Alice Eve

Currently: Making her Broadway debut in the dual roles of young Esme Act One and Esme's daughter, Alice in Act Two, both opposite Sinead Cusack, in Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll.

Hometown: London, with three stints in living in Los Angeles for a total of eight years

Trans-Atlantic Crossings: As the daughter of British actors Trevor Eve and Sharon Maughan, young Alice spent her childhood on the move, mastering an American accent during five years in L.A. from ages eight and 13. "The tween years are the time you fall into line with the culture you're in," she notes, "and so I identified much more with being a Los Angelean than I did with being a Londoner. The girls at school wouldn't let me talk in an English accent because they didn't understand me. I had to learn their way of speaking, and it's served me well as an actress." Though Eve's crisp speaking voice is now the model of a young Brit, she says, "Los Angeles is definitely my second home."

Oxford Cloth: Eve claims she didn't pay much attention to her parents' career as a child, but by the time she finished high school she was eager to get an agent and start acting herself. Alas, Mom and Dad insisted she attend college. "I was furious," she recalls with a laugh, "but I can't thank them enough now for making me go." Top scores on her A-level exams won her a place at Oxford, but as a compromise, Eve took a year off first, living in L.A. and studying American-style acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. In the end, Oxford proved to be a great choice, with Eve tackling a variety of roles at three professional theaters on campus. "I got the best of both worlds, which was really lucky. It's a very special place, Oxford, and the further I get away from it, the more special I realize it is."

A Beauty of a Start: Having found an agent while in college, Eve snagged a supporting role in Richard Eyre's 2004 feature film Stage Beauty, starring Billy Crudup and Claire Danes. "I'd start feeling faint in my corset at about 10 o'clock in the morning and Billy Crudup would stop and say, 'Have some toast,'" she says. "He was very, very sweet and considerate, a great actor to work with on my first film." In the forthcoming Crossing Over, Eve plays an Australian actress so desperate for a green card that she enters an exploitive relationship with an immigration official played by Ray Liotta. "It's a great cross-canvas piece about immigrants trying to get legal status in Los Angeles," she says of the Crash-like film, which stars Harrison Ford. "All kinds of cultures are represented. I'm really proud of it."

Mom's the Word: Eve brings a youthful vibe to Rock 'n' Roll, Stoppard's ambitious stew of history, politics and music set in Prague and Cambridge from 1968 to 1990. An enormous hit in London, the play arrives at the Jacobs Theatre with five of its British stars. Sinead Cusack plays her mother in both halves and the older version of Eve's Act One character in Act Two. "I adore her," the young actress says of the Irish-born Cusack, who was nominated for a Tony 22 years ago for Much Ado About Nothing. "Sometimes I'll catch a glimpse of us standing next to each other and I think it really works aesthetically. But this is the last time I want to play a 16-year-old!"

Rock On! Scene changes in Rock 'n' Roll are set to a rich mix of music from the period, including cuts by Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys and a '60s-era Czech group called Plastic People of the Universe. "It's a brilliant soundtrack," Eve says. "We were all given it by Tom as a present, and every song has a plethora of memories. We blare the music backstage—sometimes we're all there in the corridors breaking into song as well." When the rock legends got wind of Stoppard's use of their tunes during the London run, they couldn't resist checking out the show. "Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour [of Pink Floyd] came," she says, "and Mick Jagger—they all came. It's pretty exciting to be immortalized in a Stoppard play."

No Comment: As proof of her status as a rising star, Eve got the full pin-up treatment in the October issue of Vanity Fair, posing for a Vargas-style glamour shot in a revealing Bottega Veneta dress and mile-high Moschino heels. A profile in Paper magazine revealed that she's dating her 40-year-old Broadway co-star, Rufus Sewell, but don't ask her to elaborate on that: "I don't really want to talk about that if you don't mind," she says politely. "We are in the play together." That's certainly true. Laughing, she adds, "I think that's a fair enough approach to take, don't you?"