D akota Blue Richards is a pretty ordinary 13-year-old schoolgirl. Her school friends 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 math 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. (She's a self-possessed person, quite cool and watchful, in a white shirt with trumpet sleeves, tartan leggings, bare feet and a smattering of makeup.) 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 mother, 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 - will come to an abrupt end when The Golden Compass is released, which in Taiwan is tomorrow. At this point, Dakota will become a child star. And after that, 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 US$205 million 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 US$3 billion 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. The person who would play his heroine, he said, "is probably about 11. She might not even have read the books. She's at school somewhere, and she doesn't know that this great thing is coming towards her."
"It all depends on that casting," he added, thoughtfully. "You can have the most wonderful actors all around her, but if she isn't right, it'll be a film with a great big hole in it."
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