Harry Potter and the young starlet

Thirteen-year-old Dakota Blue Richards beat 10,000 hopefuls to win the part of Lyra in the eagerly awaited film The Golden Compass, based on Philip Pullman's best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy - and she has already been given sound career advice by Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe

Dakota Blue Richards likes shopping and would really love a pet dog, if not a horse. She couldn't possibly name just one best friend because she has five, all equally "great."

She adores her iPod Nano and MSN messaging, and Robbie Williams is pretty cool, too. Her favourite subjects are English and maths but she hates Latin. Boys are OK, but, you know, not really to be taken seriously.

She is, in fact, not dissimilar to most other 13-year-old girls in the UK, at least for now.

She's bubbly and as bright as a shiny button, likes to do silly voices and has dotty catchphrases. But there is one very big difference between Dakota and other young teens: she is about to become very famous indeed, with the weight of a £75 million film resting on her slender shoulders.

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She was chosen from 10,000 hopefuls all over the UK who auditioned for the coveted part of Lyra Belacqua in The Golden Compass, the film adaptation of the first novel in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

We meet for tea in the Grand Hotel in Brighton, with her grandmother, Elinor, and a nice PR lady called Sue.

Dressed in blue jeans and trainers and a pretty white top, she's chatty and friendly and sometimes endearingly cheeky: "Say my mum is 29. Go on. But really she's 42!"

Her mother, Micky (short for Michaela), with whom she lives in East Sussex, has now given up her job as head of a drugs rehabilitation project to be her daughter's chaperone and manager.

"I don't know what my dad makes of all this because I haven't seen him since I was six," says Dakota. "It's just Mum and me and Grandma and that's been great. She's the coolest mum ever."

"On the day of the auditions Mum told me not to brush my hair" – a mane of tumbling strawberry-blond curls – "because Lyra is always so wild and looks like she has been scavenging around or something," she recalls. "Mum says that's what made me stand out from the crowd."

Even after six long months of filming in exotic locations all over the world, the reality of impending stardom still hasn't quite sunk in, and Dakota Blue ("My mother wanted a place name for me, and wanted a colour to go with it") remains both delightfully unaffected by all the fuss but acutely aware that her life is already changing.

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Earlier this year, she was taken to the Cannes Film Festival where she rubbed shoulders with stars such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and stayed in one of the plushest hotels on the Côte d'Azur.

"It was very nice," she says matter-of-factly. "But I wouldn't want to do it every day…"

She has only seen a ten-minute teaser for the film, and finds watching herself on the big screen a little unsettling. "I still haven't got over the fact that I won't be the only person seeing the film," she says.

"I'm used to watching home videos of when I was little, singing 'Barbie Girl' and stuff, and nobody sees them except the family. Now, there will be loads of people going to see The Golden Compass. At least, we hope they will."

They almost certainly will. Pullman's brilliantly conceived books, featuring parallel worlds and an array of fantastic characters including witches (good and bad), talking bears and humans whose souls manifest themselves as animals known as daemons, have a huge following.

And the studio that owns the rights to them, New Line, also brought The Lord of the Rings to the big screen.

The Golden Compass (the name under which Northern Lights, the first of the Pullman trilogy, was published in the US) is one of the most eagerly awaited films of the year and if it's a box-office hit, the next two books will be filmed in quick succession, making Dakota one of the most recognised teenagers on the planet.

Her extraordinary adventure began on a cold day last April when, accompanied by her mother and her grandmother, she turned up for an open casting call at Cambridge Town Hall.

"My mum's friend heard about it on Newsround," she says. "But Mum said, 'If it's raining, we're not going.'"

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Dakota had never really acted before, unless you count school plays ("I auditioned for Mary in the nativity play once and they put me down as her mother"), so she didn't get her hopes up.

"I didn't think I had a chance, but I wanted to go to the audition and see what it was like. We got there early and there were lots of other girls queuing and it was freezing – but it wasn't raining."

Each time the group of girls was whittled down, Dakota found herself being asked to stay.

"We had to stand in a big circle and the casting directors asked everyone their name and questions like, 'What would your daemon be?' and, 'Have you read the book?'"

"And then some of the group had their pictures taken, including me, and then we had to read a couple of pages of script for the camera. Then another girl and I got to read another piece. I was quite nervous. I didn't even want to breathe because I didn't know if something was going to go wrong."

A few weeks later she was called up to London for a screen test and after that had a meeting with a producer and the American director, Chris Weitz. Then, after another couple of weeks, came the phone call confirming she'd got the role.

"Chris rang and told my mum to put it on speaker phone, and she hung up on him by accident," Dakota laughs.

