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"  The dress code at Campbell Hall, the private Episcopal school in North Hollywood, California, once attended by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and now by Dakota Fanning and her little sister, Elle, is strict: khaki skirt, shorts, or trousers, white collared shirt, navy sweater, closed-toed shoes. &amp;quot;You could actually wear this,&amp;quot; says the elder Fanning \u2014 wide-set, frank blue eyes; fair hair; milk-white skin; and the wispy limbs of a John Currin painting \u2014 flouncing her skirt, a cream-colored silk pouf, and in the process gaily jangles a wristful of bangles. We are sitting opposite each other in a quiet booth at the Sunset Tower Hotel, in Los Angeles. Her skirt might be passable, I think, but that little distressed white cotton tank with the bra peeking out could be grounds for detention. Ditto the 5-inch, brown Marni wedge sandals that were a present for her 16th birthday, in February, and that add significantly to her petite, not-quite-5-foot-4 frame.  And her costumes for last spring&amp;#039;s The Runaways would have probably gotten her expelled. The movie tells the story of the rise and fall of Joan Jett&amp;#039;s first band, an all-girl hard-rock ensemble (dubbed &amp;quot;glam-punk&amp;quot; by some) that emerged in the mid-&amp;#039;70s. As the 15-year-old lead singer and Jett sidekick Cherie Currie, Fanning played part na\u00EFf, part sexed-up jailbait, in a frost-white wig, fishnet stockings, and an S&amp;amp;amp;M corset. All in a moment, Fanning went from being an adorable if talented &amp;quot;child star&amp;quot; to the full-fledged genuine article, and critics took notice. Reviewing The Runaways in The New York Times, A.O. Scott gushed: &amp;quot;Ms. Fanning, who has shown herself a remarkably disciplined and self-aware actress almost since toddlerhood, displays heartbreaking vulnerability as well as frightening poise.&amp;quot; The Denver Post called her performance &amp;quot;uncorked.&amp;quot; The message was unmistakable: She had popped.  [Story continues below.]           One lasting friendship to emerge from the experience was with Kristen Stewart, the 20-year-old Twilight lead who played Joan Jett to Fanning&amp;#039;s Currie. According to both young women, re-enacting the intimate friendship between Jett and Currie brought them close instantly, and a mutual respect has kept them that way. &amp;quot;Dakota is so unfaultingly steady,&amp;quot; Stewart says. &amp;quot;In most cases, I feel like she&amp;#039;s older than me. It&amp;#039;s only when she starts talking about boys that I remember how young she is.&amp;quot; (No, Fanning doesn&amp;#039;t have a boyfriend. So far, she says, there has been &amp;quot;nothing serious.&amp;quot;) The two, who briefly shared the screen in Twilight: New Moon, reunited in this summer&amp;#039;s Eclipse, the third installment of the series, with Fanning reprising her role as a diminutive child vampire in a long cape and Mary Janes. Her character, Jane, can inflict pain with her thoughts, achieved while staring intently at her victims with eyes that appear reflector-red, thanks to a pair of color contacts. Given how much actors rely on their eyes to communicate emotion, the contacts were a handicap that might well have unsettled another, less confident performer. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s something that&amp;#039;s always been there for me, that I have huge blue eyes \u2014 it&amp;#039;s been something that people have always talked about,&amp;quot; Fanning says. &amp;quot;But I enjoyed the red. You&amp;#039;re automatically transformed into a creature when you put those red eyes in.&amp;quot; Fanning (who has been reading since she was 2) tore through the Twilight books after she was cast. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re so addicting!&amp;quot; she says, though her natural taste in literature tends toward the more refined: Right now she&amp;#039;s reading Jeffrey Eugenides&amp;#039; novel, The Virgin Suicides.  Sixteen is an age of ambivalence, a time of lingering on the threshold of adulthood with one foot safely in the realm of childhood. Some of Fanning&amp;#039;s recent choices seem calculated to project the message that she is no longer the wise child who debuted opposite Sean Penn&amp;#039;s mentally disabled character in I Am Sam when she was 6. (Penn was nominated for an Oscar for his performance; Fanning was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award \u2014 she didn&amp;#039;t win, but she was the youngest person ever to receive a nomination.) One such decision, playing an Alabama adolescent who gets raped in the 2007 indie movie Hounddog, created a backlash. To her astonishment, people seemed not to be able to distinguish between the real Dakota Fanning, then 13, and her character on-screen. &amp;quot;When you start out young, people get really attached to who you are at 6 years old,&amp;quot; Fanning says. &amp;quot;I hope that The Runaways was kind of a moment to be like, &amp;#039;You know, I&amp;#039;m not that young little girl anymore, but I&amp;#039;m still not all grown up, either.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; There is a deliberate, patient rhythm to her ambition; right now she&amp;#039;s looking for a project to do with her sister, who&amp;#039;s 12 and is about to appear in Sofia Coppola&amp;#039;s Somewhere, due out later this year. Fanning is on the brink, and she knows it: Picture an Olympic diver bouncing three times at the edge of a springboard before she takes the leap. &amp;quot;As you get older, there&amp;#039;s so much more that you can do in films,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve never wanted to rush that; I&amp;#039;ve always wanted to do what&amp;#039;s right for my age, but as you approach 18, a whole new world opens up to you as an actor, and I really look forward to that.&amp;quot;   Check out Dakota Fanning&amp;#039;s red carpet style evolution here and read the rest of Marie Claire&amp;#039;s exclusive interview with the star in our August 2010 issue, on newsstands July 13. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/a4984/dakota-fanning-interview-quotes/>