6. Jessica Alba - Sin City
Jessica Alba had already sparked interest as an actress of undeniable beauty, but - by 2003 - she'd stuck mostly to family-orientated fare. It wasn't until Robert Rodriguez's
Sin City that the actress really came out of her shell. And by "came out of her shell," I mean that Alba came out of her clothes - she donned a stripper's outfit and unleashed a mind-blowing level of sexiness onto the screen, the likes of which we'd never seen before (and totally weren't expecting, either). Nowadays, Jessica Alba is a rather obvious sex symbol, so it's difficult to remember a time when she wasn't - still, as Nancy Callahan in
Sin City, nobody was prepared to see Alba acting quite so promiscuously. The first time we see her in the movie is when Bruce Willis' character, Hartigan, has tracked her down to a bar. He hasn't seen her since she was a child, and the face that his character pulls the moment she's revealed, dressed in barely anything, sums it up. "Here I was expecting a skinny little bookworm," he says. You can say that again, Bruce.