Dakota Fanning may be only eleven years old, but the actress has already accumulated so impressive a resume–and so long a list of boxoffice successes–that they actually led Entertainment Weekly to identify her, only half-facetiously, as “the most powerful actress in Hollywood.” She’s now starring with Kurt Russell in the DreamWorks release “Dreamer,” subtitled “Inspired by a true story,” about a horse that recovers from a bad leg injury and the young girl who becomes the animal’s owner, and in a recent visit to Dallas to talk about the movie, she said of the Entertainment Weekly piece, laughing, “It was kind of embarrassing, because I don’t think of myself that way. So it was really very nice, but…” (It’s notable, though, that “Dreamer” was originally written for a young boy and was reworked for Fanning, showing how much filmmakers have come to want her. “That was really cool,” she observed.)

Fanning’s rise to young stardom started from very simple beginnings. “I went to this playhouse where you do a play at the end of the week,” she explained, “and they thought that I should get with an agency, and so my mom did. And I got two commercials in, like, ten days, so they said I should come to California. And then I got ‘E.R.,’ which was my first TV show, and I did a bunch of TV shows and commercials. And then I got ‘I Am Sam,’ which was my first big movie.” Then came “Uptown Girls,” “Hide and Seek,” “Man on Fire” and “War of the Worlds.” And after “Dreamer” will come “Charlotte’s Web.”

Fanning has worked with some of the biggest actors in the business–Sean Penn, Robert De Niro, Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, but says she’s never felt intimidated by them. “I’ve always just been very excited,” she said. “I’ve never really been nervous, just really excited.” But she does admit to watching their movies–when they’re appropriate for a girl her age. “I do it just because I like to watch them, not because I’m working with them,” she said, “because they’re playing different characters in every film.” She added about De Niro: “But I love ‘Awakenings.’”

Now “Dreamer” has added Russell to her list of famous co-stars, as well as Kris Kristofferson and the five horses used to play the title thoroughbred. Her attitude toward Russell is shown by the fact that when asked to pick her favorite scene in the movie, she chose “the one in which Kurt reads the story” his daughter had written–a sequence in which she doesn’t even appear. “Kurt’s absolutely amazing, as an actor and a friend,” she said. And of Kristofferson, she added, “Kris was so sweet–I couldn’t believe I was actually getting to work with him. It was really incredible just to get to meet him, and then I actually got to be in a movie with him–which was really surreal and strange and weird and nice and unbelievable, all at the same time.”

And then there were the horses. “It’s just the horse part of the story that’s real,” Fanning said. “It’s loosely based on this horse named Mariah’s Storm, whom we mentioned in the movie, actually, who broke her leg in the same way as the horse in our film did, and she was healed and her leg was fine, and she ran in this big race and won against all the other able racehorses. And then she was mother to Giant’s Causeway, who was a really big racehorse and is now a stud in Kentucky.” Fanning wasn’t a horse-rider before making the movie. “I learned it all for the film. It was so much fun,” she said. “I spent ten weeks in California, where I live, training, and then got two weeks in Kentucky before I starting filming–you know, riding, and also just learning about racing and everything.” As to the riding her character does in the picture, Fanning added, “I couldn’t do much of it, because in the scene I didn’t have a helmet on. But I had to have a helmet on. So I didn’t do that much of it. I only did a little bit. But it was exciting to even be on, like, the fake horse-riding.”

And since finishing “Dreamer,” Fanning has become a horse-owner and horse-rider herself–thanks to Kurt Russell. “Kurt gave me a horse!” she announced. “I love them so much, and I want to continue riding and learning more about them.”

Fanning was aware that some of her previous movies were made for older audiences, and hopes that “Dreamer” will appeal to viewers her own age. “One of the reasons I wanted to make this movie was because everyone can go see it,” she said. “It’s for all ages and for families. And everyone can take their kids, their grandkids. So I wanted to do it for that reason. And also because it’s something different from what I’ve ever done before.”

And she seemed genuinely excited to be promoting the movie. “You know, it’s so much fun!” she said. “It’s fun to see all the different cities and different states–I love doing that.

“And getting to do what I love makes it even better.”

David Strathairn is one of those all-purpose actors whom you’ve seen many times but might not be able to identify by name. But his relative anonymity will undoubtedly change his leasd performance as legendary TV newsman Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” co-written and directed by George Clooney, who also co-stars as Murrow’s supportive friend and producer, Fred Friendly.

“George called and said he was going to make this movie about his dad’s hero and therefore his hero; he said, ‘I’m going to make a movie about Edward R. Murrow. I’d like you to consider playing him,’” the lanky, soft-spoken actor recalled during a recent Dallas interview. “And that started the snowball rolling. I was hovering above the ground for minutes. Then it was a process of calls, and reading the script, and whether I was available. Of course I would make myself available for it. It was a pretty exciting process. I’m still kind of pinching myself.”

