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"  Beyonc\u00E9 Knowles, poised, professional, perfectly put-together, turns out to have a rich inner life, just like the rest of us. Recently, hints of a new Beyonc\u00E9\u2014an intriguingly volatile and emotional one\u2014have been appearing, fine little cracks in the porcelain. Her raw and audacious new album, B&amp;#039;day, may as well be the work of an altogether different person from the sweet-natured superwoman behind her earlier solo effort, Dangerously in Love. And her turn in Dreamgirls, out December 21, shows an actress willing to mine the depths of her own soul. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s very tortured,&amp;quot; says acting coach Ivana Chubbuck, who has coaxed devastating, Oscar-bait performances out of Halle Berry and Charlize Theron and who helped Beyonc\u00E9 prepare for her breakthrough role in the upcoming big-screen adaptation of the beloved 1981 musical. As her former Destiny&amp;#039;s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland puts it, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t ever want to see her mad\u2014really, I&amp;#039;m scared to!&amp;quot;  The group&amp;#039;s third member, Michelle Williams, agrees. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve seen a side of her that&amp;#039;s been like, &amp;#039;Whoa,&amp;#039; and I sure don&amp;#039;t want that side to come out on me,&amp;quot; she says. It&amp;#039;s not that Beyonc\u00E9 actually loses control. Instead, Williams says, it&amp;#039;s more like a subtle disturbance in the Force. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s something in the laugh that doesn&amp;#039;t quite giggle right or something.&amp;quot;  This is not to say that she&amp;#039;s letting down her guard entirely. The woman still never, ever dishes about her personal life. Is she getting married in November (in a $3 million ceremony on Anguilla) to her longtime beau Jay-Z, as Star recently reported? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a nice rumor,&amp;quot; Beyonc\u00E9 coquettishly answers a fan who pops the question in New York at a promotional party for B&amp;#039;day, but also for her twenty-fifth b&amp;#039;day\u2014hence the endless parade of cakes. An ambiguous and serene smile\u2014the smile of a princess being honored by her subjects\u2014plays over her lips.  There are other, not-so-nice rumors making the rounds as well. They&amp;#039;re fueled by her new record, which includes the siren-studded rage-athon &amp;quot;Ring the Alarm&amp;quot; (about her man cheating on her with another woman) and the heart-stopping ballad &amp;quot;Irreplaceable&amp;quot; (same basic idea), the breathy lament &amp;quot;Kitty Kat&amp;quot; (ditto), and the accusatory showstopper &amp;quot;Resentment&amp;quot; (you got it). Taken together, they leave the inescapable impression that someone has done Beyonc\u00E9 very, very wrong.  &amp;quot;Even though I&amp;#039;m very happy and I don&amp;#039;t have any drama in my life,&amp;quot; she explains patiently, &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t want to do another album full of love songs. I did that the last time. It&amp;#039;s boring.&amp;quot; And no, lyrics such as, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re probably thinking/ What&amp;#039;s up with B?/ I&amp;#039;ve been crying for too long/ What did you do to me?/ You lied, you lied, you lied,&amp;quot; from &amp;quot;Resentment,&amp;quot; have no bearing whatsoever on those Internet rumors about Jay-Z stepping out on her with Rihanna. In fact, they aren&amp;#039;t autobiographical in the slightest. Jay-Z has never cheated on her, she says: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sure people will read into that, but there&amp;#039;s nothing to read into. Sorry to disappoint you!&amp;quot; You never can tell with B, as Jay-Z calls her, or Bounc\u00E9, as she&amp;#039;s known on the cattier Internet gossip sites, or Sasha, as she has dubbed her more confident, sexier onstage self. She is perhaps one of the most stunningly opaque icons since Marilyn Monroe. Unlike so many R&amp;amp;amp;B singers, she is not a product of the church\u2014though she sang in choir\u2014but of the salon. Before becoming the costume designer for Beyonc\u00E9&amp;#039;s matchlessly glam Destiny&amp;#039;s Child, and now the powerhouse behind her fashion line, House of Der\u00E9on, Beyonc\u00E9&amp;#039;s mother, Tina Knowles, was a hairstylist. Beyonc\u00E9 grew up in her mom&amp;#039;s Houston shop, performing for clients while they waited for their perms to take and absorbing not just the grown-up tales of romantic intrigue women tell while getting their hair done\u2014tales that have plainly informed her songs and given her an uncanny understanding of her audience\u2014but also the transformative power of physical reinvention, the importance of keeping up appearances.  &amp;quot;I am very conscious of how I look and my image and how I am with people,&amp;quot; Beyonc\u00E9 admits, and she is indeed breathtaking to behold, curled up in a tight black wrapdress on a creamy leather banquette in the lounge of an empty New York nightclub. She&amp;#039;s got her brand-new Christian Louboutin snakeskin stilettos set neatly beside her, her rich golden hair falling silkily past her shoulders, a Der\u00E9on bag propped at her side. &amp;quot;I have a team,&amp;quot; Beyonc\u00E9 continues, &amp;quot;and we&amp;#039;ve been working together since I was 15, so every show, every earring, every shade of eye shadow is all something that comes from me and my team. I&amp;#039;m very much a perfectionist, and even before I was a pop star, or celebrity, or whatever you want to call whatever I am, I was that way. Always.&amp;quot;  Believe it. There&amp;#039;s not a sharp edge on the woman, as if all the angles had been buffed to a fine, frictionless sheen. Even her name sounds like it was cooked up by a branding shop and focus-grouped to perfection, tapping as it does into betrothal (rhymes with fianc\u00E9e), transcendence (beyond) and continental \u00E9lan (that flippantly Gallic accent aigu). The fact that it was given to her at birth in homage to her mother&amp;#039;s maiden name makes the story all the better. She is the apotheosis of pop packaging, having worked from the age of seven to make herself a star (with cumulative record sales, including the Destiny&amp;#039;s Child albums, of 140 million) while burying the messier human aspects of her self safely beneath the surface.  Or so it seemed, until Beyonc\u00E9 landed the part of Deena Jones in Dreamgirls, and those walls came tumbling down. Acting coach Chubbuck, author of The Power of the Actor, employs a technique that requires a student to draw on her or his own emotional life in a given moment\u2014as opposed to the Method, which relies on &amp;quot;sense memories.&amp;quot; And contrary to what Beyonc\u00E9 might like the world to believe, her coach says she has no shortage of torment from which to draw. Within 10 minutes of their first meeting, Chubbuck reports, the superstar was in tears. &amp;quot;Every time we got together, there would be another epiphany and another revelation about who she was and how she operates in life,&amp;quot; Chubbuck adds. &amp;quot;She found she couldn&amp;#039;t wear makeup to our sessions because it was going to run down her face. To have been, since you were a little girl, so exposed to the world, you build up a necessary protection. But she knew in order to get to the places she wanted to go she had to be open and available.&amp;quot; Asked just what personal demons she was wrestling with, Chubbuck demurs, and, characteristically, so does Beyonc\u00E9, except to acknowledge, &amp;quot;We went really deep. It was like therapy.&amp;quot; The results are extraordinary. Dreamgirls became an Oscar favorite a full 10 months before the awards, when Paramount showed a 20-minute sampler to rapturous and teary-eyed audiences at the Cannes Film Festival. The sample footage is beautifully shot and impeccably acted, and Beyonc\u00E9&amp;#039;s performance is a revelation. She somehow brings all the depth and humanity to Deena that she has been so careful to exclude from her own public image. Dreamgirls director Bill Condon (Kinsey, Gods and Monsters) asked her to test for the role, which was to be a more formidable challenge than anything she had ever tackled on film. &amp;quot;I wanted to see whether she could lose that amazing stage persona she&amp;#039;s invented and whether her interior life would be able to come though,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;and she did beautifully.