With her first starring role, the ever-talented Zooey Deschanel is stealing into the spotlight, her way.

There's something charmingly retro about a girl who favors Motown oldies and black liquid eyeliner and calls The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the wildly colorful 1964 Catherine Deneuve musical, her "ultimate fashion inspiration."
"I've always been left of center," says Zooey Deschanel. With the goofy, girly allure of a young Shirley MacLaine, the actress has become her generation's most reliable scene-stealer - no small feat with costars like Fraces MacDormand and Jennifer Aniston. "A lot of people think I'm a character actress. And I do play characters," Deschanel says, perhaps referring to the kooky Retail Rodeo clerk of The Good Girl.
Now, as Noel in All the Real Girls, a dark love story from rising indie auteur David Gordon Green, the actress has finally made the switch from upstaging stars to being one. In a tale fraught with emotional land mines, her easy, nuanced performance carries the film. "Zooey moved every line away from the expected," says Green. "She made sad things funny and funny things sad."
Deschanel, for her part, seems destined to take cliches out of movies for years to come. "Certain aspects of my personality are always going to come out on-screen," she says. "I guess that's just me - if they say I'm quirky, I'm quirky. It's better than being boring."