"And then he called back and he said, 'Dakota is going to be Lyra.' My aunt and my cousin came round and I was very excited. And then I think I played 'The Sims' on the computer."

Dakota, like millions of children around the world, had devoured the books. She was also entranced by the London stage version of His Dark Materials, and loved the character of Lyra, the girl who sets out to find a friend who'd been kidnapped by the Gobblers (a mysterious group who snatch children from the streets on behalf of the Church).

"She's feisty and independent," says Dakota. "It was because I wanted to be Lyra that I went along to the auditions, not that I wanted to act. Lyra was a gateway to acting. If you had asked me if I wanted to play any character in the world, it would have been Lyra."

The books have a controversial element, with the Church portrayed as a repressive organisation out to stifle individuality. For Dakota, though, they are simply cracking good stories with Lyra as a tomboy heroine prepared to fight for her friends.

When she met Philip Pullman on set, she wasn't afraid to quiz him about her character and the universe he has created.

"Sometimes I just asked him things that came into my mind, like, 'How are daemons born?' He said it has never come up so he hasn't thought about it."

Dakota's life is in a kind of limbo now. "I walked past the cinema on the way here, and there's a 'coming soon' poster for the film," she says. "It's not a particularly big picture of me, which is good because if it was massive I'd be scared and feel like I could never go to my local cinema again."

For the next couple of weeks at least, she can still walk through the streets of Brighton without being recognised, but everything is about to change.

She had her own tutor while filming (only returning to school for a few months when it was finished), and if the sequels get the green light, most ofher education over the next few years will be away from a normal classroom.

"I did enjoy working with my tutor and I did learn loads," she admits with some surprise ("I mean, you're not meant to like your teachers – that's just the way life is," she points out).

'But when you're tutored separately you don't realise how much you've learnt until you go back to school, because you don't have anybody else to compare yourself with."

And when she does meet up with her friends, she'll be able to entertain them with on-set stories about Daniel Craig, who plays Lyra's uncle Lord Asriel, an adventurer, and Nicole Kidman, the glamorous but rather sinister Mrs Coulter.

"One of the things Nicole taught me was, no matter what happens in a scene, you carry on – even if you fall in a dustbin," she giggles. If you get out of the bin and just carry on they might end up cutting it and using part of that scene anyway."

"But thankfully that's never happened to me," she adds. "Daniel is very funny and really nice but he does swear a lot. So we had a swear box and he had to put in £1 every time he said a naughty word. By the end he owed me £55."

"I think the hardest scene I did was when I was supposed to be sitting in a carriage with Nicole going through London, when really I was filming in a box in the studio and that was it – there wasn't a window or anything. That was really hard."

"And sometimes, when we were doing CGI [computer generated image] scenes, you would have to act opposite a big stick or maybe a puppet and that was a bit odd at first. But you get used to it."

Probably the only children in the UK who know from first-hand experience what Dakota is about to go through are the Harry Potter kids. Before she started filming, her producers arranged for her to visit the Hogwarts set and meet Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, and the rest.

"They were about the same age as me when they first started making the Harry Potter films," she says. "And meeting them helped a lot. They gave me some good tips, especially Daniel. He said, "Know who your friends are – and listen to your mum.”

And he said, “Whenever you feel that maybe you are feeling a bit weird and different, ask somebody who will tell you the truth – keep people around you who you know will be honest.”

"I think that's very good advice. Emma [Watson], who plays Hermione, was really nice as well – we had a bit of girl bonding."

Dakota is already at work on her next film, The Secret of Moonacre (based on The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge), in Budapest, Hungary, with her mother alongside and a tutor on set. "I have to ride horses in the film and I've been having lessons, which has been great fun," she says.

You suspect that she will carry on acting as an adult, although that seems a long way off to her right now.

"I'm going to stay at school until I'm 18 and then I'd like to go to college and then do a teacher training course. I'd like to do acting as well. And be a supply teacher."

Dakota already has a fantastic collection of memories and souvenirs from her time on set at Shepperton Studios and on location all over England and in Norway. Her leaving present from the producers was an Alethiometer – the Golden Compass itself – a machine that can find the truth if you know how to read it properly.

Her new wealth has paid for a few treats – but when you ask what she would like most of all, she sounds just like any other little girl.

"I said, 'Mum, can I have a horse?' 'No, you can have a dog – when you are seven.' I get to seven. 'Mum, can I have a dog now?'"

'No, wait until you are 13.' 'Mum, can I have a dog now?' 'No, wait until the cat has died.'

"And I mean, I love the cats but one of them has just died and I still haven't got a dog. So please Mum, if you read this, can I have a dog now?"

The Golden Compass will be in cinemas from 5 December.

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