For role models, Zoe Kazan looks to the careers of Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck—and Karl Malden? "He worked till he physically couldn't anymore. I have a hunger in me like that," says Kazan. The granddaughter of legendary director Elia Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront) appears this month as Leonardo DiCaprio's young mistress in the domestic drama Revolutionary Road. "I had to fight really hard for the role," she says. "They thought I was too young, that I didn't have the right look for the part." But after sitting down with director Sam Mendes, "I thought, Oh, he's taking me really seriously," she says. At 25, Kazan, the daughter of screenwriters Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune) and Robin Swicord (Memoirs of a Geisha), has already won acclaim for her performances on the New York stage, including the role of Masha in last fall's Broadway production of The Seagull. "The more praise I get, the more I feel I have to prove myself," says Kazan, a Brooklyn resident, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Yale. "Knowing that my grandfather was both revered and loathed for different parts of his public life"—Elia Kazan infamously named names to huac—"I have a firsthand knowledge that fame is a double-edged sword. You have to be proud of your work and how you behave in the world, and that's the standard that I'm trying to hold myself to."