Bright young thing

When the

'It is years and years since I was so bowled over by the performance of any young actress on stage,' concluded an enthusiastic de Jongh. As Lucia, James Joyce's mentally disturbed daughter in Michael Hastings' play Calico, Garai proved herself to be an actress of real ability and scope.

She'd been seen before on TV, of course, as Zoe in the dotcom drama Attachments, and as Gwendolen in the BBC adaptation of Daniel Deronda. She'd also got raves as Cassandra in the film I Capture The Castle. But just how big a star was she going to be? As big as Keira Knightley, to whom some have compared her?

Cracking open a Corona beer in her hotel room in Sydney, where she's currently filming a big-budget drama for ITV, Garai speaks with an intelligent and unusual frankness. Despite the somewhat demanding Los Angeles agent through which all interview requests are processed - a rather luvvie-ish touch for someone so young - Garai comes across as a clever and unaffected middle-class girl who has thought hard about her chosen profession and knows how lucky she has been. In manner, in fact, she is much less like Knightley - more like a young Kate Winslet.

'It would be false modesty to say that I wasn't delighted with that review of Calico,' she says. 'But I do think that if you take the good, then you have to take the bad as well, and there were otherswho said different things about that performance. When I auditioned for the part, I thought, well, what's the worst that can happen? The worst is that I'll be completely useless and ruin the play for everyone else - but at least I'll know my limitations as an actress.'

The contemporary setting partly attracted her to Inside I'm Dancing, her latest film, set in Dublin and directed by Damien O'Donnell of East Is East fame. It's a two-hankie movie, saved from mawkishness by the wit of its script, in which Garai plays a working-class girl hired by two disabled lads (James McAvoy and the excellent Steven Robertson) as their full-time carer - and after all the bonnet and corset roles, it's bliss, she says, wearing jeans and T-shirts.

'Any actress will, at any given opportunity, bang on about the problem with women on film,' she says, 'which is that, certainly in Hollywood, they're not represented as they really are. Then there's my problem, which is that I seem to appeal to directors of period dramas. So, yeah, it was great to play a modern girl for once.'

It turns out that Garai is no great fan of Hollywood: she has had her fingers burned there already. The straight-to-video release of the Miramax turkey Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, in which she starred alongside the Mexican actor Diego Luna (after months of dance training), taught her to lower her expectations of big studio film-making. 'I learned an important lesson from that film,' she says boldly, 'which is that if you really want to act, don't work in the Hollywood studio system. It's always going to be a process of compromise when you do. I'm not saying that actors in Hollywood don't give wonderful performances, but if you do want to act in an unbridled way, shall we say, then you're better off with independent or British films.'

She has always been independent-minded, she says. Garai was born in Hong Kong, where her father worked for a bank. The family - a younger sister, Roxanne, and two adopted older siblings, Ralph and Rosie - returned to Wiltshire when Romola was eight. At Stonar boarding school she did the 'usual plays' but had no real ambition to act. Self-reliant even as a teenager, she persuaded her parents to let her live in

Rosie's London flat while she did A-levels at the City Of London School For Girls. When a casting agent came looking for a theatre studies student for a role as the young Judi Dench in ITV's The Last Of The Blonde Bombshells, Garai got the part, an agent and £300 in fees.

Not wanting to give up her studies, she took one year of a degree course in English Literature at London University before realising that work as an actress was there for the taking. Her friends have just graduated. 'A lot has happened in a short space of time,' she says thoughtfully, 'and that kind of isolates me from the universal experience of everyone of my age. I seem to be set on this career path while they're still wondering what to do with their lives.' She's currently single and 'has the great luxury, at my age, of living alone in London'.