Hair today, and tomorrow

Ginnifer Goodwin makes her feature film debut in “Mona Lisa Smile” playing the slightly frumpy, fairly spunky fourth to a trio of Hollywood’s hottest young actresses (Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal), all overseen by Julia Roberts.

Perhaps because she lacks the recognition factor of her better-known co-stars, it is Goodwin who is most convincing and seemingly at home amid the film’s 1950s trappings. Which makes the sleek and fashionable young woman who slips out of a sport utility vehicle late one afternoon all the more surprising.

“I think I can look very, very different all the time,” she says with bubbling enthusiasm. “I strive to transform myself. It’s really one of the best things about acting; it’s like you get to try out every job there is. One day I want to play an astronaut!”

One would be hard-pressed to recognize her from role to role. Originally from Memphis, Tenn., Goodwin studied acting in Boston and London before moving to New York the day after her college graduation.

With a fellowship providing a financial cushion, she furiously hit the audition circuit, eventually landing a small, one-time part on TV’s “Law & Order” and then a larger recurring role on “Ed.”

After work on “Mona Lisa Smile,” she filmed the coming “Win a Date With Tad Hamilton” (which inspired a recent move to Los Angeles) and is shooting “ Love Comes to the Executioner” in Montana.

Goodwin had seen “Mona Lisa Smile” for the first time two days earlier, and the experience of watching herself onscreen was disorienting.

“It was insane. I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t watch it as a movie, I watched it as a cumulative experience, as though looking through a picture album. Oh, I remember Julia Roberts said this to me right before I shot that scene, or that’s so funny, we shot that at 3 in the morning and it looks like daytime. There was a story for every scene.”

She cheerily reports that all her co-stars treated her as an equal and leans in close to conspiratorially add that even her trailer was the same size as those of the other young actresses. And she can’t contain her feelings about 1950s swimwear and hair styles.

“I don’t know if you noticed,” she says, “but I am the only girl who got out of the swimming pool in that bathing suit. And those things are dreadful. I was so excited, let’s show a woman with real thighs and real arms, let’s put that out there.”

Her sudden gust of confidence deflates as she adds, “Oh, but that hair was awful, wasn’t it awful? It was great, perfect for the time and perfect for the character, but I can’t believe I had to walk around with that haircut.”

-- Mark Olsen