Age 9 Why Her? Holding her own opposite Sean Penn in I Am Sam, Fanning, at 7, became the youngest actor to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award. The attention has landed her plum roles in Uptown Girls and The Cat in the Hat. Her First Screen Kiss As the young Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama, she bussed the actor playing the young Josh Lucas. "I was 7 and he was 10," she recalls, "A very nice guy. I'd worked with him four times before. We were so nervous. We were in school just doing our work and I'd look up, and he'd look at me... and then we'd go back to what we were doing. And he tries to be like, 'Oh, I'm not looking forward to it.' But I think he was." How You Can Tell She's Arrived She already has a Christopher Walken story (from filming the kidnapping drama Man on Fire with the actor): "We had a little boy in one scene and this guy had a flaming red shirt. And Christopher goes [here Dakota speaks perfect Walkenese], That's a nice shirt."

The article is accompanied by a three quarters page color photo of Dakota holding a blond doll (of herself?), looking soulful with dark eye shadow around her eyes.