Heather Donahue

Donahue and the others played students (their characters used their own names) filming a documentary about the 200-year-old legend of the Blair Witch for a college project. The movie seen in theaters purported to be an edited version of the film and tape recordings the trio made before disappearing in 1994, and the brilliant back story provided by the Blair Witch Web site coupled with the mockumentary "Curse of the Blair Witch" (1999) that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel preceding its wide release blurred the line so well that many believed the movie to be the real footage of lost student filmmakers. Receiving money comparable to a couple of weeks work as an office temp, Donahue created Heather's "confession," a fearless piece of acting and the movie's emotional centerpiece, which helped her land subsequent movie roles as a socially inept engineering student in Robert Iscove's "Boys and Girls" (2000) and as one of a group of upper-class twentysomethings spending a weekend together in a house on New York's Fisher Island in Derek Simonds comedy-drama "Seven and a Match" (lensed 1999), filmed in digital video.