Amy Adams, 34, doesn’t get enough press. She quietly shows up to work, does a phenomenal job, promotes her films when they come out, and then disappears until awards season. We probably don’t hear much about Adams because she leads a low-key lifestyle with her fiance and doesn’t say things to the press for shock value. I remember seeing her on The Tonight Show earlier this year and she told a cute story about driving down Hollywood Boulevard in a UHaul with her boyfriend on a Friday night. The Oscar-nominated actress was moving her own stuff, and it even struck her as funny once she stopped to consider it.

Amy isn’t a cookie cutter beauty, but she is gorgeous and looks strikingly different from your average starlet with her lovely red hair and pale skin. On the red carpet, Amy sparkles in dresses that flatter her coloring and are fashion-forward and bold, and her makeup and hair are usually perfect.

Given how lovely and well styled Amy usually is, I’m disappointed that someone at Allure chose feature a cover photo of her in red eyeshadow with light brown too-thick eyeliner. Her cover shot looks geeky and kind of amateurish, like a high schooler experimented with her makeup for the junior prom. Maybe the small photo of the cover (below) doesn’t do the image justice, as it doesn’t look as bad on the photo from Allure’s website (above). Inside the magazine, Amy isn’t particularly quotable but she’s honest. She says she’s been engaged for a year and her fiance is losing patience with her. She’s not quite ready to make it official and start having children right away, and considering how well her career is going you can’t blame her:

Don’t ever confuse Amy Adams for a bridezilla. The actress has been engaged for a year and she still hasn’t even locked down a wedding date.

“I’ve been really busy, and I feel like a horrible fiancée that I haven’t gotten swept up in the whole idea of a wedding,” Adams, 34, tells Allure in its August issue. “But I just haven’t.”

Luckily for the star, her fiancé, actor Darren Le Gallo, isn’t pressuring her to rush down the aisle.

“He wants to be married,” Adams says. “I think he was patient for the first nine months, but that we have been engaged for a year, he’s sort of, you know, ‘This is going to happen, right?’ He understands I’m busy but he’s ready. He’s much more ready for kids and stuff than I am.”

One reason Adams has been so busy: She had to learn how to cook a lot for her role in her latest film, Julie & Julia, which costars Meryl Streep as famed chef Julia Child. Adams learned how to poach an egg – “a talent that comes in handy,” she says – and tackled more complicated kitchen tasks like trussing chickens, boning ducks and making bruschetta.

Cooking aside, Adams says she identifies with her character in the film, Julie Powell, a real-life, 30-something author who wrote a memoir about trying to cook all of the recipes in Child’s landmark cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “Thirty was a big deal for me,” Adams says. “It was the age where I reevaluated everything – how I approached life and how I thought about myself.”

“When I look at my 20s, or when I look at any period in my life, I think about how much time I’ve wasted trying to find the right man,” she says. “But the truth is, once you have a great man in your life, it allows you – or at least for me – to look at yourself and grow as an individual. And gosh, if I had known I was going to find this, my 20s would have been completely different.”

[From People]

Amy’s last sentence in that excerpt – that she wasted a lot of time looking for a guy instead of trying to work on herself, is something a lot of us struggle with. I know when I was in my 20s I went through something similar, but I do feel like I was able to have a great time while I was single and wasn’t exactly pining for a guy. It doesn’t sound like Adams ever was, either. Maybe she’s just not ready to get married, or maybe she feels deep down that her fiance really isn’t the one for her.

Allure has more photos from Amy’s shoot and it looks like they’re going for a kind of elegant romanticism with the photos, which feature some elegant dresses and historic pieces. In one photo Amy even is seen holding her chest as she poses topless in a white gown. She looks beautiful in the other photos, and it’s a shame they chose that kind of unfortunate gummy-looking picture for the cover.