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"It&amp;#39;s 3 p.m. on a gorgeous sunny day in Los Angeles, and Amanda Seyfried is sitting at an outdoor caf\u00E9, wearing a light-blue long-sleeve button-down and shorts, her signature glamorously wavy blond hair peeking out from a mustard-yellow cable-knit cap that she made herself. In a bag on the table is a DIY dog-collar kit for Finn, her blue-eyed Australian shepherd who lies lazily at her feet. The actress isn&amp;#39;t hiding under huge sunglasses, sitting in a dark corner, or ignoring the passersby who stop to pet her adorable pup. (In fact, she&amp;#39;s chatting them up, making it difficult for anyone to get a word in edgewise.)\n\n Amanda is the rare young star who has managed to continue to thrive in Hollywood despite having no background in anything remotely Disney or Nickelodeon, and in case you haven&amp;#39;t noticed, she&amp;#39;s having a moment. In the past year, the 24-year-old actress from Allentown, Pennsylvania, has hit a movie genre trifecta\u2014Dear John, a Nicholas Sparks tearjerker; Chloe, an indie thriller; and this month&amp;#39;s rom-com Letters to Juliet. And beyond the occasional red carpet and the Oscars, where she presented alongside Miley Cyrus, the paparazzi have generally left her alone. The closest they&amp;#39;ve gotten are a few snaps of the actress with beau (and Mamma Mia! costar) Dominic Cooper, although one guy was daring enough to follow Amanda and Finn on a recent six-mile hike.\n\n &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t really care about paparazzi\u2014like, I&amp;#39;m not wearing makeup right now and I should be\u2014but when someone follows me around on a day like that, a really wonderful, beautiful day . . .&amp;quot; she trails off. &amp;quot;Had I known he was there, I would have been really upset.&amp;quot; Amanda&amp;#39;s going to have to get used to it.\n\n A breakout role as Sophie in 2008&amp;#39;s Mamma Mia!, alongside Meryl Streep, launched the career of the actress, who got her start on daytime soaps As the World Turns and All My Children, but it was her big-screen debut as the ditzy Karen in Mean Girls that first made audiences take notice. &amp;quot;People still come up to me and say, &amp;#39;You were really funny in that,&amp;#39; and I&amp;#39;m like, It&amp;#39;s not me. Tina Fey wrote everything I said!&amp;quot; she says, laughing. &amp;quot;I think I impressed a lot of people in Mean Girls. I don&amp;#39;t know how I pulled that off.&amp;quot;\n\n Proving that her comedy chops weren&amp;#39;t just a fluke (or a gift from Tina Fey), Amanda shined as the nerdy Needy in last year&amp;#39;s Diablo Cody\u2013written horror-com, Jennifer&amp;#39;s Body. Though it didn&amp;#39;t exactly blow up the box office, the film catapulted her into the spotlight. At the end of 2009, she announced that this past season of the HBO drama Big Love would be her last. And after Dear John made over $30 million in its opening weekend, Amanda moved from actress to star. Letters to Juliet is sure to make her a bona fide celebrity.\n\n In it, Amanda plays Sophie, a young woman who travels to Verona, Italy, the home of fiction&amp;#39;s most well-known tragic couple, Romeo and Juliet. Sophie finds an unanswered love letter and chases down it&amp;#39;s owner, Claire (played by Vanessa Redgrave), in an attempt to make things right.\n\n One would think that starring in two heartstring-tugging films in a year would turn even the most unemotional realist into a romantic. For Amanda, whose parents have been together for almost 30 years, that&amp;#39;s simply not the case. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s fun to play characters who have these ideals that you don&amp;#39;t have. Like, in Dear John, Channing [Tatum] and I had such a good time because we were pretending to be in love,&amp;quot; she says, but even though Letters to Juliet was &amp;quot;very romantically shot in a very romantic place,&amp;quot; it didn&amp;#39;t change her perspective. &amp;quot;A lot of people ask me, &amp;#39;Is Dominic the one?&amp;#39; I don&amp;#39;t know, and I&amp;#39;m fine with that. Too much planning can lead to heartbreak. Love is great and possible, always, but it&amp;#39;s very rare to have the feeling that &amp;#39;I want to be with this person forever.&amp;#39;&amp;quot;\n\n Lest we peg Amanda as a stone-cold cynic and revoke her membership in Hallmark&amp;#39;s card of the month club, she does melt a little when she talks about her past relationships. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#39;t remember if he said I love you first, or if I did,&amp;quot; she says of her first serious boyfriend, Micah Alberti from All My Children, at age seventeen. &amp;quot;But I do remember when my ex Jesse said it to me. It took my breath away.&amp;quot;\n\n Her passion is most evident, though, when she talks about her craft, especially the process of deciding whether or not to sign on to a movie. For her next two films, Albert Nobbs and The Girl With the Red Riding Hood, Amanda fell head over heels for the directors (Rodrigo Garc\u00EDa and Twilight&amp;#39;s Catherine Hardwicke, respectively) and said yes to both projects almost immediately. This impulsive creativity might make life hard for her agent, whom Amanda has been with since day one, but it&amp;#39;s a good demonstration of the driving force that makes her performances so vibrant.\n\n &amp;quot;I had no idea if I wanted to do Red Riding Hood, but I sat with Catherine for, like, two and a half hours that first day, and she was amazing,&amp;quot; Amanda remembers. &amp;quot;She is who should be a big Hollywood director, making cool-ass movies. She has such an imagination. I was like, OK, I&amp;#39;m doing it. Done.&amp;quot; And that was before Amanda had even read the script.\n\n When she&amp;#39;s not filming, Amanda spends a lot of time at her piano, a gift from Letters to Juliet director Gary Winick, which has inspired the classically trained singer\u2014who has written a song with Damien Rice and contributed songs to the Mamma Mia! and Dear John soundtracks\u2014 to return to her musical roots.\n\n These days she&amp;#39;s listening to a lot of A.A. Bondy and Deer Tick.\n\n After a chance meeting with singer/songwriter Joshua Radin at the Soho Hotel in London a few months ago, Amanda agreed to record a duet with him, but she has no intention of making this her full-time, or even part-time, career. &amp;quot;I love being the background voice,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I&amp;#39;m not interested in being in the spotlight.&amp;quot; The actress, who lists Miu Miu, Stella McCartney, and Alexander Wang as some of her favorite designers, is equally as chill about her personal style, describing it as &amp;quot;comfortable and simple with a little edge.&amp;quot;\n\n That&amp;#39;s pretty much Amanda&amp;#39;s M.O. There was some drama earlier this year when the blogs (falsely) reported that she was being difficult about committing to a Mamma Mia! sequel, holding out for more money, but in reality, she is as low maintenance as it gets. And she has a strict &amp;quot;no expectations&amp;quot; philosophy that keeps her grounded and has solidified her reputation as one of Hollywood&amp;#39;s most down-to-earth glamour girls: &amp;quot;I am successful now, and it&amp;#39;s wonderful. But the reason it is so wonderful is because I didn&amp;#39;t expect it to happen.&amp;quot;\n\nEdited for teenvogue.com. For the complete story pick up the June/July 2010 issue of Teen Vogue, on newsstands May 25!"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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