When grasping at how to play the wife of a firefighter in Ladder 49, Jacinda Barrett nixed the acting coach and turned to a more reliable muse: Mom. "I asked her how she dealt with her fears," says Barrett, whose father is retired after 33 years with the Brisbane, Australia, fire department. She discovered that when she was little, "there were so many things they kept from me. They downplayed the scary stuff. I never had the fear about my father not coming home at night."

As Joaquin Phoenix's wife in Ladder, Barrett, 32, faces the scary stuff—but she's hot stuff at the movies this season. In November's Bridget Jones sequel, she plays Renée Zellweger's rival for the affection of Colin Firth. A model as a teen, Barrett quit the runway, she says, after a photographer told her, "Don't think. Just be a model." Since then, she's been on a winning streak: As one of the flatmates on MTV's Real World: London in 1995, she notoriously ran down a street naked on a dare. She bared all again in her breakthrough role in last year's The Human Stain. But, sadly, Barrett's hectic workload has kept her from setting a date with her fiancé of over a year, The Recruits Gabriel Macht, 32, with whom she shares her Hollywood house. "I haven't been home in a year," she says. "I can't even wrap my mind around planning a wedding."