Brave Beauty

"Poseidon's" Emmy Rossum isn't afraid of a challenge.

By Kevin Maynard

With her alabaster skin and wide almond eyes, Emmy Rossum looks the part of the winsome ingénue she portrayed in "The Phantom of the Opera." Don't be fooled: This 19-year-old is no wallflower. When she met hunky star Jake Gyllenhaal one morning a few years ago, Rossum pulled a move worthy of the Phantom.

"I went over to him and said, 'Look, I know it's 9 a.m., but is it OK if I kiss you?' " Rossum recalls. When he consented ("He said, 'It's never too early!' "), she obliged. "I knew if I didn't do it, it would seem like I was scared. And I wanted to kiss him. He's very, very cute."

Of course, that was right before her audition for the pair's 2004 action flick, "The Day After Tomorrow." And yes, she got the part. ("Because I kissed him!" she says.) But even as her career grows and she takes on more physical roles -- she's now in "Poseidon," an update of the 1972 high-seas thriller "The Poseidon Adventure" -- Rossum still gets treated like a delicate flower, even when she's doing her own stunts.

In "Poseidon," she plays the daughter of an overprotective former New York mayor (Kurt Russell). Trapped aboard a capsized luxury liner with an assortment of oddballs (Josh Lucas as a gambler, Richard Dreyfuss as a jilted lover), they fight to stay alive -- which for Rossum meant slingshotting across a three-story drop with a harness but no safety net.

"What impressed me about Emmy was how she jumped in feet first with any physical challenge," Russell says, noting one Titanic-esque scene in which she was submerged 20 feet underwater, in what the crew called the "cage of death," for almost an hour (albeit the "ocean" was a tank on the Warner Bros. lot).

During filming breaks, Rossum began recording her first CD, due out next year. "It's pure pop, like Whitney Houston or Billy Joel," she says with absolutely no irony. She's undaunted by the leap from starlet to wannabe pop star -- and in her case it makes sense.

Born Emmanuelle Rossum in New York, the only child of a photographer mom and banker dad landed a place in the Metropolitan Opera's Children's Chorus at just 7. She sang in 20 operas in six languages before, at 12, she was deemed too tall and turned her attention to the screen.

After a stint on a soap and several TV movies, Rossum appeared as Sean Penn's daughter in the Oscar hit Mystic River. As Christine in Phantom, she earned a Golden Globe nomination at 17.

Now, she's trying to teach her lap dog, a 3-pound Maltese, her gutsy-girl ways. "She came with the name Crystal, so I call her Chris to toughen her up," she says. "I will never carry her in my purse. She thinks she's a Rottweiler."