Meet the minx of the moment

It's been a dull time on the redhot-celebrity-minx front, lately.

Liz Hurley's pregnancy has meant that her minxing career is on hold, for the next few months at least. The more we see of Kylie Minogue, the more we realise that her minxiness is actually skin-deep celebrity spin. And Pasty Kensit's divorce seems to have drained her of all minx potential.

Thank heavens, then, for Jane Harper, lead in ITV's magnificent new teen/adult crossover soap, Night and Day. A combination of glacial china-doll beauty, Fifties pin-up body, schoolgirl wiles and a personality that is manipulative and mysterious in equal parts, Harper effortlessly claimed mainattraction status when the soap debuted last Tuesday. Within the space of a week, she'd turned 16, seduced her best friend's father (played by Joe McGann), toyed with the affections of a beautiful runaway, delivered some killer, signature put-downs, and disappeared. Oh, and increased Night and Day's audience share vastly with a broad selection of nontarget demographic dads.

The actress playing Jane Harper is 17-year-old Georgina Walker, who, rather thrillingly, seems to be not unlike her onscreen incarnation. "I wouldn't want to be friends with her, necessarily," says Georgina, of Jane. "But I've grown to love her, and yeah, in some ways I've grown more like her too. I've always been old for my years, but she's made me stronger and more confident." She insists that the similarities between the two of them end there:"Jane kissed two men and played footsie with a third in one episode. I've never done anything like that."

Whether or not Walker's poise is actually a carefully maintained veneer masking a normal teeny vulnerability, it's certainly more than stage-school polish. Georgina never had any burning acting ambition, and never signed up with Sylvia Young. "I've had no training, no drama school, nothing," she says. "I wanted to be an archaeologist, but dropped out of college and started modelling instead. After one fashion shoot and one Cornetto ad, I ended up on the Night and Day audition by accident, after the actress my agency originally sent called in sick." Ask her how she felt when she got the part, and you'll get none of the standard-issue nascentstar gibbering excitement you might expect from someone of her age. "It was surreal," she says, simply. "It feels surreal even now."

Those who originally cast her talk about the opaque, whimsical qualities that first attracted them to Walker, but her unremitting gorgeousness was undoubtedly a factor, too. Georgina insists, predictably, that she can't begin to imagine she's a sex symbol in the making, and offers up some vague protest when the suggestion is made.

("No! Really? What are people saying?") Then she reconsiders. "Maybe I can see that Jane is, because of the way she handles men, but me? No - although I guess we're sort of the same thing. At school," she adds, '"I was the one with the unrequited crushes on boys who always fancied other girls. I was never the one everyone fancied." She's generally unapologetic about her looks, doesn't fake humility when they're referred to, but is none the less philosophical about their significance. She says that people have always stared at her and whistled "because of the blonde thing".

Yet what makes both Jane Harper and Georgina Walker particularly significant in the grand scheme of pinups goes beyond mere prettiness. Their communal allure marks an evolution in modern minxiness. For the past five years or so, female lust objects have been issued in two standard formats. They've been the flawed, vulnerable, lovable Jennifer Aniston and Kate Winslet type, whose non-threatening goofiness is customdesigned to win over female fans and take the edge off their physical allure. Or they've been the vampishyetaccessible FHMcover-girl variety - your Rachel from S Club 7, your Appleton sister - whose girl-next-door glamour and seven shades of slut wardrobe lend them a pseudo accessibility. Jane Harper's brand of sex appeal, however, references neither of these prototypes on sexiness. It's unflawed, uncompromising, distant and inaccessible, and not particularly English. There's ultimately something iconic about it. As a testimony to this, she's already got an underground slogan T-shirt dedicated to her, a bootleg piece of Night and Day merchandise which reads: "Have you seen Jane Harper?" How does it feel to be an icon? Says Walker: "I dunno. I certainly don't think I am.

Where men are concerned, Georgina insists that comparisons can't be drawn between her and Jane Harper. She currently has just one boyfriend, and no clandestine lovers. Theirs is a newish relationship. He's not on the show, he's got nothing to do with the industry, and he's been out of the country for the past month. "I never really explained exactly what I was doing, so he's going to be gobsmacked when he comes back," she thinks. As for the appeal of older men - something her character clearly understands - Walker admits that she almost gets it. "But there are limits. As for going out with someone my best-friend's dad's age - no. I think that's too old," she adds.

That smashing noise, in case you were wondering, was the sound of several thousand fortysomething male fantasies being shattered.