It’s a happy birthday to Kate Beckinsale, who turns 34 today. It took a couple years — back in the Cold Comfort Farm and Shooting Fish days — for me to get it through my thick head that her surname was actually Beckinsale, without the “d” that I apparently wanted to add before the last syllable.

Whenever
people ask about the hottest or best looking celebrities (however you
want to quantify or describe it) that I’ve interviewed, my mind will
typically fog for a split second, because the person asking usually has
a specific crush or three that they’re interested in hearing more
about. Beckinsale, though, always comes to mind in these moments.

I’ve interviewed her a couple of times — for print pieces, too, not television — and Beckinsale is criminally hot, flawlessly beautiful in a not overly made-up kind of way. It’s like looking directly at the sun, quite frankly.

But the flip side of this is that I know she split from her baby daddy, actor Michael Sheen (The Queen), which means she can’t be fallen-from-heaven perfect. So (in my accursed over-analyzation), I look at her and think, “What’s the deal?” I mean, I know she smokes, but one could get over that easily enough, right? Beckinsale is so incredibly hot that to have a man who doesn’t want to any longer be with her she must be either a dead lay, or have a seriously defective personality. Or both. And yes, yes, I know… that says a lot about me that I think that. Shoot me.

Kristen Bell, who turns 27 today. Bell is taking the young starlet’s road less traveled; she will continue to try to parlay the critical and smallish-but-loyal support of Veronica Mars into big screen notoriety via (fairly) respected roles, but she needs to steer clear of material like Pulse, which was god-awful. Bell acquited herself decently in the wildly uneven Fifty Pills, but that was minor-chord filmmaking. Meanwhile, Fanboys has been delayed so many times I’m not even convinced it’s actually real at this point. A few indie-leaning dramas wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea, but here’s hoping Forgetting Sarah Marshall, produced by comedy’s King Midas of the moment, Judd Apatow, will do it for Bell.

From the Hollywood starlet files, it’s
a happy birthday to Sophia Bush, who turns 25 today. While she takes a big hit
for having once been married to squinty-eyed hair gel champion Chad Michael Murray
(who’s only a step above Devon Sawa
in the poor-man’s-Shane-West sweepstakes), Bush will always hold a special place
in my heart for showing me her zebra-print panties on the set of The Hitcher (don’t ask).

I’ve never seen One
Tree Hill, but Bush starred in Stay
Alive and John Tucker Must Die,
the latter of which made box office hay out of its savvy Comedy Central ads
featuring costar Brittany Snow in a red bra-and-panty set.
And upcoming she has The Narrows,
costarring Vincent D’Onofrio, Kevin Zegers and Monica Keena,
from director François Velle, who helmed the quite funny, underrated comedy New Suit, from 2002. All in all, Sophia is really
charming and cute, and capitalizing on her time in the sun fairly well, though I’d
love to see her cast in a smart indie romantic comedy, though I guess those are
few and far between. The main problem, perhaps? The surname Bush isn’t exactly
doing her any favors right now. Don’t laugh (too hard) — while she won’t be mistaken for Dubya or anything, these things sometimes have a way of percolating in subconscious fashion in the minds of filmmakers and casting directors. Just ask ’70s starlet Rhonda Nixon. Who, you ask? Exactly.

It’s a happy birthday to leggy Dane Connie Nielsen, who turns 42 today. We’ll celebrate with some shots of her in her birthday suit, though it’s not mere prurience, I assure you. Whenever I think of Nielsen, I think chiefly of her temptress’ work in 1997’s The Devil’s Advocate (above), I suppose because I randomly stopped in Albuquerque during a solo cross-country drive and caught the movie, which proved the perfect trashy-delight diversion for a heat-addled mind. I look at that screen-cap now, though, and think, “Sweet Jesus, she looks skinny.” I mean, I know a thing of two about sucking in one’s stomach, but what’s up with that middle shot?

