A Penny Saver

Very few of the very few people who have seen Kate Hudson in lesser films like Desert Blue, 200 Cigarettes or Gossip would have guessed she had it in her to play Penny Lane. It's one of those roles for an actress that major studios don't come up with too often--memorable and complex, requiring laughter through tears and other feats of acting that separate the men from the boys.

"The core of Penny is sad," says Hudson, 21, who didn't meet her character's name sake until the film was almost shot. She actually prepared for the role by meeting with a few ex-wives of musicians. "Just observing them, they're having a blast, but there's such sadness," she notes. (Hudson herself is seriously dating a musician, Black Crowes lead singer Chris Robinson, but doesn't seem at all worried.)

The movie's lucky to have her as Penny Lane, and she's lucky to have the part. Crowe had assigned her to the role of the young journalist's big sister until his first Penny, Sarah Polley, dropped out. Hudson is also lucky to have been born with exceptional external beauty--the kind you inherit when you're the daughter of Goldie Hawn.

"People ask me about her, and I say, 'Please understand. You're talking about my mom,' " says Hudson. "We don't sit around and read the trades." After Hudson's father, comedian Bill Hudson, split with Hawn in 1981, she was raised by Hawn and Kurt Russell. (She calls him Pa.)

Hudson says Hawn and Russell are "the most un-Hollywood couple," but she knew she was going into the family business early on. "I went to my mother when I was 11 and told her I wanted to act," says Hudson, who also appears this fall as a Texas socialite and aspiring Dallas Cowboys cheerleader in Robert Altman's Dr. T & the Women, opening Oct. 13. By the time she was 16, she had an agent--and some solid career advice from Pa. "I was in the sixth grade, and I choreographed this dance to Janet Jackson," she recalls. "It was just me in front of the whole school. Before I went out, I was showing him the dance and got embarrassed when I was doing my hip stuff. My dad said to me, 'When you shake your hips on that stage, you do it.' " We expect a whole lot more shaking will be going on.