From PEOPLE Magazine Click to enlarge
Many of our favored and fortunate on the preceding pages swear up and down that they were ugly ducklings. So how did they turn out to be swans? To find out, we asked a number of this year's 50 Most Beautiful to send us pictures from their younger days and tell us how they felt about themselves then. Now it's up to you: Guess who's who (answers are provided) and decide who shows promise these delightful childhood snapshots.

"I was a little pudgy, and I had huge cheeks and a lot of curly hair."

"When I was born I was a fat little baby and grew into this skinny teenager who was always good at sports,"

"Growing up, used to be real skinny, that's for sure. I definitely wasn't a prince back then."

"I never thought about my looks then. I thought more about the way I felt."

"I had very cute cheeks. I knew that because everyone pinched them."

"There were other girls considered far more beautiful than me. I won beauty contests usually on talent, I think."

"As a child, I was a great combination of Dennis the Menace and Eddie Haskell."

"It looked to me that life was much simpler for people who did not have red hair."

"I was in a gang. I wasn't much good to them, but I had a couple of protectors, and if I got a belt, they made sure everyone else got three!"

"The top of my face is my father—high forehead, small eyes, the little bump on my nose."

ANSWERS: 1. Joey Lawrence; 2. Dean Cain; 3. MaliVai Washington; 4. Barbara Babcock; 5. Kimberly Aiken; 6. Faye Dunaway; 7. Matt Lauer; 8. David Caruso; 9. Daniel Day-Lewis; 10. Estelle Hallyday

"I just looked like your average boy. I never did look like a bully—I had a baby face."

"As a boy, I used to get the bejesus kicked out of me regularly in school."

"I had a crew cut, and I liked the Sex Pistols."

"People always said I was cute, but I was cute with buck-teeth and braces."

"My cowlick was just as bad then as it is now. But now my hair is short and messy, so it blends nicely."

"I grew up in a determinedly political family, in which I learned at an early age to be very sensitive—too sensitive, perhaps—to what others were thinking."

"Up until the sixth grade I had a big butt and a potbelly, and I was a lot taller than everyone else."

"My world was always about achieving and academics or athletics."

"I looked like a cherub with a mischievous grin, as if I always had something up my sleeve."

"Dressing up to me was putting on a shirt with a collar."

"I had an Afro when I was young, and I was always kind of skinny and kind of a loudmouth back then."

"Invariably, I would come back with mud and dirt on my dress. My mom just quit trying to dress me like a girl."

"I wasn't shy. I had a lot of energy, and by the time I was a teenager I had a kind of rage inside."

ANSWERS: 1. John Michael Montgomery; 2. Paul Newman; 3. Winona Ryder; 4. Heather Locklear; 5. Lucky Vanous; 6. Al Gore Jr.; 7. Tyra Banks; 8. Henry Cisneros; 9. Ming-Na Wen; 10. Dan Jansen; 11. David Justice; 12. Julie Moran; 13. Juliette Binoche.