It doesn’t take acting ability to make it in Hollywood, writes Phillip McCarthy, as these top 10 Next Big Things show.

You’re young, telegenic and fancy a career in Hollywood. How hard can that be? The good news for you - although not necessarily for the future of acting - is that you probably don’t need Meryl Streep-calibre training to be the Next Big Thing.

In a less sentimental town, even good old-fashioned nepotism (think the so-called dynasties of Fonda, Douglas and even Sheen) is no guarantee of a real leg-up these days. Tom Hanks’s son Colin, 27, made a bid to get into the business a few years back, but although Peter Jackson gave him a gig in King Kong, it didn’t translate into instant acceptance.

These days, Hollywood is more attuned to buzz, charisma and the rather nebulous concept of "freshness", so the sort of academic depth that served Streep, or her friend Marlon Brando, just doesn’t count for as much.

It’s not that casting agents actually hold a drama qualification against anyone; but knowing the method technique won’t open doors. What counts for more is a few television commercials and a reel with an eye-catching spot on Days Of Our Lives.

Top US talent agent Jamie Hunt said: "What helps more than anything these days is the idea that even a newcomer brings a constituency along who will buy tickets. That’s why rap artists are in such big demand. As far as the newcomers go, an awful lot of them come out of television. If there’s a web following, even better.

"The idea there is that a proven, appealing persona on the small screen will translate to the big screen and you’ll also bring along a few fans. So many kids get the breaks because they have a look and they did some television."

Some modelling won’t hurt, either. And of course you need a look that could be called "fresh" - but is more generally a minor variation of someone who is already established and successful. (Jennifer Garner’s fame, for example, was apparently because she looked a little like Julia Roberts - or "Julia Roberts with less teeth", as it has been put.)

One exception to the new rule that the path to the movies is through television is Kate Bosworth, 22, although she did make her entry through luck rather than training. As a teen, Bosworth - who has been in Sydney for the past month shooting Superman Returns - landed a major movie, The Horse Whisperer, without really trying.

Her splashiest role came four years later when she got Blue Crush, the story of an aspiring, untested surfer chick competing in Hawaii. Her character doesn’t win the pipeline heats, but Bosworth made waves in casting circles. She also turned the head of another up-and-comer, British actor Orlando Bloom.

"I think I was 14 when I got The Horse Whisperer and even then I didn’t really know," she said. "It just sort of fell into my lap and then, all of a sudden, I went off and auditioned for something else. I mean, I know I want to do my acting thing because I really love it. But it just sort of happened, there wasn’t a master plan."

Michelle Trachtenberg, 19, stars in the new Disney ice-skating drama Ice Princess. It’s a bit like Blue Crush on ice and, like Bosworth, Trachtenberg started in the business young, when she conspicuously landed the role of the precocious Harriet in Harriet The Spy at age 10. (She too dates an actor, Shawn Ashmore, the X-Men’s youthful Iceman.)

"I started doing commercials when I was three so the idea of it being a career choice never really dawned on me," she said. "When I got older I realised, ’Oh, right, this is a job I’m doing’. My mum always said to me keep doing it till you stop having fun and that’s been my approach. I know Hollywood is cutthroat but I’ve always been lucky in that things have come along."

While Bosworth expects to score with Superman, Katie Holmes, 24, has just done a similar thing with Batman (in this one he’s played by Christian Bale). The high-profile prequel, Batman Begins, could be for Holmes what Spiderman was for Kirsten Dunst. Not that tall, leggy Holmes - she was a teen model before getting into acting - needs much of a kick-start. She did several years on a hit television series, Dawson’s Creek, which also allowed her to squeeze in movies on her filming hiatuses.

Rosario Dawson, 25, was "discovered" sitting on a stoop in New York, aged 15. She ended up in a controversial film about adolescent sex. It was an edgy debut and - after several years of girlfriend roles - she’s edgy again. Last year she had a steamy love scene with Colin Farrell in Alexander.

Next, in Sin City, she gets around dressed like a dominatrix. And right now she is playing the heroin-chic heroine in the film adaptation of the musical Rent. She also has an actor boyfriend, former Sex And The City star Jason Lewis.

