Nicole Kidman is flawless— and we mean it: we saw her naked during the 1998-99 London and Broadway runs of The Blue Room, directed by Sam Mendes. Her sexually charged performance opposite husband Tom Cruise (from whom she has recently separated) in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 Eyes Wide Shut allowed audiences to feel they knew her even better. Yes, Hollywood’s most elegant Australian import knows how to create a buzz. American audiences were introduced to Kidman in the 1989 psychological thriller Dead Calm. In 1995 she starred in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, in which her wicked portrayal of a woman obsessed with becoming a TV personality won her a Golden Globe for best actress. This spring, Kidman will surely teach us a thing or two about the cancan in Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited musical, Moulin Rouge. -PUNCH HUTTON

She is still one of the world’s most beautiful women, and if she stopped working today, her status as one of the greatest film actresses of all time would be secure. Over the course of her 88 films, which include The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Belle de Jour, Repulsion, The Last Metro, and Indochine, she has worked with everyone from Bunuel to Truffaut, personifying the bourgeois malaise of postwar Europe with minimalist precision. But Catherine Deneuve continues to seek out unexpected roles in interesting films (remember Dancer in the Dark?). And then there’s her image: the lifelong muse of Yves Saint Laurent, the face of Chanel in the 70s and of France’s Marianne in the 80s. Of this year’s Legends of Hollywood cover, Deneuve says, “I came to New York just for this shoot. I think I would fly anywhere for Annie Leibovitz.” She showed up at the studio with a pack of cigarettes, a cup of espresso, and a copy of Le Monde, then proceeded to charm all those present by being witty and so needlessly down-to-earth. -MICHAEL HOGAN

When Meryl Streep slept through the L.S.A.T.’s she had signed up for during a dark moment at the Yale Drama School, the gods of drama were proved just. What was to come—Kramer vs. Kramer, Sophie’s Choice, The French Lieutenant's Woman— made most agree with Clint Eastwood when he cast her in The Bridges of Madison County. She was, he said with a shrug, “the greatest actress in the world.” Her dedication to her art is famous: to prepare for her role as a violin teacher in 1999’s Music of the Heart, she practiced the instrument six hours a day for four months. It paid off with her 12th Academy Award nomination; she’s won two of the things. She’ll appear onscreen next with Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, and Claire Danes in director Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours. And then there’s the little matter of The Seagull—in Central Park this summer with Kevin Kline. -MARC GOODMAN

Gwyneth Paltrow seems immune to the usual trappings of celebrity, driving her entourage-less self to the V.F. cover shoot and then playing D.J. Perhaps it’s because she always figured she was going to be famous that she handles stardom so gracefully. As she once said, “Fame is like a pre-destined thing,” and having grown up in the business doesn’t exactly hurt. (Mom, as you may know, is film and theater actress Blythe Danner; Dad is television producer and movie director Bruce Paltrow.) But the 28-year-old perennial “It girl” has emerged as one of her generation’s most respected actresses, and certainly its most luminous, through roles in films such as Emma, Sliding Doors, and Shakespeare in Love, for which her heart-stoppingly flawless performance earned her 1998’s Oscar for best actress. Last year she went from being directed by Dad in Duets to starring with on-again, off-again beau Ben Affleck in the romantic drama Bounce. This year, she’s slated to be seen in six films, among them: The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson’s follow-up to Rushmore), in which she’ll appear opposite Gene Hackman; and the Farrelly brothers’ Shallow Hal. -LAURA KANG

The fact that Cate Blanchett never really intended to become an actress is sure to dismay more than a few aspiring thespians. Ten years ago she was still a halfhearted acting student (yet to be discovered by Geoffrey Rush) who soon couldn’t help winning multiple best-performance awards. She has since come on to moviegoing audiences like a storm, beginning with the under-appreciated Oscar and Lucinda (1997), then the thunderous success of Elizabeth (1998), for which she won a Golden Globe as well as earned an Oscar nomination. Refusing to lose momentum, Blanchett followed with An Ideal Husband (1999), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and, most recently, The Gift (2000). Her seemingly endless range and chameleon-like beauty allow her to transcend periods, nationalities, and genres—an ability that will be challenged still further by Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, in which she will give her first cross-species performance, as an elf queen. -ROBIN RIZZUTO

