Age and occupation: 24, actor.
Provenance: Hunter Valley, Australia.

Rampant kidmania: Ever since her breakthrough performance in 2004's Somersault, Cornish has had to contend with the "Next Nicole" hype that accompanies any young woman who is beautiful, talented, and Australian. But with the pending releases of Neil Armfield's Candy (in which she stars opposite Aussie god Heath Ledger) and Ridley Scott's A Good Year (in which she stars opposite Aussie god Russell Crowe), maybe the hype is justified.

Sole occasion in her life thus far in which she has been to Los Angeles:
"When I was 14, because I won a competition out of a teenage magazine. You had to write in and say who you wanted to meet at the MTV Movie Awards and why. I wrote that I wanted to meet Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and I wrote this poem, and I won. So Mom and I went to L.A. and went to the MTV Movie Awards. We stayed at the Beverly Hilton, and we were there for five days, and it was a really fun time. I didn't actually get to meet [Matt and Ben]." …

But Cornish did meet her unlikely career oracle, in the form of the man who won an Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood:

"I remember I saw Martin Landau, and I went up and introduced myself to him and said, 'Can I get a photo with you, please?' I took a photo with him and he grabbed my hands and said to me, 'Are you an actress?' I said, 'No, no, I'm not,' and he goes, 'What do you do?' And I said, 'I just go to school.' And he said, 'I think I'm going to see you again one day—I think you're going to be a famous actor.' It just sort of went through me—if anything, I'd always wanted to be a vet as a kid and work with animals. So that was, when I look back at it, a very strange experience with someone who's quite amazing."