"I often felt, because of the way I got into the business, that I sort of snuck in and someone was going to figure me out," Rosario said. "I hadn’t wanted to be an actor all my life. And I’ve been doing this for 10 years. And I suspect because I was a bit ambivalent about my status in the industry, I didn’t always play things as smart as I should have. But things have looked up."

Jessica Alba’s television following probably still exceeds her big-screen status, but that seems set to change. At 23, Alba - who did take a few acting lessons when she was 12 - hit it big on the small screen in 2002 in a smash television series called Dark Angel. Her character had genetically enhanced superpowers and a penchant for skimpy dresses. After a couple of misfires in her transition to the big screen - and a few high-profile dalliances, including actor Mark Wahlberg - she has found herself an eye-catching trio of Hollywood forays. First up is Sin City, alongside Dawson, in which she plays a stripper. Then comes Into The Blue, and the eagerly anticipated film version of the cult comic Fantastic Four.

Similarly, Topher Grace’s good fortune was, at age 20, to be cast in what became a hit television series, That ’70s Show. He had no training or professional experience, but the show’s producers liked him in their daughter’s school play. Despite the ridiculous first name - it’s an abbreviation of Christopher - he parlayed that success into three movies last year.

They included Win A Date With Tad Hamilton! and the upcoming In Good Company in a starring role alongside Dennis Quaid. His portrayal of a shallow corporate ladder-climber got him a lot of solid notice. "I think doing a television series is the best graduate school an actor could have," Grace, 26, said. "It’s also a good graduate school for fame because there is some spotlight on you but it is not as harsh as it becomes in movies."

Lanky Ryan Gosling, 24, graduated from a full slate of television work about five years ago to appear in the sports movie Remember The Titans. But it was the film he made two years later, Murder By Numbers, that gave him his Hollywood buzz. It was as much his off-screen doings as his on-screen acting: he had an affair with his leading lady, Sandra Bullock, 16 years his senior. And that was before Demi met Ashton.

That dalliance cooled, but Canadian-born Gosling’s career is still hot. Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Gosling has managed to find roles in a lot of prestige projects with important directors. He did a Nick Cassavetes film, The Notebook, last year and Steven Soderbergh has cast him in his version of the life of Che Guevara, Che.

But in the best British tradition Oliver James, 24, did study acting for several years in London before relocating to Hollywood. "I think it’s possible these days to do a good job on a lot of these scripts with acting instinct and not a lot of training," he said. "But I am still glad I did it. What happens if, one day, I get offered Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams?"

Another acquired skill, the guitar, has proved to be a useful prop in the actor’s two big Hollywood gigs. In both of them, What A Girl Wants in 2003 and Raise Your Voice last year, James plays the musician/love interest to the movies’ stars (Amanda Bynes and Hilary Duff respectively). What could be more winning than a good-looking guy with musical aptitude? But proving that he was more than a pretty face, James also penned a couple of songs for What A Girl Wants that ended up on the movie soundtrack.

Michael Pitt, 24, was also in Murder By Numbers. But if his work on screen got overshadowed by the Bullock-Gosling stirrings, it hasn’t held him back. He went on to do Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1960s, Paris-set drama The Dreamers, with lots of nudity. And his innocent, slightly grungy looks made him a natural to a play a Kurt Cobain-style musician in Gus Van Sant’s upcoming Last Days.

But if Amanda Peet, 33 and our 10th Next Big Thing, is anything to go by, you don’t necessarily have to be a former TV star or a young punk to rise to fame. Professional in approach, if not in looks, she could be classed as "the next Gwyneth Paltrow". They both have a foot in Hollywood and on Broadway. And while Peet is older than the average ingenue, things are happening.

At the moment the actor, voted one of People magazine’s 50 most beautiful stars, is doing movie director and playwright Neil LaBute’s controversial play This Is How It Goes, opposite Ben Stiller in New York. She is in Woody Allen’s latest film, Melinda And Melinda and, later in the year for Australian audiences, she stars opposite Ashton Kutcher in A Lot Like Love.