&amp;quot; Loosely based on the story of Diana Ross and the Supremes, Dreamgirls chronicles the rise and fall of a &amp;#039;60s girl group from Chicago, the Dreamettes. Jamie Foxx stars as the band&amp;#039;s manager, who replaces lead singer Effie White (American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson) with the more beautiful and polished Deena, whom he later marries, eventually leading to the group&amp;#039;s implosion. The parallels between Deena and Beyonc\u00E9 are hard to miss. Both started young in girl groups, eventually breaking out into their own successful solo careers. And like Deena, Beyonc\u00E9 owes much of her success to the men in her life: her father, Matthew Knowles, who has been her manager since the beginning, and Jay-Z, president and CEO of Def Jam, who frequently collaborates with her, turns up in her videos, and raps on her tracks. According to Condon, Beyonc\u00E9 and Deena also share &amp;quot;confidence and ambition and an incredible work ethic. And that sense of being kind of molded and presented, and then going out to find your own voice, is something I know Beyonc\u00E9 relates to.&amp;quot; She is keener to point out their differences. &amp;quot;Deena is a lot more sneaky,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Everything she does is premeditated. She&amp;#039;s very likeable, but she&amp;#039;s a bit manipulative. And her performance style was the opposite of mine. Bill kept saying, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t belt, don&amp;#039;t sing in your full voice, don&amp;#039;t do any runs, don&amp;#039;t growl, keep it contrived.&amp;#039; It was a real challenge.&amp;quot; Though Beyonc\u00E9 previously starred in Carmen: A Hip Hopera, Austin Powers in Goldmember, The Fighting Temptations, and The Pink Panther, she joked to Condon that she considers Dreamgirls her film debut. Whereas she mostly walked through those earlier roles (Pam Grier, the blaxploitation diva on whom her Foxxy Cleopatra in Austin Powers was based, could have used Beyonc\u00E9&amp;#039;s demure character as a hair pick), she threw herself into portraying Deena, dropping 20 pounds and working with Chubbuck for hours each day. &amp;quot;Every time I saw her she was looking thinner,&amp;quot; Rowland recalls. &amp;quot;And she had all these pictures of Diana Ross all over her walls. I&amp;#039;d go to the set and watch her and be just like, &amp;#039;Oh, my God.&amp;#039; Her performance is astounding, and she&amp;#039;s singing\u2014excuse me\u2014her ass off in every song. She better can an Oscar.&amp;quot; Chubbuck remembers one scene in particular, when Deena is arguing with her bullying manager-husband, and he walks out of the room. The script said nothing about Deena&amp;#039;s reaction. She might have dropped her eyes sadly, or glared in open-mouthed disbelief at the slamming door. Instead, Chubbuck recalls, &amp;quot;Beyonc\u00E9 literally fell apart. We were all just like, &amp;#039;Whoa.&amp;#039; We all just wanted to jump on the set and hug her and take care of her and make the pain go away. It takes a great deal of courage to expose yourself like that. Most people never come close to it in their lifetime.&amp;quot; Beyonc\u00E9 calls the experience of making Dreamgirls &amp;quot;life-changing,&amp;quot; in light of which it&amp;#039;s not hard to see why she was so eager to celebrate the arrival of her quarter-century on the planet. Taken together, the film and the new album\u2014which she recorded on her own dime in a secret, two-week whirlwind session immediately after the movie wrapped\u2014represent a creative rebirth.  &amp;quot;I called a meeting right before I finished the movie, with my dad and my publicist and everyone,&amp;quot; Beyonc\u00E9 says. &amp;quot;We had this big white board with my calendar for the year, and I told them, &amp;#039;Don&amp;#039;t ask me to do an album until 2007, because I need time to rest.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;But when I was resting,&amp;quot; she continues with a giggle, &amp;quot;I kept hearing songs, so I said, &amp;#039;Let me go in the studio, but I&amp;#039;m not going to tell anyone because then they&amp;#039;ll start planning.&amp;#039; More than anything, I didn&amp;#039;t want the pressure of having to record a quote-unquote hit record. I feel like the best work happens when a lightbulb clicks and you&amp;#039;re excited, not because you planned it.&amp;quot;  B&amp;#039;day is the most out-there, and the best, album she has ever done, from the rhythmically delirious &amp;quot;Get Me Bodied&amp;quot; (the title of which, Beyonc\u00E9 explains sweetly, applies a slang term for &amp;quot;murdered&amp;quot; to the notion of dance-floor abandon) to the broken-doll funk of &amp;quot;Freakum Dress,&amp;quot; with its wiggy, &amp;#039;80s performance-art vibe, and the nearly unhinged scorched-earth ferocity of &amp;quot;Ring the Alarm&amp;quot; (the video for which depicts a scenario out of Guantanamo Bay, with helmeted goons restraining Beyonc\u00E9 while she squirms, kicks, and screams her head off).  