Dunst leaps ahead in Spiderman

Hollywood's favourite little sister has grown up.

After her chilling role at the age of 11 as the bloodsucking child in Interview With The Vampire, Kirsten Dunst seemed to have cornered the market in dizzy cheerleaders and high-school beauty queens.

Now, at 19, she has made the leap to big-budget leading lady in the movie version of Spiderman. But she has not become so much of a lady that she refused to get involved in the spectacular action sequences set around New York's skyscrapers.

Stuntmen were impressed by her ability to hang off balconies and fall 80 feet in a harness. The film's stunt co-ordinator, Jeff Habberstad, said: "She falls off Queensborough Bridge. In Times Square she falls off a 15-storey balcony. She was a trooper."

But the biggest test for her acting talents was her first kiss with Spiderman, played by Tobey Maguire - in the rain and with her co-star hanging upside down.

She tells this month's Vanity Fair magazine: "It was January; freezing. I was in a skimpy outfit with water up to my ankles."

Dunst's acting career started at age three with a cereal commercial; she was seven in her first film, New York Stories, in 1989. In 1990, she played Tom Hanks' daughter in The Bonfire Of The Vanities, and then things really took off. Her Vampire role as an innocent corrupted by ghouls Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

But, despite being seen as one of Hollywood's hottest stars, she is reluctant to flaunt it. After a few tame sex scenes, she says from now on she will never act even partially nude. Even discreet about her love life, she denies any romantic link with co-star Maguire.