Imagine the screaming sound an agent makes when a twentysomething actress announces she's going to waste her prime Hollywood years getting an education.

Such was the case with Leelee Sobieski (Eyes Wide Shut, Joan of Arc), who put her career on hold for three years to get a degree from Brown University in 2005. I suggest to her that she, Claire Danes and Jodie Foster are the big three who have gone this route.

"Oh c'mon," says Sobieski, who co-stars with Tricia Helfer in the Canadian S&M caper comedy Walk All Over Me. "There are lots more." She thinks about it. "Um, Natalie Portman, Julia Stiles ..."

Okay, that's five.

Add another year during which she "lived with an ex-boyfriend and kinda became a housewife for a year in L.A. That was a crazy experience," and you have an actress who's had a lot of lost time to make up for. Her road back has included a frankly silly Canadian movie, a Razzie nominee for worst film (Nicolas Cage's The Wicker Man) and another film, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale for the man reputed to be the worst director alive, Uwe Boll.

Still, no regrets. For starters, she says she had fun in all of it. As for the hiatus, she says, "I'd been working since I was 11, and for work, you need to live. To be able to make an interesting character onscreen, you need to lead an interesting life. If you're only working, you have nothing to give your character because you don't exist as a normal human being. It's this character, then that character, then that character until there's no real you anymore."