Mandy Moore Adds New Chapter to Her Career

On the surface, Mandy Moore looks like all the other teen queens. She's blond, bubbling with energy and dressed to the nines in the latest summer garb - bellbottoms and a form-fitting tank-top T. But once she starts talking, you begin to see where she and Britney and Christina part ways.

The 17-year-old Orlando, Fla., resident appears to be a little more self-assured than her pop counterparts. That's why you'll never see her in anything too revealing. "I'm only 17," she says. "That's not the kind of image I want to have. I'm not comfortable doing that. If it works for them, fine. But it's not for me."

Also, Moore knows what's really important in life, and that's to have a life. Sure, she's just released her third CD - "Mandy Moore" - with its hit single, "Crush," and she recently made her film debut in "The Princess Diaries," a film in which she plays one of those snooty high school cheerleader types. But she always makes sure she has time to chill with her parents and two brothers, chat online with her fans, cruise to the mall with her girlfriends in her new BMW X5 SUV and hang out with her boyfriend, actor Wilmer Valderrama of TV's "That '70s Show."

"I love what I'm doing and I don't ever want to stop, but I realize how important it is to take time for me, too," Moore said during a press junket for "Princess Diaries" with Julie Andrews, Anne Hathaway, Heather Matarazzo, Erik Von Detten and director Garry Marshall at the Four Seasons Hotel.

In the film, Moore, who in real life no longer goes to high school (she studies with a tutor) plays Lana Thomas, a girl who has it in for the initially mousy princess-to-be, Mia Thermopolis (Hathaway). Although Moore has sung on stage for thousands of fans and hosted her own MTV show, filming the movie made her nervous at first.

"I was intimidated, like, the first day going to set. I mean, here I am, I'm like this singer, and I'm going to the set working with Garry Marshall and all these other professional actors - Julie Andrews - that really freaked me out!" says Moore.

"But once I got to set, Garry welcomes everyone like family. He's such a father figure that I quickly forgot about everything and it was a good experience."

Moore says she isn't like her character and isn't concerned that her fans won't be able to separate fact from fiction. "I think people are smart enough to, like, differentiate reality and fantasy - a movie and real life," says Moore, who performs one song during the film. "I was actually interested in doing it. She is the stereotypical girl that's at everyone's high school who makes herself feel good to put others down. Obviously she has this real lack of self-confidence, even though it's probably not displayed. People love her, but also probably love to hate her."

When Moore attended regular school, she says, she fit somewhere in between the popular clique and the bookworms. "I kind of blended into the background."

Perhaps that's because she was very focused on her goals. She's known that she wanted to entertain since she saw a group of sixth-graders at her school perform the musical "Oklahoma!" when she was 6. Moore was particularly captivated with a girl who sang "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning."

"I was, like, I want to do that," says Moore, who immediately informed her airplane pilot father and newspaper reporter mother of her plans. "I knew I wanted to have the lead in the sixth-grade play, and when I got to sixth grade, sure enough, I got the lead and was on stage performing, and that sealed the deal."

Moore, who says she was crazy for Broadway tunes as a kid, got her start in musical theater when she was 10. Her road to stardom began just three years ago, though, when a FedEx delivery man who had heard her sing gave her self-produced demo to a friend of his at Epic records. At 14 she recorded her first CD, "So Real," which produced a Top 10 single, "Candy." A year later came the platinum-selling "I Wanna Be With You," and in May she released her self-titled third effort, "Mandy Moore."

And now she's a burgeoning movie star with two films under her belt. Moore recently completed shooting "A Walk To Remember," in which she plays a minister's daughter who falls for a small-town boy. Since this acting thing is kind of new to her, Moore says she learned a lot just by watching her "Princess" co-star, Andrews. "I was in one scene with her and honestly, I could have been like the potted plant, the fur in the background," says Moore. "I was like the blip on the screen. But I watched her. I watched her come on the set and introduce herself to literally everyone on set, from the camera guys to the catering people and everyone in between. And I was like, wow, that's somebody to look up to. She doesn't have to do that, she's Julie Andrews. But she's beautiful and classy."