It always starts with a face. Not the face you have when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, or the one you wear when you’re stuck in traffic behind someone who thinks a turn signal is optional — I mean the face. The one that can stop a room cold. The one that can make a producer forget his wife’s name. The one that makes people in the cheap seats lean forward without knowing why. Hollywood has a long history of finding those faces, polishing them like jewels, and then using them like poker chips. A beautiful woman is never just herself in this town — she’s a commodity, an export, a walking stock option. You’re either “rising” or “slipping,” and there’s no comfortable middle ground. The trick is to stay luminous long enough to outlast the men who think they own you. Very few do. For every woman who figured out how to play the game without losing her shirt — or her soul — there are a dozen who were eaten alive by it. The ones who smiled too much, or not enough. Who believed the f...