When Bryce Dallas Howard was 4 years old, a clod she’d never met handed her a script to slip to her father. One year later, Ron Howard and his writer wife, Cheryl, moved from Los Angeles to rural Connecticut, where their four kids enjoyed childhoods shielded from Hollywood crassness. Bryce, who gets her middle name from the city she was born in (just as well it wasn’t Hackensack) ended up becoming an actress anyway, but she’s no garden-variety starlet. Having studied at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts, she paid her dues on stage and still does, producing and acting in an experimental theater company she founded with a bunch of college friends: “We take these ancient rituals like The Mahabharata and translate them into present-day theater,” she says over bottled water at a Beverly Hills hotel. But Howard got her movie break early on when director M. Night Shyamalan and a friend of Lars von Trier each spotted her on Broadway playing Rosalind in As You Like It (a role she will reprise later this year in Kenneth Branagh’s film of the Shakespeare comedy) and cast her in movies that are fast establishing her as one of the most promising young talents in the industry. Howard shone in Shyamalan’s otherwise moribund The Village (2004), as a blind young woman who nonetheless sees what those around her don’t. Now, taking over from Dogville star Nicole Kidman in Manderlay — part two of von Trier’s America-the-Ugly trilogy — she excels again as Grace, a young woman who sees but is blind to the needs of all around her. Not bad for a 24-year-old whose parents, she says, “neither encouraged nor discouraged” her from entering the film business, yet offered their daughter unstinting support when she moved back to Los Angeles three years a... More >>>