Analeigh Tipton

Watch for the brunette who drops robe in a room decorated with kitten posters in the trailer for Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s new dysfunctional relationship comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love. She’s 22-year-old newcomer Analeigh Tipton, a luminous screwball presence in the star-crossed ensemble cast that includes Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Julianne Moore, and Kevin Bacon who plays a gangly teenage babysitter awkwardly enamored with Carell’s character while also being the object of his 13-year-old son’s affections. Growing up, Tipton was a competitive figure skater, and spent much of her youth shuttling between her family’s home inFolsom, California, and various training facilities out west, including the Olympic center in Salt Lake City, but her pairs dreams were quickly dashed when she shot up to five feet nine inches tall at the age of 16. Nevertheless, another path to international fame opened up when she was spotted on MySpace by a scout for America’s Next Top Model. She appeared on 2008’s Cycle 11 of the reality-competition show for aspiring CoverGirls, where she may have learned a thing or two about outsize personalities during her time spent “smizing” (that’s smiling with your eyes) while suspended in couture from a ship’s rigging before she was eliminated after flubbing a commercial try. Ford signed Tipton anyway, but her fledgling career didn’t exactly begin with a bang. “The life of a working model in L.A. kind of sucks,” she says. “I was doing a lot of Internet T-shirt modeling—chin down–type things for hours on end.” But after scoring a walk-on role opposite Seth Rogen—as a character originally dubbed “Hot Girl”—in Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet, Tipton landed her spot in Crazy, Stupid, Love. She will also star this fall in talky cult satirist of East Coast ennui Whit Stillman’s upcoming Violet Wister’s Damsels In Distress, the director’s first feature film since 1998’s The Last Days Of Disco, in which she plays a transfer student who is taken under the wing of a type-A coed (played by Greta Gerwig) who believes that Diorissimo perfume and intellectual conversation will empower young women against the epidemic of male stupidity. Tipton and Gerwig, who is five years older, graduated from the same single-sex Catholic high school in Sacramento County. Unsurprisingly, the women had to memorize pages and pages of very precise dialogue. “Whit would stop the camera, if I added so much as an ‘um,’ ” Tipton says. Not bad for a girl who once failed to deliver an “easy, breezy, beautiful” line correctly.

Photos: Analeigh Tipton in Los Angeles, March 2011. T-shirt and jeans: Diesel Black Gold. Briefs: Calvin Klein Underwear. Styling: Moses Moreno/Margaret Maldonado Agency. Hair: Michael Long/Frankreps. Makeup: Dawn Broussard/Frankreps.