Jurnee Smollett Comes of Age…

Eve’s Bayou star Jurnee Smollett is all grown up and loving it! The twenty-one year old (is she really that old!) is strutting her stuff in the 50s pin-up inspired calendar shoot for Vanity Fair. See what the rising star had to say about her latest role in “The Great Debaters” starring Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker.

The Vanities Girls

Since 1992, the magazine’s Vanities section has opened with a full-page portrait of a promising young star. In September 2006, we tweaked the format: the Vanities opener now features an up-and-coming actress in a 50s-style pinup shot. These shapely ingénues are on the cusp of fame or have just hit it big; they have names you need to know and faces you won’t have trouble remembering.

January 2008: Jurnee Smollett

Age: 21.

Provenance: New York–born, but with lots of time logged in L.A. as a member of a peripatetic acting family.

Potential Oscar bait as … Samantha, a star of the Wiley (Texas) College debate team in Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters, out on Christmas Day. The film is based on the true story of Wiley’s 1935 team, an unheralded crew from a small black school that, guided by a remarkable poet and English professor named Mel Tolson, challenged Harvard for the national championship. (Washington not only directs but also plays Tolson.) “My character is based on a woman named Henrietta Wells, who’s still alive at 95,” says Smollett. “I spent time with her, stayed in her house in Houston. She made me breakfast in the morning. I sang in her church.”

If Smollett looks oddly familiar, it’s because … half a lifetime ago, she was a ubiquitous child actor, appearing on such TV shows as Full House, Cosby, and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, and playing the title role in the 1997 film Eve’s Bayou. She also appeared with her five real-life Smollett siblings—those would be Jazz, Jocqui, Jake, Jojo, and Jussie—in the short-lived 1994–95 ABC sitcom On Our Own.