The excitement included some trepidation, though. “[It was] intimidating, it was scary” taking on Murrow, Strathairn admitted. “And then it became very moving.” The picture isn’t a biography of Murrow, but rather an intense and focused account of the journalist’s decision to examine Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s controversial investigatory tactics on a famous 1954 episode of the “See It Now” program; and that affected the way Strathairn tackled the part. On the one hand, the approach meant getting the hothouse atmosphere of the newsroom right. “George knew that in hand,” he said, “because he had grown up in the newsroom with his dad, Nick Clooney. At nine or ten or eleven, he was running a teleprompter in Cincinnati, so he knew what it was like. That was predominantly one of his insights that he brought to the production. Plus, Joe and Shirley [Wershba, who worked with Murrow] were there, and they knew the workings and procedural things, who did what and the layout, the lay of the land, where the reporters did their work, the bullpen.” Another aspect of the tight focus was that Strathairn had to emphasize the professional Murrow. “I read a lot about the events of his life, the chronology, but not who he was in the other parts of his life. And I think it would have been irresponsible to try to guess what was going on and assume something, first of all, that’s not really germane to the story and might not have been correct–out of respect to him, but also out of respect to the particular event that the film was about. That was George and Grant [Heslov, producer and co-writer]’s choice–you don’t want anything extraneous, outside, you don’t want to have any eddies that let the audience linger or go to a place that takes the focus away from the place the story is happening. George said, ‘We’re not making a bio-pic here, and we definitely don’t want an impersonation, because that would be impossible. But try to at least affect a sense of him.’ The way to do that was to get the voice, at least the cadence and the pattern, his phrasing and his articulation, and there are certain phrases–it’s very musical when you listen to it. You could mimic the posture and the way he would stand or sit, and the way he would hold himself in front of the camera. But that was predominantly the cinematographer’s achievement. Then you just try to–you sort of guess, based on fact, what he did and what people said about him. You try to guess how he would react at any given moment, and in this case it was all the McCarthy stuff and certain [newsroom] relationships. But it is a lot of guessing and hoping. It was a huge responsibility.”

One of the special challenges in playing the part was, in a way, holding back and keeping a pose of emotional restraint, especially in Murrow’s scenes with Don Hollenbeck, a CBS news reader and friend of Murrow played by Ray Wise, who was being attacked as a leftist in the media when Murrow was focusing his gaze on McCarthy. “That was a tough scene [with Ray],” Strathairn said, “because they were friends, and Hollenbeck was a protégé of his. And I think Murrow was very aware of what Hollenbeck was going through, and felt for the man. But that’s another thing George was very savvy about, saying that people related differently to each other back then, when you’re in the trenches together, so to speak, as these guys were. You were together but you were alone at the same time. And there was a particular, different kind of dynamic between people. So we’re not going to do any high-fives, no hugging on the set, and we’re not going to have anybody crying in the corner or jumping around. You were demonstrative in a different way in the fifties. I think inside [Murrow] was always churning. If you opened up his head and looked inside, it would be like this cauldron going on–boiling intensely. And yet on the outside he was very poised and seemingly calm. I don’t think he was ever really calm.”

Another aspect of the role that made it particularly challenging was the decision to make the film in the style of the period–which meant in black-and-white–and using original archival footage with which Strathairn’s Murrow would interact. “I’m sure it was George’s [call], from the get-go, to do black-and-white,” Strathairn said. “I don’t think they ever thought about doing it in color, because no one ever saw Murrow or McCarthy in color. To pay respect and homage to television at that time, it was all black-and-white. And they had this footage of McCarthy and Eisenhower that they decided to use, much in the way Murrow used McCarthy so that he could fall on his own sword and expose him for who he was. And George said we’re going to make this movie like a journalist and show it like it was, as much as possible. And they double-sourced everything. Everything that’s in the film happened. There’s some truncation of time, but all the scenes were documented. If it had not been in black-and-white, I think it would have been sort of irresponsible to the memory of the man and the time period.” The process meant that in sequences in which Strathairn’s Murrow was interacting with television monitors in the studio, what Murrow would actually have seen was on them. “When I looked over to the Kent commercial or to Joe Welch at the [Army-McCarthy] hearings, the Gina Lollobrigida [interview that Murrow was simultaneously conducting on ‘Person to Person’] was going on at the same time. It was amazing–you were just there.” At another point Strathairn’s Murrow interviews Liberace via archival footage. “That was so much fun talking to Liberace!” he said. “That’s an amazing interview that goes on for about fifteen minutes–you go from his bedroom out to his pool, to his piano collection, into the garage where his mother is out there–watching wrestling shows!”

In the end, Strathairn emphasized that for him, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is very much a collaborative effort, not a project he carries. “It was daunting enough trying to keep Murrow in focus and keep the issues in focus that each day we were dealing with. It really felt like we were making the news. The film carries itself, I think. It’s carried by so many things, it’s carried in so many ways–the beautiful cinematography, and the score, the music, the editing, the ensemble cast. It just so happens that Murrow is the blabbermouth. He’s the one who had the most important, significant text to deliver. But no, I don’t think of it as that I have to carry this movie. If I’d thought that,” he added with a hint of a smile, “I probably would have said, ‘George, you’d better play this part.’”