Disney pick Pooh fan

He has grown up just a few miles away from the forest made famous by the exploits of a certain toy bear and his friends.

Tom Wheatley is 12 now, but as a little boy he would entertain his family with impressions of the characters from Winnie The Pooh. He religiously collected the AA Milne story books plus any Pooh Bear toys or videos.

Now Tom's ability to bring the characters to life has landed him a coveted role in the latest Walt Disney animated version of the classic tales - as the voice of Christopher Robin.

He beat 80 other young hopefuls to the part in Piglet's Big Movie and in November spent two days at a London studio recording the clipped tones of Christopher, for which he was paid £1,900.

But he is most excited by Disney flying him first-class to Los Angeles tomorrow ahead of the film's Sunday evening premiere. There he will rub shoulders with the likes of Carly Simon, who wrote and performed the music for the movie.

"I just can't wait to see the film and hear my voice," he said. "The animation had already been done so we had to add the voices to it. It was nerve-wracking at first but really enjoyable once I started. It's my voice but a little bit bouncier and more chirpy. I try to make it sound a bit younger because Christopher Robin is 10 or 11."

Tom lives with his BBC technician father Mike, and mother Sally, in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, only a short car ride away from Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, where AA Milne used to live, and which became Hundred Acre Wood, the setting for the Pooh books.

It was on a bridge there that the characters invented the game Pooh Sticks. Tom said frequent visits to the forest got him hooked on Winnie the Pooh.

His parents have hired an agent to help him get into acting and he has had four years' experience in amateur and professional dramatics, starring in school plays and musicals.

A leading light at a local theatre school, he won Hastings Music Festival's under-16 solo singing competition when he was 11, and has been in a professional production of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.