Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette, covering the nineteen years that fabulous and tragic woman spent at Versailles, created a sensation when it opened earlier this year in France. It was filmed largely on location in the palace, with unswerving support from the directors of the museum. For the two leading actors—Kirsten Dunst as the young queen and Coppola's cousin Jason Schwartzman as King Louis XVI—it was a transformative experience to walk in rustling silk and tapping heels through halls filled with ghosts. For Dunst, exquisitely but unstuffily costumed by Milena Canonero (who deserves an Oscar for this work), it was a very sensual role. "You breathe differently in those dresses; you move in a special way," Dunst says. To prepare herself, on the night a scaled-down crew was filming her in the emotionally charged balcony scene, she walked alone through the palace in the dark. "I could look in those mirrors," she says. "Be still in myself. Feel my place in that house."

"Teen Queen," written by Kennedy Fraser and photographed by Annie Leibovitz, has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the September 2006 issue of Vogue.

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