THE Hollywood star Reese Witherspoon, frontrunner to win the best actress award at next weekend’s Oscar ceremonies, is to push earnings for women in the film business to record heights with her next movie.

Witherspoon, 29, impressed Academy members (who vote for the Oscar winners) with her performance as June Carter Cash, the country music star, in Walk the Line. Now she is producing and starring in Our Family Trouble, about a mother fighting demons possessing her child in Witherspoon’s native Deep South.

Hollywood deal makers predict that if the new film is even a moderate hit next year, she will earn $30m (£17m) — putting her in the same league as male stars such as Tom Cruise and Jim Carrey.

In so doing, Witherspoon would overtake Julia Roberts, 38, the current box office queen, who became the first woman to break into the “all boys club” of $20m salaries with Erin Brockovich in 2000 and earned a record $25m three years later for Mona Lisa Smile.

While Roberts’s movie was marketed as an “inspirational” family film — and proved a box office disappointment — Witherspoon is venturing into a once-despised genre, the horror flick. The actress has given little away about Our Family Trouble, which she wants to film near her childhood haunts in Tennessee. “It’s about a young child in peril, which as a mother I can appreciate,” she said. “There is nothing scarier.”

It will be a new departure for Laura Jean Reese Witherspoon, the daughter of a Louisiana surgeon who could have become a scholar instead of a film star. After excelling at Harpeth Hall, an exclusive all-girls school in Nashville, she was accepted to study English literature at Stanford University.

She put her studies on hold when, having earned pocket money in television commercials from the age of seven, she was offered big roles in action movies with Kiefer Sutherland and Mark Wahlberg.

She went on to make her mark in the critically acclaimed satires Pleasantville and Election, before winning over the public in 2001 as a seemingly ditzy Valley Girl at Harvard in Legally Blonde.

Witherspoon, who married fellow actor Ryan Phillippe in 1999 and has two children, said that before Legally Blonde Hollywood was biased against her in three ways: “I am discriminated against because I’m a blonde, because I am an actress and because I’m from the South.”

Yet in Walk the Line she sang all the songs she had learnt at Harpeth Hall and relished reverting to her natural accent.

Pundits say the time is right for Witherspoon to pick up her first Oscar — barring last-minute competition from Felicity Huffman, the Desperate Housewives actress who plays a man becoming a woman in the comedy Transamerica.

With Our Family Trouble, Witherspoon will move in a different direction again, joining the growing number of big name actresses to appear in a new generation of “superior supernaturals” that have little in common with Hollywood’s traditional low-budget slasher movies.

Renée Zellweger, 36, who won an Oscar for Cold Mountain, is preparing to star in a remake of The Eye, in which a woman can see past events after an optic transplant. The film will be financed by Tom Cruise’s company, CruiseWagner Productions.

Monica Bellucci, the Italian actress who prefers art films to Hollywood productions, is said to be in the running for a role in Night Watch, a vampire blockbuster. “At 41, you cannot take yourself too seriously,” she told the Italian press recently.

Dakota Fanning, 12, who starred with Cruise in War of the Worlds, is under consideration to play the narrator in The Lovely Bones, based on Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel about a murdered child who observes the hunt for her killer. Directed by Peter Jackson, a triple Oscar winner for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it has been described as “a supernatural story without chainsaws”.

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