Image credit: Suzanne Hanover

When Katherine Heigl was 16 years old, a teacher at her Connecticut high school asked the class to write down what they saw for themselves in the future and seal it away in an envelope. Heigl, who'd been working steadily since she was 9, smugly predicted that after graduation she'd be driving around the hills of Los Angeles in her shiny new red convertible, basking in the glow of having made it.

Hollywood had been good to her so far. When she was 15, she starred with Gérard Depardieu in My Father the Hero, a movie memorable mostly for the shot of Heigl walking away from the camera in a white thong bathing suit. Later that year, Steven Seagal decided he wanted to meet the girl the studio had cast to play his niece in Under Siege 2, so he invited Heigl out to Los Angeles and booked her a suite at the Beverly Wilshire for over a week. ''He flew me in, put me up at this extravagant hotel where Pretty Woman stayed, and didn't even come and meet me. Whatever. I was hanging out at the pool all day, going shopping with my mom. I was dating Joey Lawrence at the time and we got to see a couple movies.'' She lets loose with a throaty barroom laugh. ''Good times!'' she says.

But when she turned 18 and moved to Los Angeles, Heigl joined a city teeming with blondes who wanted their own red-convertible moments. She landed a role on the extraterrestrial teen show Roswell, but when that got canceled she started getting turned down for everything from Lifetime movies to feature films. At the time, she was living with her older brother, who used to make fun of his diminished sister's daily routine of waking up around 10 and hanging out for a few hours before she'd start complaining that she was coming down with something and going back to bed. Heigl had long before met J.J. Abrams, when he was doing rewrites on the script for My Father the Hero, and his office asked her to audition for Felicity. They passed, and then brought her back to try for a variety of roles on Alias. She was sure she'd finally booked a part playing Michael Vartan's evil wife. They went with someone else.

''That's when I wanted to quit,'' she says today. ''But J.J. did send me a letter apologizing, and he was wonderful. I kept that letter on my fridge for two years because I felt like I needed it to remind me to keep going.''

Any working actor knows that it's luck, as much as the talent and connections, that end up paying the bills. If Heigl had gotten Alias, she never would have been available for the pilot of Grey's Anatomy. And now the girl who couldn't get a callback for Wedding Crashers is starring in this summer's big-dude comedy. ''It's fun to see people really take to her,'' says Apatow. ''[At first] I thought Knocked Up was about two people trying to decide if they liked each other. But people have such an affection for her that it became this movie about Seth Rogen trying to earn Katherine Heigl.''

And just like that, she landed her next starring role in 27 Dresses. ''The town has a tremendous respect for Judd,'' says the movie's producer Jonathan Glickman, who cast her in February, months before Knocked Up hits theaters and audiences have a chance to decide how she translates to the big screen. ''If he's given his stamp of approval, you have to say to yourself 'Okay, she must be great.'''

Heigl almost lost the chance to bask in his glow of acceptance. Rather than celebrating landing the best role of her career — ''It's my first big film since, uh, The Ringer'' — Heigl started panicking that her commitment to Grey's would keep her from the movie. ''There was a week of conflict and it looked like I maybe wouldn't have been able to do it. Lots of tears! Lots of crying on set. 'Please, please, just let me go!''' she says, laughing. '''I'll pay you!'''

''Well, don't say that, '' warns Nancy, and they both roll their eyes.

NEXT PAGE: ''I didn't have a courageous moment,'' she says of defending Grey's costar Knight. ''I had a couple glasses of champagne, and I was furious and frustrated for my friend and sick of the whole mess of it.''