BRYCE Dallas Howard used to deny any interest in following in her famous father's footsteps and becoming an actor. She was denying something she'd actually wanted to do from the age of seven when she had a cameo role in Parenthood - a movie directed by her dad, Happy Days star turned film-maker Ron Howard.

"Dad's a film-maker, mum's a writer, so it seems fairly reasonable to assume that the child of these two would somehow participate in the industry or at least a livelihood that depended on the imagination," she says.

"So, my form of rebellion was to say, 'No, I want to do forensic anthropology or law".

Now 23, she deliberately tried to avoid acting because she was frustrated with all the assumptions about being an actor. "I only really admitted to myself and to my family when I was 17 or 18 that my heart was really in acting," she explains.

"And even then I had a little loophole to myself that if I got into a school I could try to be an actor but it was the one school that also had liberal arts education that was attached to it, so I could double major."

With her red hair, freckles and cute smile, there's no mistaking the family resemblance and that dad is the actor who played Richie Cunningham in the hit 1970s TV show Happy Days. Not that she's picked up any acting tips from him. "It's really unfortunate because the advice my dad has given me about the profession I didn't take seriously when I should've, so now he's stopped giving me advice completely."

After studying acting and appearing in a handful of theatre productions, she landed her big screen break - as blind girl Ivy in The Village, the latest thriller from M Night Shyamalan.

The writer-director of The Sixth Sense and Signs saw Bryce on stage in a production of As You Like It after someone suggested her for a supporting role. Shyamalan compares the experience to the first time he saw Haley Joel Osment, the youngster he cast in The Sixth Sense: "I was looking around going, 'She's amazing'."

Kirsten Dunst had been earmarked for the role originally but scheduling conflicts made her unable to commit to the film. Bryce wasn't fazed by the prospect of appearing alongside such experienced Hollywood actors as Sigourney Weaver and William Hurt. "When it comes to my work I don't operate from a place of fear because that's quite destructive and it would waste time," she says.

"I got this role in May and we started filming in October, so I had a limited time to prepare for it. If I spent any of that time being insecure or doubting my abilities or being nervous that would be disgraceful because this was a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous role.."

She learnt how to act blind convincingly by spending time at a home for the visually impaired in New York. "I met the head of one department who walked up to me and said, 'I hope you enjoy your time here' and then she walked away. It was only when she did I noticed she was holding a cane. I hadn't realised during the course of the dialogue that she was blind.

"I learned from that because for me, it was very important that Ivy was believable. If she'd been stumbling around too much it would have been a big problem. So a lot went into it, I spent the majority of the day wearing a blindfold. I studied other performances. I read up on it too."

She went from The Village to a leading role in Manderlay, taking over from Nicole Kidman in Danish director Lars von Trier's follow-up to Dogville. The actress has no idea what's next. "In many ways I feel like I'm doomed because I've had this experience with Night, then to follow that with an extraordinary experience with Lars, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm nervous about it and think about it every days," she says.

She can look to her father for inspiration. "The one thing I've learned by example is that you can have a long career and it can extend to the day you die," she says.

"There'll be times when you feel like you're experiencing failure or disappointment and what I've learned from my dad is that it doesn't mean you should stop.

"You should just try even harder, you should push it even further and because of your failure you're getting even closer to the ultimate goal, so though it terrifies me, the position I'm in right now, I also know it's a very, very good thing."

Published: 19/08/2004