With her sensuous lips, high forehead, and piercing eyes, Claire Forlani is a stunning beauty, and the London native, who moved with her family to Northern California just shy of her 21st birthday, has had a quick rise up the pecking order in Hollywood. Forlani made eight films in four years before being chosen for the plum female lead opposite Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins in "Meet Joe Black" (1998). Her first role of note in a Hollywood film came in 1994's "Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow" in which she played an interpreter for the visiting cops. She went on to play Brandi, the girlfriend to Jeremy London who ditches plans to travel with him in order to appear on a TV dating show in Kevin Smith's uneven "Mallrats" (1995) and had a small but memorable role as Sean Connery's angry daughter in "The Rock" (1996).

Trying to cast the lead role of Mel Coplin, an adoptee searching for his biological parents in the wake of his own son's birth in the comedy "Flirting With Disaster" (1996), writer-director David O. Russell knew what he wanted: "a young Dustin Hoffman type, who was kind of urban, kind of smart and ethnic." Ben Stiller, the only son of the venerable husband-and-wife comedy team of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, convinced Russell that he could fill the bill. Increasingly busy before and behind the camera, the curly-haired, quirkily handsome actor-writer-director seemed well poised to become the poster boy for Generation X era comedy--regardless of his stated discomfort with such a designation. With decisive roles played by nepotism, "Saturday Night Live" and MTV, Ben Stiller's swift career trajectory may be somewhat paradigmatic to those for whom the name "Barrymore" evokes "Drew" before "John" or "Lionel".

Tall, dark and photogenic, Benicio Del Toro spent several years in less than memorable supporting roles before his breakthrough as the mumbling Fred Fenster, the most erratic of the conspirators, in Bryan Singer's "The Usual Suspects" (1995). After that award-winning turn, the actor seemed on his way to a sterling career, although not all of efforts have met with box-office success.

A petite blonde actress with pretty, pixiesh features and a high energy presence, California native Amanda Detmer made her debut in the TV-movie "Stolen Innocence" (CBS) in 1995. A local girl (the project was lensed in her native Chico), Detmer impressed with a featured role in the telepic, but resumed her education, earning her BA and later her MFA in theater. In 1998 she spent a summer on stage in Minneapolis and that same year lensed a starring role in the mystical independent drama "Last Seen".