Dakota Blue on way to stardom

Plucked from obscurity to star in The Golden Compass, Dakota Blue Richards is just an ordinary teenager who runs around shouting 'Chicken pie!' at random strangers. Harriet Lane meets her.

Dakota Blue Richards is a pretty ordinary 13-year-old schoolgirl. Her schoolfriends call her Dee, or Dee-Dee. She says "like" a lot. She has a tank of pet fish. She's "a bit of an addict" when it comes to MSN. She enjoys maths and English, but "I don't like Latin. And I know it's really mean to say that to the teachers and to everyone who likes Latin - but I despise it."

She worries about the environment. The last film she loved was Transformers, Michael Bay's noisy robot smash-fest. When she and her friends Celeste, Grace and Olivia get together, they hang out on the seafront in Sussex, southern England where they live, or in the park, creeping up on unsuspecting strangers and shouting "Chicken pie!" before running away, howling with laughter.

"We have these really random phrases. And they're just things that we say. We do Borat impressions and stuff. We're a bit random and weird," says Dakota, with a casual little shrug. It's a good teenage line, hinting at the security that comes from finding your place in a tight little group as well as the heady thrill of being, well, just a bit different.

Oh, go on, show us your Borat impression, I ask, without optimism. But Dakota, after shooting a quick questioning look at her mum Mickey - who is sitting quietly in the corner of the room - is game. "Erm, OK, I'll try," she says, straightening up.

"'Hallaw. My name isa Borat. Nize to meet you. Ver' nize. High five!'"

Dakota and her friends are mad about Borat. "We did see someone wearing a mankini once when we were out. He was just lying there on the beach. Freak! And we were like, yeuch. My friend ran up to him and she goes, 'High five!' in a Borat voice, and then ran away."

The poignant thing, of course, is that this sort of life - anonymous, free and unconsidered - has now come to an abrupt end. The Golden Compass has just been released and Dakota has become a child star. Now anything could happen: just ask Daniel Radcliffe, Haley Joel Osment, Macaulay Culkin, Christian Bale, Drew Barrymore and Jodie Foster, plus all those has-beens whose names are now good for nothing but the pub quiz.

Everything hangs on her performance as Lyra Belacqua, the plucky, hot-headed adventurer whose struggle for self-determination steers the plot of Philip Pullman's ambitious children's trilogy, His Dark Materials. As well as carrying this $205m movie, with just a little help from Nicole Kidman, Christopher Lee and Tom Courtenay, Dakota is the central character in what film studio New Line hopes will be its next long-haul fantasy franchise. The company reaped $3bn from The Lord of the Rings: the stakes are very, very high.

I met Pullman three years ago, just as casting directors were beginning the search for Lyra, and he was full of uncomplicated excitement about the direction one girl's life was about to take.

Dakota is just as good as the rest of the film, which is to say that she does all that she possibly could do and makes a perfectly decent fist of it. But for all its budget and lavish effects, The Golden Compass film can't touch the original material, and readers who found Northern Lights disturbing and thought-provoking may feel short-changed at the straightforward entertainment dished up here. Either way, Pullman wins.

Long before she heard it was being turned into a film, Dakota loved Northern Lights. Her mother read her the book when she was nine, and they'd been to see the stage adaptation at the National Theatre. "And since then I'd just wanted to be Lyra. Lyra's like my favourite character ever."

Dakota was born in London in April 1994, soon after her parents split up. As for her name: "My mum wanted a place-name that hadn't been used before and, well, Blue just went with it."

They moved to Sussex, where Mickey ran a drug-treatment centre. Dakota did nativity plays, class assemblies and a bit of local am-dram (no big parts; the adults got those).

"I'd always enjoyed acting, but I never really thought I'd get into doing it professionally. It never really crossed my mind."

So, what did she say when asked about possible careers? "I wanted to be a vet. But I don't any more. Now I couldn't deal with the whole thing of having to put animals down. It just seems like it might be kind of upsetting."

A family friend happened to catch an item on the BBC's children's news programme Newsround, saying that open castings for Lyra were being held around the country. Dakota had to work on her mum to take her to one of the sessions.

That was in April, and 10,000 other British girls were also interested. In July, after two recalls and a screen test, Chris Weitz rang her at home.

Filming was fine, she says, although she'd been expecting to go to "Greenland, Iceland, see the Northern Lights. And we went to Oxford and Chatham and Greenwich!"

What a rip-off, I suggest. "It was nice," says Dakota, remembering herself, "but it's not quite polar bears and ice and cool stuff."

In between sessions with her tutor, she spent long hours alone in front of the cameras, so that the special effects - talking polar bears, witches, daemons (spirit companions/souls) and so forth - could be layered in later.

She was a bit nervous about meeting the stars, but there was nothing to worry about, everyone was really nice. (When I ask her to tell me a secret about Nicole Kidman, she thinks hard and says, "She likes Parma violets.")

At weekends, she'd go home to Sussex, catch up with her friends, and sense how much she was missing out on. But she managed to smuggle Celeste, Grace and Olivia into the movie: they're there towards the end, being abducted by Tartars, "and then I basically come along and save them, because I'm cool."

She has signed up to star alongside Ioan Gruffudd and Natascha McElhone in The Secret of Moonacre, based on Elizabeth Gouge's The Little White Horse, but this doesn't mean that she's set on an acting career. Nope. "What I want to do," she says firmly, "is do acting on the side. "

So she'll finish up at her private co-ed school, "and then go to university and then go on to teacher-training course. Because I want to be a supply teacher in a primary school. I think that'd be cool. I've wanted to be one since I was about 10."

I wish her lots of luck. I imagine we all do.