True life fairytale for Lara

Here's a fairytale - bubbly, peach-skinned and just 17, Lara Belmont is mooching up Portobello Market when she comes upon a film crew doing spot casting.

She isn't an actress. 'In fact, I wanted to be a photographer, but I'm very bad at taking photos,' she sighs. Maintaining she was simply 'privileged to be in the right place at the right time', suddenly Lara's signed up and playing a lead role in Tim Roth's directorial debut The War Zone, also starring Ray Winstone and Tilda Swinton.

'To be honest, when I heard Tim was directing, I thought "Who's he?"' No doubting who Lara was, though. Her raw, unaffected performance in the harrowing incest drama won her a raft of 'best newcomer' nominations and awards.

'My mum and stepdad bought and sold houses, they'd do them up and move on. It's good, you get to meet loads of people,' Lara says, by way of explaining why she doesn't know where she's from.

Now 21, stability is to be found studying photography at the College Of North East London - 'Kat off EastEnders went to the same place'. But that doesn't mean she's let the acting slide. Cinema audiences can catch her later this month in Long Time Dead, the latest attempt to revive the British horror genre - 'I die quite early. It was great, a gruesome death... loads of blood' - or on TV in the psycho-thriller The Swap (starring Mike Maloney and Jemma Redgrave), and again in an adaptation of Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment, with John Simm and Kate Ashfield, another acquaintance from The War Zone. 'That's the mad thing, you keep bumping into the same people.' No coincidence, surely, that the people Lara keeps 'bumping into' are the best in the business.

'I've only done four things and it's given me such an opportunity in life.' So, with an American agent on the case, what's next for the accidental actress? 'You never know what you want to do until it comes up - be open-minded. Hollywood? I want to travel, but I'd rather do the India thing.' Whichever path she chooses, Lara Belmont is certainly going places.

The War Zone: review & film clip