballet dancer but it seems 'destiny' has other plans for her. She switched to full-time acting only in 2006 and was nominated for a Young Actress AFI Award (Australia's acting award giving body) for her role in Suburban Mayhem.

- - -

- - -

American TV audiences will remember her for her performance in HBO's In Treatment, playing Sophie, an aspiring Olympic gymnast who is sent to Gabriel Byrne's psychotherapist following an accident which is suspected to have been a suicide attempt. She followed that up with supporting roles in several films - She played the role of Elinor Smith, a young woman hoping to follow in the footsteps of Amelia Earhart in Amelia, starring Hillary Swank. Wasikowska also appeared in Defiance with Daniel Craig, as well as in the indie film That Evening Sun with Hal Holbrook.

Her role in the new Tim Burton film, Alice in Wonderland, is giving the young actress a lot of buzz. Says the Olivia Smith as the Daily News:

At the center of the director's latest off-kilter universe will be relatively unknown Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, 19. Wasikowska has been picked to play the plumb role of Alice, who is 17 in Burton's realization of the classic fantasy book by Lewis Carroll (the heroine of the book is a younger girl). Burton said of his choice, "We met a lot of people, but she just had that certain kind of emotional toughness, standing her ground in a way that makes her kind of an older person with a younger person's mentality," [ read more ]

- - -

# 26 - Abigail Breslin - the Academy-Award nominated American child actress is also the fourth youngest actress ever to be nominated for an Oscar. Best known for portraying Olive Hoover in the film Little Miss Sunshine, Nim Rusoe in Nim's Island. She also plays the title character in Kit Kittredge: An American Girl and The Ultimate Gift as well as for several supporting roles in other films.

- - -

- - -

Says Claudia Puig at Abegail's USA Today profile, highlighting her role in Little Miss Sunshine:

Abigail was 8 when she played the endearing, wide-eyed Olive in Little Miss Sunshine. Co-stars Greg Kinnear and Alan Arkin have said they were astounded by her seriousness of purpose during shooting. Olive's dream is encouraged by an eccentric grandpa (Arkin), who coaches her. She's an innocent among a throng of creepily sophisticated little girls vying for a trophy; she conveys the sense of being out of place so capably that our hearts ache for her as she performs her inappropriately suggestive, but hilariously naive, dance number in the finale. [ read more ]

- - -

- - -

- - -

Written by Joel Stein, it provides a bird's eye view of Dakota's acting career, which I'm quoting below:

She's made for cute: the clear blue eyes, the chipmunk cheeks, the giant smile on the pixie face. And yet Dakota Fanning takes on roles that Max von Sydow would find too dark: the daughter losing her retarded father in I Am Sam with Sean Penn in 2001; a kidnapping victim in last year's Man on Fire with Denzel Washington; a horror story about a girl with an imaginary friend in January's Hide and Seek with Robert De Niro; a kid running from aliens in this summer's Steven Spielberg movie War of the Worlds. It will be six years before the 11-year-old can legally see a large chunk of her films without her parents.

Never has a kid had such a well-planned path to becoming a serious actress. She reportedly took a pay cut from her million-plus fee on Hide and Seek to get her name above the title right next to De Niro's. She took the movie, she told reporters, because she had "never done a psychological thriller before." On Feb. 23 she got a camcorder for her 11th birthday from Spielberg. "I used to say she was 30," says her agent, Cindy Osbrink. "Now, after Hide and Seek, I say she's 105. She gets more mature and thoughtful and expressive."

Today, the question is: Can Dakota Fanning realize her dream and be the young actress she envisioned herself? I'll leave that to our viewers, but in the meantime, Dakota is our 25th ranked young actress.

- - -

Right from the start, Rinko Kikuchi was a surefire crowd pleaser. She has never conformed to the populace and has the uncanny ability to make her roles something more unique than they were intended to be. Rinko Kikuchi has carried her eccentric sense of style over into everything she has done in her acting career.[ read more ]

Enter Hollywood: In 2006, she appeared in the critically-acclaimed Alejandro González Iñárritu-directed film Babel, where she played Chieko Wataya, a deaf teenage girl, in a role for which she was critically acclaimed and nominated for numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

She won several, such as the National Board of Review Award for Best Breakthrough Female Performance (tying with Jennifer Hudson) and the Gotham Award for Best Breakthrough. Kikuchi is also the fifth actress in Academy Award history to be nominated for an award for a role in which they do not speak a word. (The others were Jane Wyman, Patty Duke, Holly Hunter, and Samantha Morton.)

- - -

- - -

Her emotionally intense role in Babel has led to her being noticed by many international directors, such as Rian Johnson, auteur director of Brick. She starred in his second film, 2009's The Brothers Bloom, which was her first fully English-language feature. Though she plays a main character, she only speaks three words in the film; her character is said to only know three words of English. Up next for Rinko includes the Japanese remake of Sideways, the John Cusack starrer Shanghai and acclaimed filmmaker Anh Hung Tran's latest feature, Norwegian Wood, where she is playing the lead character, Naoko.

