Turns out Hines Ward isn’t the only hero of the silver screen with Steelers ties.

Actress Rooney Mara takes center stage in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the first of three major films based on author Stieg Larsson‘s “Millennium” series. Directed by David Fincher, the film, which opened Wednesday, required Mara to undergo a real-life transformation from seemingly innocent princess-type to a pierced, tatted-up Scandinavian fire starter.

Mara pulls it off, by all accounts, hailed by The New York Times as “a marvelous pop-culture character, stranger and more complex than the average superhero and more intriguing than the usual boy wizards and vampire brides.” She also received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama.

About those NFL ties: Mara, 26, is the granddaughter of former longtime Giants co-owner Wellington Mara and the great-granddaughter of both Steelers founder Art Rooney, Sr. and Giants founder Tim Mara. Her older sister, Kate, also is an actress with a long list of credits.

(In other words, we’re dealing with women who’ve never paid to get into a football game.)

In “Dragon Tattoo,” Rooney plays Lisbeth Salander, a young computer hacker who helps journalist Mikael Blomkvist (played by Daniel Craig) search for a woman who’s been missing for 40 years.

We’ve asked them to hunt around for the Jaguars’ offense while they’re at it.

– Marc Sessler

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