Cara Delevingne unleashes her inner Alice

The excellent Delevingne DNA strikes again. This time it is Cara, 17, Poppy's younger sister, hot on the heels of her model sibling. There she is, all glacier blue eyes and sharp cheekbones, lounging in the Gloucestershire woodland in the latest Bamford campaign (opposite Poppy).

She was recently in the Youth issue of Love magazine and has been signed by Poppy's agency, Storm. But modelling is not really her thing. 'She wants to be an actress,' says her mother Pandora, the 1970s society beauty, now a Selfridges personal shopper. 'She likes playing villains and mobsters.'

'Not mobsters,' corrects Cara primly. 'I like tough characters. I don't want a part to be easy.' Earlier this year she played the feisty Martha in a school production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 'I would have loved the Meryl Streep role in The Devil Wears Prada,' she adds.

With her golden hair and pretty pout, Cara looks like a young Twiggy. Today she's in a blazer, tea dress, laddered black tights and leather lace-up boots - average daywear at her liberal boarding school, Bedales. 'The good thing is, you get a lot of freedom. You sleep with the boys. Well, in the same house, but not the same floor. You get to go out to dinner and you can drink with an 18-yearold,' she explains.

Her friends include Sting's musician daughter Coco Sumner and Jazzy de Lisser, the stepdaughter of the Marquess of Bute: 'Her brother had an amazing party in their castle in Scotland recently.' Her AS levels are in psychology, dance and theatre studies (of which she finds dance the most challenging because it's 50 per cent theory) and she plays the guitar and drums and sings in numerous bands.

With a gap year fast approaching, it won't be long before Cara joins the rest of her family on the society pages. Her grandfather is Sir Jocelyn Stevens, her father Charles is a property magnate and her other sister Chloe has a South Kensington members' club named after her. But first she plans to visit Poppy in New York, where her sister shares a flat with Sienna Miller.

Still unsigned by an acting agent, Cara got to the final casting last year for the new Alice in Wonderland film at Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter's adjoining houses in Belsize Park. 'I was so scared. It was all maroon inside, filled with all this odd stuff from The Nightmare Before Christmas and his amazing paintings. He's a crazy man.'

The part went to the unknown Australian actress Mia Wasikowska. 'They wanted an Alice with a deep sadness in her eyes; maybe I just wasn't sad enough,' she says. By way of compensation, George Bamford, photographer and family friend, asked her to be his Alice. Curiouser and curiouser.