Rising and shining

NEW YORK -- When Bryce Dallas Howard got the acting bug as a 16-year-old, her first career decision was to turn down a movie. Her dad, Ron, was about to take the whole family with him to direct "EdTV" in San Francisco, planning as usual to use his four young kids as extras, but his eldest daughter rebelled.

"I put my foot down," says the 23-year-old, whose red hair, alabaster skin, and green eyes make her undeniably the progeny of Richie Cunningham. "I didn't think it was cute anymore. He used to call us his good luck charms."

Instead, she stayed alone in suburban New York and finished the school year by herself. It was hardly the first indication of a stubborn, independent streak in the young woman, but it was her first attempt to strike out on her own in the cinematic world that had been her father's home since he was a baby and her grandfather's before that.

She held out for a much more dramatic Hollywood debut as a leading lady in a film that has nothing to do with her father, and is, in fact, the antithesis in theme and content to most of his feel-good films. M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" is a spine-tingling morality tale set in the late 19th century about a town that is cut off from the rest of the world because the woods surrounding it are controlled by dangerous creatures.

Many actors in the cast have been nominated for or won Academy Awards, but Howard is really the center of the film as a fierce young woman who must take on the mantle of leadership for the community. It is a startling debut in a movie that earned more than $50 million in its first weekend, and the attention is multiplying. She has had a "Vanity Fair" feature, thanks in part to the fact that she was an intern there when in college. She has also been picked by Entertainment Weekly and Daily Variety as the next "It Girl." After having spent most of her life trying to avoid the spotlight of her family's fame, she's now right in the thick of it.

"Oh, she'll be able to deal with it," says William Hurt, who plays her father in "The Village." "She's centered as a person. She doesn't feel like a newcomer at all."

In fact, Howard isn't a newcomer, despite her protestations that she didn't know her father was a celebrity until she was in college and her claim that she's never seen an episode of "Happy Days." "I thought he just made movies with his friends," she says sheepishly.

She grew up in Connecticut and New York, going to public school and working as a waitress at 14, but she has been around the movie industry all her life and knows how movies work. She had to leave school for months when she was younger to travel around the world, being taught by tutors and showing up as an extra in movies such as "Apollo 13" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."

When Shyamalan described to Joaquin Phoenix the actress who would be his love interest in "The Village," he said she was a girl he had seen in a play who had never been in anything before. Phoenix says Shyamalan then told him, "I think you know her. She was on the set of `Parenthood.' She's Ron Howard's daughter."

That kind of statement is both a victory and defeat for the actress, in that it acknowledges her talent but also identifies her background. It was once so important to her that nobody think she was riding into Hollywood on her family's coattails that she enrolled in New York University's Tisch School of the Arts as Bryce Dallas and didn't tell anyone about her origins until her sophomore year.

She was able to get her first acting job without using the family influence either, with her fellow actors not knowing about her provenance until her father blew her cover by thanking her by name in a speech he made at the Academy Awards when "A Beautiful Mind." was honored.

"I just knew her name and that she was a student at NYU," says Lynne Meadow, the artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club, where Howard made her debut in the duo of Alan Ayckbourn plays "House" and "Garden." "Bryce really knocked me out on her own talent, not on her pedigree. She's very intelligent and enormously gifted."

So how exactly does a young actress get discovered by Hollywood if it isn't by who you know? It turns out, it still is. When Kirsten Dunst couldn't fit in Shyamalan's three weeks of pioneer "boot camp" rehearsals, the director went searching for a new lead and found Howard in a Public Theater presentation of "As You Like It" that his producer, Scott Rudin, told him to go see.

Howard ended up auditioning for "Manderlay," her next big role, because Blair Brown recommended her to director Lars Von Trier after Nicole Kidman had to pull out of the "Dogville" sequel. Brown had costarred in "Dogville" and with Howard on stage.

What happens next in Howard's career has very little to do with either connections or with her father, though. It's all up to the Hollywood machine. And for now, she is riding it out. She moved into a house in Los Angeles and is working with her agent to find new roles.

"It's kind of scary. This is all great and fantastic, but I kind of need a job soon," she says. "It's a funny game I play right now. Obviously nobody knows me, and I just don't have access to the greatest scripts."

If the reviews from the people she's worked with so far are any indication, she'll have to start protecting her dad from her fame, instead of the other way around.

Beth Pinsker can be reached at bpinsker@nyc.rr.com.