- - -

# 23 - Clemence Poesy - A personal favorite of mine, Mademoiselle Poesy is not only a fabulous fashion model, but a talented actress. I don't think I would get tired of watching her, even in such film as Le grand Meaulnes, which was a critical flop, to say the least.

- - -

- - -

Askmen.com explains the reasons why Clemence Poesy is quite succesful today:

Clemence Poesy is fast on her way to becoming a household name. This stunning 26-year-old starlet has already appeared in 18 films and television productions including huge hits like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, as well as smaller, critically acclaimed gems like In Bruges and Sans moi. Despite her remarkable success, she insists it's easy to imagine a life beyond the silver screen. "I don't know if I see myself as an actress for the rest of my life," she admits. "I am interested in costume. Clothes in your daily life are important: your choices say something about you, even if what they're saying is about non-choice. And what you wear in a film is crucial. A film is a great deal about what you see, and the silhouette of a character tells you a lot.

- - -

# 22 - Ludivine Saugnier - Arguably one of France’s most talented, Ludivine Sagnier, has proven her mettle in both period and contemporary films. From François Ozon’s 8 Women and Swimming Pool to Laurent Tirard’s Molière to Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs and Claude Chabrol’s The Girl Cut in Two, Ludivine has these filmmakers as admirers.

It’s interesting to note that when the films starring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Romola Garai were translated into French, it was Saugnier who was sought after to dub their voices.

Says the actress:

I'm much more confident in front of a camera, hidden by a character, enhanced by makeup, so I can go much further than I can in real life. Sexual acting is painful, because even though you're pretending, you have the skin of the person in front of you, and it's not the skin you wish you had. After that you run into the shower to get rid of everything.

Hopefully there will be a chance for the actress to do an English language movie in the near future.

- - -

# 21 - Anna Paquin - As many of you know, the Canadian-born New Zealand actress has her breakthrough performance in Jane Campion's Piano, which earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1994. It made her the second youngest winner in Oscar history at the age of 11. After such acclaim, it seems she never had another acting vehicle to further explore her acting talents, except for two movies - as young Jane in Jane Eyre and the lead part in Fly Away Home - a choice that was reported to be hers, since her family was quite unprepared to handle her fame after winning the Oscars.

- - -

- - -

Many of her fans and ordinary moviegoers were quite ecstatic when she appeared as Rogue in the blockbuster X-Men movie in 2000, its sequel X2 in 2003, and its third installment X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006. While the series will not feature Ms. Paquin in a similar role that gave her such acclaim, it was enough to put her back in the spotlight. Last year, Paquin appeared as Sookie Stackhouse in the HBO series True Blood, her first role in a TV series. The show is based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels by Charlaine Harris. Paquin won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama Series for her role in the show, and also won a Satellite Award in a similar category.

Well, I mean, obviously, when you're doing a massive studio film, you can build enormous sets and X-Men jets and all sorts of things, and blow things up if you want to. On smaller films, you're more constrained. I think what's really interesting about independent film, is that sometimes within those constraints, you end up finding more interesting ways to do it, because you don't have the option of wasting time or energy or money. You have to be more focused and more creative, and I personally really enjoy that. I've done a lot of independent films (Laughs). I haven't done that many huge films except for X-Men, X2: X-Men United and X-Men: The Last Stand, so (independent film) is where I'm very comfortable.

But her return to the big screen was supposed to be via Margaret. The film is all about a young woman (Paquin)  who witnessed a bus accident, and is caught up in the aftermath, where the question of whether or not it was intentional affects many people's lives. Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo also stars. Unfortunately, the release of the movie is quite uncertain, as it faces a lot of legal issues. Reports IndieWire from an extensive reportage from the LA Times' John Horn:

The Los Angeles Times’ John Horn wrote an extensively informative piece this weekend on Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” which wrapped production in the fall of 2005 and has yet to see the light of day. The $12.6 million film was developed and financed by Fox Searchlight, and is now the subject of two different lawsuits.  “‘Margaret’ has turned into a nightmarish production that has devolved into a bitter court fight,” Horn said. “Despite ‘Margaret’s’ initial promise, it is now uncertain when Lonergan’s movie, which was filmed more than three years ago, will ever make it to theaters.”

Horn explains that while movie studio shelves are filled with troubled projects that have been on hold for various reasons, the rarity of “Margaret” is its pedigree. Beyond Lonergan himself (who wrote and directed his acclaimed directorial debut “You Can Count On Me”), the film features big-name actors like Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo and Anna Paquin, and an all-star producing team that includes Oscar winners Scott Rudin and the late Sydney Pollack. According to one of the two lawsuits currently being pitted against the film, the reason “Margaret” hasn’t come out yet is that Lonergan can’t finish the film. [ read more ]