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s so aggressive,&amp;quot; Rowland says of B&amp;#039;day. &amp;quot;She takes it to the next level and beyond. When she played it for me I was like, &amp;#039;Who are you?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Williams agrees. &amp;quot;She didn&amp;#039;t just do what&amp;#039;s out on the radio now. She&amp;#039;s first with what she&amp;#039;s doing, and now everyone else has to play catch-up.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to say what I did before was a formula, but certain records just sound like the radio,&amp;quot; Beyonc\u00E9 admits. B&amp;#039;day is different. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s brave and it&amp;#039;s bold and it&amp;#039;s risky. I wanted to surprise myself and not do what everyone was expecting.&amp;quot; While the reviews have been mostly positive (&amp;quot;nervy and fascinating,&amp;quot; said The New York Times), some listeners aren&amp;#039;t sure what to make of the new Beyonc\u00E9. USC music industry major Robert Thomas even circulated an online petition to Columbia Records (&amp;quot;We, the fans of one Beyonc\u00E9 Knowles, ask that an alternative video be shot featuring: more choreographed and less spontaneous dancing, clearer visual themes that relate to the lyrics of the song, less gyrating...&amp;quot;). Thomas insists he&amp;#039;s a longtime Beyonc\u00E9 fan who made the petition as a joke for friends, but it caught on &amp;quot;like wildfire,&amp;quot; he says, eventually drawing some 6,000 signatures and a furious response from Matthew Knowles, who issued a press release suggesting the petition was part of a concerted &amp;quot;plan by some to create chaos&amp;quot; around the album&amp;#039;s release. Asked about the controversy, Beyonc\u00E9 at first laughs it off, noting that some of the signatures\u2014like &amp;quot;Kelly Rowland&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Tina Knowles&amp;quot;\u2014are obvious fakes. But then, for the first time during our conversation, a touch of that &amp;quot;Ring the Alarm&amp;quot; passion surfaces. &amp;quot;Everyone has a right to their opinion, but because people really don&amp;#039;t have a lot of things to say about me, they [put a story about the petition] in the paper. So every radio station talked about it because they&amp;#039;re thinking, &amp;#039;Wow, this is serious!&amp;#039; But what they didn&amp;#039;t put in there was that my fans signed a petition against the petition, saying, &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s the best video she&amp;#039;s ever done!&amp;#039; But it&amp;#039;s amazing how when you read something, people become, I don&amp;#039;t want to say brainwashed, but they jump on the bandwagon. And the most unfortunate thing is people want to put you in a box, and they don&amp;#039;t want to see you change. You know, they want the same four girls behind me and the same shiny background. And I will do that again when the song feels right. But I&amp;#039;m very happy with the video.&amp;quot; She sighs. &amp;quot;I just wish people were open to people taking more risks.&amp;quot; A week later, Beyonc\u00E9 is the subject of a special edition of BET&amp;#039;s 106 &amp;amp;amp; Park (which is filmed, it turns out, at 57th and Tenth). Standing in the studio with an audience of teenage girls, all of them die-hard Beyonc\u00E9 fans, I ask what they think of the petition. All voice their steadfast support. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s nonsense!&amp;quot; says Dakotah Ahlston, 17, from Brooklyn, to nodding heads. &amp;quot;If she did what they&amp;#039;re saying, people would have been like, &amp;#039;Look, she&amp;#039;s the same.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Later, the girls stab the air with their fingers as they roar along to &amp;quot;Ring the Alarm,&amp;quot; proffer handmade artwork for the cameras, and get teary-eyed when Matthew and Tina Knowles come out to chat about their daughter. Beyonc\u00E9, for her part, is all smiles throughout the broadcast, even showing a bit of hip-hop noblesse oblige by introducing a video by LeToya Luckett, one of three early Destiny&amp;#039;s Child members to be fired. (&amp;quot;This first video is by my H-town childhood friend,&amp;quot; Beyonc\u00E9 says smoothly.) And in the end, when a pair of production assistants wheel out yet another giant birthday cake, she really does look surprised. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a9203/natural-woman-19323/>