Spotlight on Julia Stiles

''Hollywood is a popularity contest,'' says Julia Stiles, in a tidy summation of her chosen industry. If the movie business is indeed an exaggerated playground of high school politics, with the short-skirted ingenues skipping class to hang out on the red carpet with the paparazzi, then Stiles is the quiet girl in the back of AP English furiously underlining her Sylvia Plath novel.

''A lot of people in the tabloids are the actors who are successful and working,'' the 25-year-old says, without bitterness, on a spring evening in a Manhattan teahouse. ''If you have everybody talking about you, you're the first person that people will think of when they're trying to cast a role. Maybe I'm naive, but I would hope that my work speaks for itself as opposed to what clubs I go to or where I'm seen.''

Stiles' words and career choices are both telling. In 2000, she back-burnered her acting for college, though she had already assembled an impressive CV, with a major in modern Shakespeare (Hamlet, 10 Things I Hate About You, O) and a minor in teen lite (Save the Last Dance). Her degree finally in hand (the native New Yorker got her B.A. in English lit from Columbia University last spring), Stiles may yet prove the benefits of long-term thinking and a life spent outside the limelight. Her first postgrad job is a good start: She's starring opposite Liev Schreiber in a slick, commercial remake of the 1976 horror classic The Omen, which opens June 6.

With her sturdy air of maturity, Stiles slides easily into the updated role of wary mother to the Antichrist. ''The original movie treats Lee Remick as the sort of red-wine-guzzling stay-at-home mom who just kind of had to cope,'' says director John Moore. ''I don't think Julia would have touched the role if she didn't feel that she could play a modern woman.'' Indeed, Stiles' character seems less like a neurotic muddle than a new mother wrestling with an evil bout of postpartum. The film was also a reunion of sorts with Mia Farrow (she plays the wicked governess, Mrs. Baylock), who took Stiles under her wing while playing the young actress' mother in the 2005 Off Broadway production of Fran's Bed. ''As long as I live, Julia will be in my sense of family,'' coos Farrow. ''Her intelligence is obvious once you watch anything she's in. And there's a certainty to her that I've been lacking all my life. I'm riddled with self-doubt all the time and she seems not to be at all.''

But nobody who has her teenage years unfold on the big screen (Stiles shot her first film at 14 and at 15 played Harrison Ford's daughter in 1997's The Devil's Own) can escape with her ego fully intact. Stiles was 19 when one particularly unsubtle producer left a pair of breast enhancers in her dressing room, devastating the young actress. ''I wasn't yet equipped with a strong self-image,'' she explains, brushing off the incident. ''I took it more seriously than I should have.'' And today? ''I'd probably just say, 'Well, thank God I'm not going to look flat-chested on camera!''' Stiles admits, having learned with age that a sense of humor can be handier than righteous indignation.