Kate Bosworth Grows Up

When Kevin Spacey met Kate Bosworth two years ago to talk about her starring with him in a Bobby Darin/Sandra Dee movie he planned to direct, he felt the eerie resemblance between the two blonde starlets immediately ‑- down to hearing the theme song to A Summer Place in his head as Bosworth, then 19, sailed across a crowded Los Angeles restaurant toward him. Bosworth, on the other hand, suffered a bit of generation-gap confusion. "I asked him, 'Sandra Dee from Grease? You're doing a remake of Grease?'" she says, laughing, during a recent interview in New York.

Spacey, feeling all of his 43 years at the time, calmly explained that, no, he was making Beyond the Sea, a biographical movie about the '50s pop crooner of "Splish Splash" and his Hollywood sweetheart wife, who had been in the original movie Gidget.

Coming off roles as a teen surf champion in Blue Crush, a sweet girl next door in Win a Date with Tad Hamilton and a teenage porn star in Wonderland, Bosworth was looking for something different ‑- something adult and dark without being tawdry. "What hooked me," she says, "is that Sandra Dee was so different from her image. She was sweet and innocent, but she had a lot of demons as well."