Jessica Chastain in "The Heiress" and at Juilliard Jessica Chastain at her alma mater, the Juilliard School. On Nov. 1 she opens on Broadway with "The Heiress." JESSICA CHASTAIN has turned up lately in so many movies all at once that audiences may be forgiven for imagining that with her ethereal manner (in "The Tree of Life," anyway) and Botticelli looks - the alabaster skin, huge green eyes and cascade of auburn hair - she wafted into Hollywood on a seashell. In fact Ms. Chastain, who makes her Broadway debut in "The Heiress" on Nov. 1, is a trained stage actress who spent four transformative years at Juilliard, from which she graduated in 2003. On Labor Day, before the students had unpacked their stuff, she dropped by for a quick visit and headed right for Room 304, a big rehearsal space where first-year students spend most of their classroom time. "I was actually born in this room," she said, laughing. We had an exercise where we had to start as a fetus. There were people lying on the floor and screaming and crying, and then we were toddlers, and then there were people getting into relationships and divorces. It was the whole cycle of mankind, until we died. Ms. Chastain, who doesn't like to give her age, grew up in a small Northern California town in a family whose members weren't theatergoers and didn't even go to movies much. But from an early age she imagined herself as an actor, and her resolve was sealed when her grandmother took her to a production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat." "That's when I realized that this was a profession," she recalled. It wasn't like I wanted to be an actor. It was more like I am that. This is my job. It was so clear cut, I never had to make a choice. After high school she landed the role of Juliet in a production of "Romeo and Juliet," and heard about Juilliard from Romeo, who was a student there. "I thought, "If that's where he goes, that's where I want to go," " she said. No one in her family had ever graduated from college, but she nevertheless applied, and for her audition did what she now describes as a near-pornographic version of Juliet's "Gallop apace" soliloquy. "I've always made really strange choices, maybe because no one told me otherwise," she said. "I thought the language was very sexual, so I was like "Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night, give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die, take him." And it ended with me rolling around on the ground. I think it was probably pretty shocking. She recalled that Michael Kahn - one of Juilliard's renowned teachers - turned to her and said, "Jessica, did you have fun?" She was admitted even so, and in the fall of 1999 her grandmother, the one who had taken her to "Joseph," flew east with her, checked her into the dorm and took her to Bed Bath & Beyond to make sure she had the right kind of shower caddy. "It was hard," Ms. Chastain said about her first few weeks in New York. I had never really spent any time in a city like this. But everything I was craving was here. I had never seen a foreign movie, and Lincoln Center was across the street. I was sitting in the cafeteria one day, and Baryshnikov was at my table. It was everything I had dreamed of since I was a little girl. In those days Juilliard had a policy, since abandoned, of dismissing students not thought to be making the grade. "I worried all the time about being cut," Ms. Chastain said. It was unfounded, because in my second year I actually got a scholarship. But I'm that way still. I always think I'm going to get fired. There was a bar here called Malachy's, where everyone went to hang out, and I think I only went twice in four years. I'm just obsessive. I'd be doing my reading or watching movies. My whole life I wanted to be here, and so when I was, I wanted to suck up every bit of it. Every morning, she recalled, sticking her head into Room 306, she studied movement for two hours here with Moni Yakim, another famous teacher, and at lunchtime she answered the phone outside the office of Katherine Hood, the administrative director. "That was my desk," she said, happily pointing it out. A turning point in her Juilliard career came at the end of her second year, when she was Arkadina in a production of "The Seagull" directed by Rebecca Guy. "That's when my confidence started to kick in," she said. It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.