Amanda Seyfried Goes Wilde

The term "star-making turn" might be applied to Amanda Seyfried, who just a couple of years ago was a fairly anonymous young actress. She was in Mean Girls, and for most people, that was about all they could identify her from. Her boobs predicted the weather. Then she grew up a bit and appeared on HBO's Big Love, and Seyfried was one of two good things about Mamma Mia! last summer, Meryl Streep being the other. It's that performance that might be the star-making turn. The 23-year-old will lead the cast of an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's comedy, A Woman of No Importance, which Variety says will co-star Annette Bening and Sean Bean. It's not her first big signing since Mamma Mia!, however. She'll also appear in Lasse Hallstrom's Dear John and Atom Egoyan's Chloe, opposite Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore. You could do worse than working with those two directors, and in the case of Chloe, those two actors. The Wilde thing will be an interesting experiment. The reason we still see Oscar Wilde movies now and again is that good writing never goes out of style, and very few writers have ever been more clever with their dialogue than Wilde. But that places a huge demand on the actors, and from the looks of the films she has coming up, there will be a lot of demands placed on Seyfried. And to think, all it took was a bad ABBA musical.