Will Kristen Stewart make a good Snow White?

Her hair is often black as ebony, so at least she's got that part down.

Whether Kristen Stewart will make a good Snow White in other ways is an open question.

A week's worth of reports that Stewart would take on the role of the fairy-tale princess came to a head today with a story that Stewart is now officially in negotiations to play the title female character in "Snow White and the Huntsman."

The movie is one of three new twists on the fairy tale that Hollywood is developing, this one with commercials director Rupert Sanders. (Charlize Theron will play the evil queen and Viggo Mortensen the huntsman, who takes Snow White under his wing.)

The hallmarks of the character, at least in the Brothers Grimm telling, is softness and vulnerability. Stewart has done vulnerability -- sort of -- in parts of the "Twilight" franchise. But her defining characteristic  has been toughness. Certainly that's been a part of the non-"Twilight" roles she's tackled, as hard-living rocker Joan Jett in "The Runaways" and as a troubled stripper in "Welcome to the Rileys." Will her Goth aspects mesh with the softness of a princess?

In a way, the Stewart casting evokes a reversal of the Rooney Mara-Dragon Tattoo problem. There people were asking if an actress was too soft for the part; here you could ask if she's too tough for it.

The new Snow White does reimagine the character as someone chained to the huntsman instead of set free by him, and, consequently, someone who must learn to fight her way out of trouble. Let's hope, for K-Stew's sake and ours, that means the part calls for more grit than it does soft smiles.

--Steven Zeitchik

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Carrie