David Boreanaz

Sexy Carla Gugino has just headed to Philadelphia to begin starring stints in the big-screen "Our Lady of Victory" with David Boreanaz and Ellen Burstyn - hoping that the feature helps fill a need.

"Today I don’t think we have a lot of good women role models for young girls," says notes the actress. She believes Cathy Rush, who she will be playing in the movie, is one. In the 1970s, Rush coached the girls basketball team at the Catholic Immaculata College to three consecutive national championships - and gave the players a new way of thinking about themselves.

"They’d been taught to be humble, that girls are the lesser sex. She told them, ’Girls, it’s OK to apply yourself, to believe in yourself, to play to win.’ I think this story has a lot to say about something I think is very important, the equality of dreams," adds Carla.

Boreanaz plays her NBA referee husband, and Burstyn the school’s mother superior.

"Our Lady of Victory" continues the pace of back-to-back projects Gugino’s been keeping up for a year and a half. In fact, her current stint as a lusty agent on HBO’s "Entourage" overlapped her shooting schedules for "Night at the Museum" and Mark Rydell’s new "Even Money" feature with Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito, Forrest Whitaker, Ray Liotta and Nick Cannon - in which Carla gives a terrific performance as a woman agonizingly in love with a bookie. She also squeezed in the forthcoming "American Gangster" with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.

"I really felt so blessed to be able to do them all in a relatively short amount of time," she tells us. "It’s so cool to bounce back and forth and play all these different characters - which I could do, because they’re all supporting parts. I felt like I was in a repertory theater."

With "Our Lady of Victory," however, the film rests squarely on her shoulders.