The Hollywood women everyone's talking about

Tinseltown's new wave of red-hot actresses are a force to be reckoned with.

In Tinseltown everyone is always on the lookout for The Next Big Thing, and at the moment there seems to be a few red-hot actresses everyone's starting to talk about. Want to know who you'll be watching on the silver screen and the telly for years to come? Read on.

Carey Mulligan

The new: Samantha Morton - with a dash of Natalie Portman thrown in for good measure.

Elfin beauty with formidable talent to match her striking screen presence.

You'll See Her In: New movie An Education, which came out in New Zealand October 8. Based on the autobiography of British journalist Lynn Barber, Mulligan plays 16-year-old London girl Jenny, whose highly planned life opens up to a whole new world of possibilities when she meets a dashing, much older man, played by Peter Sarsgaard.

With a screenplay by author Nick Hornby, the man who wrote About A Boy and High Fidelity, the film won the Audience Choice Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Twenty two years old when An Education was filmed, the now 24-year-old British actress first appeared on the big screen as Kitty Bennett in the movie version of Pride and Prejudice. She's performed on Broadway, appearing in a version of Chekhov's The Seagull, and had a small role in the recent Johnny Depp movie Public Enemies.

Mulligan's performance as Jenny in An Education already has many in Hollywood hotly tipping her for a Best Actress Oscar nomination, although official nominations aren't due to be announced until February.

Critics have gushed over her performance, with Villagevoice.com reporting that the actress has "a star quality they can't teach in acting school."

She currently working on Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to classic ‘80s flick Wall Street, in which she plays Winnie - the daughter of Michael Douglas' character Gordon Gekko. She is currently dating her co-star in the film, Shia LaBeouf.

Malin Akerman

The new: Cameron Diaz.

Goofy, gorgeous blonde with a knack for comedy and beyond.

You'll See Her In: Couples Retreat, where she plays Ronnie, the wife of Dave (Vince Vaughn) on a group holiday in Bora Bora with friends who are trying to avoid getting a divorce. Unfortunately the therapy component of the tropical island trip proves not to be optional.

Malin Ackerman was born in Sweden, but the 31-year-old actress moved to Toronto with her family as a toddler. There she stayed, with frequent trips back to her homeland. She now lives in Los Angeles with her Italian musician husband Roberto Zincone.

After working as a child model and within the industry throughout her teenage years, Ackerman moved into acting. You may have seen her in Ben Stiller flick The Heartbreak Kid, as Katherine Heigl's sister in 27 Dresses, in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, or as Silk Spectre II in this year's superhero movie Watchmen.

Next up for the actress? The Bang Bang Club, about combat photographers working in South Africa during the dying days of apartheid, co-starring Ryan Phillipe.

The actress' toned figure, wide smile and blonde locks have seen her compared more than once to Cameron Diaz, a comparison she enjoys given Diaz's knack for comedy.- but Ackerman is more than keen to expand her acting repertoire.

"I think that being beautiful is a blessing and a curse," she told the Daily Mail in a recent interview. "I tend to get a lot of scripts in which people want me to play the trophy wife, which is frustrating because I want the interesting, meaty roles."

Amanda Seyfried

The new: Part Winona Ryder, part Keira Knightley

The wide-eyed ingénue who's one of the most in-demand young actresses in the business.

You'll See Her In: It seems like half the people on earth have seen the 23-year-old Pennsylvania native in her role as Sophie in Mamma Mia, based on the smash hit ABBA musical, and as Karen Smith in the 2004 hit movie Mean Girls.

Seyfried (pronounced ‘sigh-frid,' for the record) straddles the worlds of both film and TV. She's played Sarah Henderson in the polygamist drama Big Love since 2006.

Still to hit New Zealand screens is the actress' latest movie, Jennifer's Body, in which she co-stars with Megan Fox, but the girl is certainly keeping busy. She has three films - Chloe, with Liam Neeson, Dear John and Boogie Woogie shot and in post-production - and two, A Woman of No Importance (with Joanna Lumley, Alan Cumming and Stellan Skarsgaard) and Letters to Juliet, coming up.

Not one to be pictured without underwear or falling out of nightclubs, the ethereal looking actress dates her Mamma Mia co-star, actor Dominic Cooper.

She told the Daily Mail in a 2008 interview: "It was like we were the same person - except that he's British, almost 30 and a man! We both look like frogs with out wide-set eyes, and neither of us have a lot of willpower."

Christina Hendricks

The next: Fifties pinup for a new era. Voluptuous could be her middle name.

Putting the va-va-voom back into voluptuous characters on prime time television.

You'll See Her In: Emmy award-winning TV series Mad Men.

When I saw Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks arrive at this year's Emmy Awards, poured into a dark blue, fitted L'Wren Scott gown which hugged her fabulous figure in all the right places, I was transfixed. It's not often my jaw actually falls open, but it did that day. And I am a straight woman.

The 34-year-old actress has set plenty of pulses racing in her role as office manager Joan Holloway on Mad Men, the Emmy-winning drama series set in a fictional New York ad agency in the early 1960s.

I say in a totally non-pervy way that she has the best boobs on the box, and Hendricks has been told by viewers that they get so hot and bothered after seeing her performance on the show that they make love immediately afterwards.

Now that is some effective acting.

Last week the flame-haired actress (who has been dying her naturally blonde hair since the age of 10) tied the knot with fellow actor Geoffrey Arend in New York City.

The 34-year-old moved around Tennessee, where she was born, Idaho and Virginia before settling in Los Angeles with her mother, where she appeared in three cancelled TV series - The Big Time, The Court and Kevin Hill - before getting the script for Mad Men. Her agents dropped her from the books for chasing the part of Joan Holloway. Hendricks had the last laugh.

Her red hair and amazing body get Hendricks just as much attention as her acting work. NY mag has praised her "retro-bodacious beauty," while site The Hollywood Interview referred to Hendricks and her character Joan Holloway as echoing "screen sirens from years past such as Ava Gardner, Kim Novak and Marilyn Monroe: curvaceous beauties who have more than one ace up their sleeves when dealing with the men in their lives."