Hollywood may have expected Kate Winslet, after her Oscar-nominated performance as the spirited, corseted Rose in Titanic, to step regally into her assured status as an Opener of Blockbusters—but that held little appeal for the resolutely unpretentious 25-year-old. “Hollywood can more than take care of itself,” Winslet has tartly noted, and she followed Titanic with more delicate, idiosyncratic films, such as Hideous Kinky, in which she played a hippie mom in Morocco, and Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke!, in which she played a cult member opposite deprogrammer Harvey Keitel. Indeed, low-budget, arty fare has paid off richly for Winslet: it was on the set of Hideous Kinky that she fell in love with assistant director Jim Threapleton, now her husband and the father of their baby daughter, Mia. Her current films are Philip Kaufman’s Quills, in which she plays a helpful chambermaid to Geoffrey Rush’s Marquis de Sade, and Enigma, a British film (produced by Mick Jagger) about code breakers in World War II, which won praise at Sundance and is due out in theaters later this year. -BRIDIE CLARK

It is safe to say that Vanessa Redgrave is unique in Hollywood. While it is rare for an actor’s career to span more than 40 years, 80 films, and countless stage productions, it is even more rare for an actor to be as committed to her causes as to her craft. Redgrave has famously—and sometimes notoriously—supported the P.L.O., the I.R.A., and the Workers Revolutionary Party. Most recently she has turned her political attention to Kosovo and Chechnya. Fortunately, she does have time to act: she has given Oscar-nominated performances in Isadora; Mary, Queen of Scots; Julia (for which she won best supporting actress); and The Bostonians. She also won a Golden Globe this year for HBO’s If These Walls Could Talk 2. Before her most recent turn, as a grieving grandmother in The Pledge (Sean Penn’s third film as a director), Redgrave teamed with her brother, Corin, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard for London’s National Theatre. Her fifth decade as a pro, it appears, is set to be just as rewarding as the others. -SIOBHAN McDEVITT

Chloe Sevigny, 26, has chosen her roles with an idiosyncratic esprit, taking parts that have ranged from a preppy publishing peon in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco to Lana Tisdel, the lover of Hilary Swank’s transgendered teen in 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry. The latter role, in which Sevigny bravely essayed one of the screen’s frankest—and wittiest—orgasms, earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Meanwhile, wary of the mainstream, she has rejected parts in potential blockbusters other actresses would kill for. She is currently trying her hand at directing one of the three vignettes in Jokes, a film adapted from the life’s work of Milton Berle. Sevigny’s unconventional muse also extends to the world of fashion, where she’s famous for looking cutting-edge in either thrift-store castoffs or haute couture—or, typically, both at once. Without aid from the stylist at our cover shoot, she unblinkingly selected a gorgeous black lace number by Christian Dior. -DAISY HO

“The girl makes you think all the wrong thoughts,” said Clark Gable of Sophia Loren, his co-star in It Started in Naples. That was some 40 years ago, but with those legs, those eyes, that jaw, that decolletage, she’s still making men think those thoughts. The star of 86 films—even the ones of which she was not the star—Loren was presented with an honorary Academy Award in 1991 and is the only woman to have won a best-actress Oscar for a performance in a foreign film, 1961 ’s Two Women. Loren was last seen by American audiences six years ago in her memorable role as Walter Matthau’s seductress in Grumpier Old Men. “I could work every day,” she says, “but you have to choose the right things, gifts to yourself. Otherwise it’s better to stay home, read wonderful books, work in another domain, or just look at a sunset.” Her next picture may be the perfect gift: a film written and directed by the younger of her two sons, 27-year-old Edoardo. -STEPHEN LEVEY

So how does one go from young talent one year to legend the next? Penelope Cruz, the first star to land on successive covers of V.F.’s annual Hollywood issue, should know. After all, the 26-year-old Madrid native is hardly a novice, having appeared in 25 movies in Spain and the United States, including last year’s All the Pretty Horses and Woman on Top, her first American star vehicle. Her breakout performance came in 1992’s Belle Epoque, the first of two films she starred in that went on to win Oscars for best foreign-language film (the second was Pedro Almodovar’s 1999 All About My Mother). “I always find it sad when a film ends,” Cruz has said, and she must mean it, since she never stops working, or so it seems. This year she will be seen onscreen in three films, including Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, where her co-star is an actor named Tom whose last name is a homophone for hers. -CAITLIN MORLEY