“Power Starlet: Scarlett Letters,” by Sally Singer, was originally published in the March 2004 issue of Vogue.

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Scarlett Johansson is lounging at New York’s Soho House and talking about transitions, by way of explaining her penchant for slicked-back hair on the red carpet. “I had a severe mullet when I was doing Girl with a Pearl Earring. It just kept getting more severe until I was seriously mulletized,” she states, ruffling her Warholesque shock of peroxided hair. “I rocked the mullet for a while, which I loved, but then I decided that I wanted long hair. And a mullet is seriously painful to grow out.”

The metamorphosis from mullet to mane, an awkward business of patience and improvisation (all those layers, all those spikes), would ordinarily serve as an apt metaphor of the growing pains from youth to adulthood. But the case of Johansson is one of smooth and triumphant maturation from child actress to full-fledged star. In the last year, she has earned critical respect and a popular audience with her telling performances in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. In both films she plays lonely, silenced young women who experience awakenings in the company of much older men, themselves in the grip of unfamiliar yearnings. This is perhaps Johansson’s greatest cinematic quality: With her oversize lips and growling voice and, most important, her stillness (says Coppola, “She expresses emotion with very little action”), she renews our sense of mystery about the world.

In person, Johansson is no more mysterious than any nineteen-year-old has a right to be. She may have starred in five films since she graduated from high school two years ago—look out for her in The Perfect Score, A Love Song for Bobby Long, and A Good Woman—but certain rites of passage are unavoidable. There’s learning to drive, as any New York girl who relocates to the West Coast must do: “Driving changes your whole life there. Your independence is granted at the DMV.” There’s squabbling with her architect dad about the decor of her new L.A. home: “I’m stuck in the fifties. He’s stuck in the sixties. I want a bit of kitsch. He’s from Denmark and wants things minimal. I always win because it’s my apartment and he says, ‘I’ll do what you want.’ ” And there’s struggling with the metaphysics of grownup-ness: “There’s so much pressure on you to change when you get out of high school. . . . It’s a harsh reality.”