Nielsen is interesting as an actress because, like Juliette Lewis, she can look alternately stunning or a bit haggard and run-down — va-voomish and dangerous (The Ice Harvest), casually attractive in a foreign-correspondent kind of way (The Situation), something a bit more severe (Basic) or even a little more suburban (One Hour Photo). Without dipping into a bag of prosthetic tricks, there’s a subtle range to her mere physicality that not many actresses possess. While she doesn’t necessarily elicit heaps of sympathy (a function of the roles she’s offered, really), check out some of her Danish work if you’re not convinced of her talents.

It’s a happy birthday to Angelina Jolie, who turns 32 today, but celebrates presumably with a tattoo rather than another adoption. The hoi polloi give Jolie a lot of shit, but I’ve always found her candor refreshing, and I can tell you that her advocacy work and humanitarian efforts as a goodwill ambassador on behalf of the United Nations is legitimate and to be admired. She has a true global consciousness. Having interviewed her several times, I can also vouch for the fact that she’s in a much better place — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, however you want to couch it — than she was earlier in her career, when she was vicariously living out damaged roles such as her Oscar-winning turn in Girl, Interrupted. I’m sure she’d agree that motherhood has helped center and calm her, and that comes through in her work, be it in something politically topical like Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, or even a piece of spry, mischievous commercial fare like Mr. & Mrs. Smith. One can’t always draw connections between an actor’s public faces and performances, but in Jolie’s case it’s appropriate. She’s found her groove, hopefully in lasting fashion.

It’s a happy birthday to Timothy Olyphant, who turns 39 today, and has finally grown into the gauntness of his face. After some bit parts, Olyphant got his big break in 1997’s Scream sequel, and parlayed that into a steady diet of supporting work in movies like When Trumpets Fade, Go, Gone in Sixty Seconds and the like.

Olyphant has small eyes an angular face that breeds a certain wariness, if not outright distrust. He’s found a home on HBO’s Deadwood as Seth Bullock, and his snarl will no doubt be put to use effectively as the villain in this summer’s Live Free or Die Hard. A few attempts to subvert this image (as a wounded Jennifer Garner’s bad-boy boy-toy in Catch and Release, for instance) have fallen by the wayside, but where Olyphant should be concentrating his efforts at branching out is in comedy. He absolutely slayed in 2004’s The Girl Next Door, an underrated teen comedy that I’ll have to address in long-form re-posted review sometime soon. As a smarmy, spike-haired porn producer, Kelly, who gets locked into a battle of wills over a starlet with a high school student and would-be valedictorian (Emile Hirsch), Olyphant is charming and dangerous, amusingly recognizable and inherently unknowable at the same time.

Olyphant oozes charisma, displays crackerjack timing and knows how to sharpen a casual line into a dagger with pointed subtext. The problem, of course, is that he’s too big and athletic-looking (he was a college swimmer at USC) to play the wacky neighbor or sidekick, so there’s almost always going to be that grey lining to those types of characters that he gets offered. It’s a similar problem Billy Bob Thornton faced early in his career — translating that edginess into a more rakish magnetism. Here’s hoping Olyphant finds some screwy, fun character work soon. He’d be great in a noir, too — something canted and unhinged like Red Rock West — something that allowed his exasperation to poke through in subtle, mounting ways.

It’s a happy birthday to Jordana Brewster, who turns 27 today. The daughter of an investment banker (yawn…) and former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Maria João, a bushy-browed Brewster starred alongside Cameron Diaz in 2001’s absolutely wretched The Invisible Circus, but garnered a lot more attention for dutifully standing next to and sitting in colorful cars in that same year’s The Fast and the Furious.

More recently she’s popped up in Annapolis , in which she acquitted herself nicely, and last fall’s terrible franchise prequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, a movie of near-bottomless sadism and equal pointlessness. Next up for Brewster: the pilot for suburban assassins-in-angst, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (yes, based on the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie movie), opposite Martin Henderson. ABC has yet to decide whether or not to exercise its option on the potential series for the fall of 2007. Still, the part for which Brewster was clearly born is that of Demi Moore. Should some horrible fate befall Mrs. Kutcher in the next few years, Brewster will headline the inevitable cable biopic. I’m just sayin’…