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Anna Chlumsky
''They love me in Brazil,'' hoots Anna Chlumsky. ''I'd sit down for a manicure and they'd freak out. More attention than I got here. Ha!'' It's the same bubbly exuberance Macaulay Culkin inspired when the two came of age in 1991's My Girl. Blue-eyed, precocious Vada Sultenfuss marked the beginning and essentially the end of Chlumsky's flirtation with fame (a subpar MG sequel notwithstanding). ''I was given this beautiful break very young. I didn't know how to work for it and I just expected it to happen again,'' says the now-24-year-old. ''Not getting hired, being told [I] didn't look a certain way...took its toll. You're insecure enough in adolescence — let alone trying to be on the big screen.''
Wearied by acting — and more often, not — Chlumsky enrolled in the infamously intense University of Chicago in 1998. ''College helped me use my brain for things other than reading scripts. It was wonderful,'' she notes. After brief postgrad stints as a Zagat researcher and editing sci-fi fantasy books at HarperCollins (''totally up my nerd alley!''), the Brooklynite has embraced the small victories, taking to the stage with a string of Off Broadway works while auditioning for film roles. ''People think perfect is achievable, and then they get disappointed. Once you own up to perfection not being possible, a lot of beauty can occur.''
