On her debut at the Cannes Film Festival last week for the world premiere of Felicia's Journey, the movie's bright young Irish star, Elaine Cassidy, did something unheard of - as she was returning home, she returned her unused per diems to Bruce Davey, the film's producer. It usually works the other way at Cannes, where actors have been known to clock up - and charge up - the kind of expenses that send shivers down the spines of producers.
What Elaine Cassidy did was so unusual that it made the pages of the daily trade papers at Cannes, and they noted how Bruce Davey gently advised her to hold on to the money and that he and Mel Gibson, his partner in Icon Productions, were very impressed.
The story illustrates just how natural and unaffected Elaine Cassidy is off-screen, and those qualities shine through in her remarkably expressive central performance in Felicia's Journey, Atom Egoyan's fine film of William Trevor's novel. She plays Felicia, a naive and gullible 17-year-old Irish girl who becomes pregnant and goes to Birmingham in search of her sweet-talking boyfriend (Peter McDonald). There she is drawn into the web of a cunning Jekyll and Hyde character played by Bob Hoskins, who preys on vulnerable young women and murders them.
On the day after the film's Cannes launch, I sat down with Elaine Cassidy in the Grand Salon of the Carlton hotel for her only one-to-one interview in a crowded schedule of press conferences, round table interviews and TV soundbite sessions.
I note how well she's looking after the late-night beach party that followed the film's Cannes premiere. "Oh, that's good makeup," she says with a shrug. "I left the party at one o'clock, but I woke at six because my mind was so active after the night before." She was dressed by Chanel for the big night, but looked just as well-dressed the next day. Is that Chanel, too?, I wondered ignorantly. "No, I bought this dress in Penneys," she replies.
Her big night in Cannes began with the ritual passage up the red carpet of the Festival Palais, flanked by gendarmes and accompanied by her mother, director, producer and co-star, and cheered on by hundreds of local people behind crash barriers. There was an ovation in the packed 2,400-seater cinema at the end of the screening, and then it was down the red carpet again and up the Croisette for a beach party where she was feted by, among others, Mel Gibson, Faye Dunaway, Susan Sarandon and Ron Howard.
"My mother thought it was brilliant," says the young star. "I could hear her sniffling towards the end of the film. She's been having a ball here. I had so many emotions I don't know how I felt. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Going up the steps I was just blank, but coming down the steps afterwards was amazing. It was very emotional, and I didn't expect that. Maybe it was that everything just hit me at that stage."
Elaine Cassidy, who is 19, is from Kilcoole in Co Wicklow, where Glenroe is filmed, and she recalls how when she was six or seven years old she wrote down her name, age and address and gave it to a member of the crew. "He teased me and said, `Oh sure, we'll give you a call', and they never did."
She started out acting in a school production of Pinocchio, playing the title role, when she was five, and she made her film debut at 13, when writer-director Geraldine Creed cast her in the short film, The Stranger Within Me. Three years later she was given her first role in a feature film, again by Geraldine Creed, who cast her with Angie Dickinson, Jason Donovan and Gina Moxley in The Sun, The Moon and The Stars, for which Elaine was nominated as most promising actress at the Geneva Film Festival.
Last year, shortly before sitting her Leaving Certificate at Loreto in Bray, one of the Glenroe team called to her home. "Just as the lady was about to leave," she says, "I worked up the courage to give her my CV. I felt like a right prat doing it, but about two weeks later I got a phone call, offering me a part."
Shortly afterwards her Irish agent and drama teacher, Gladys Sheehan, to whom Elaine has been going since she was 12, sent her for an audition for Felicia's Journey. There was a problem: the audition clashed with her business organisation exam in the Leaving Cert.
"I had to leave the exam about 20 minutes early and get a taxi into Dublin," she says. "I had a note saying why I was leaving early and why I wasn't wearing my proper uniform. The principal was saying, `This is your Leaving Cert, it's very important'." How did she fare in that exam? "I did bloody good," she laughs. "I got a C1 Honours in bizorg."
She was called back for a second audition on the day after her last exam, but this time the audition clashed with her plans to go with some friends to the Glastonbury rock festival in England. "I was all set," she says. "I had my wellies bought, and my tent, when I got the call from Gladys. So I had to cancel my tickets and the whole trip, and I was very annoyed about that for about half an hour. Now I'm so glad because that audition went really well."
But there were two further auditions to undergo, and then a nail-biting three weeks before learning if she had got the part of Felicia. "First I was told it was down to three of us, and then I was told that it was 99 per cent certain it would be me. I felt relief more than anything else when I got it, and then a few weeks later I started to get excited about it."
To complicate her life, she had already succeeded in her Glenroe audition. "I was absolutely chuffed, but then I got the part in Felicia's Journey, and I really wanted to do that. I wouldn't like to have played the same role for a year or more, so I did five episodes of Glenroe, as the friend of Catherine."
She says she had never heard of Atom Egoyan, the Cairo-born, Canadian-raised director of Felicia's Journey, before he cast her. "I'd seen none of his films and he asked me to wait until we'd finished shooting before watching any of them, which I did. I felt he obviously knew what he was doing."
It took time for her to come to grips with the character of Felicia: "I had to understand her because she was so unlike me. There she was going over to Birmingham with just a boy's name and looking for a lawnmower factory where she thought he worked. It shows her innocence. And I had to come to grips with her background - her father's very Republican, and she's close to her grandmother whose husband died in the 1916 Rising."
Elaine Cassidy said that she found three scenes difficult to film, only to find two of them have been left on the cutting-room floor. "There was one scene where I was getting out of the bath, and I'm the most modest person in the world, but I did it and the camera saw nothing. I had the choice to do it or not and afterwards I couldn't believe I did it. And then it got cut out!
"Then there was the sex scene with Peter, which was quite hard because I never kissed anyone before on camera. But Peter was so easy to work with, and so encouraging that I felt really good having done it. And then there was the rain scene, which was like a freezing cold shower and I had to do it over two nights."
However, having suffered for her art, she is now being lauded for it. And as soon as she returned to Ireland from Cannes last week, she started work on a new movie about which she has been asked to remain tight-lipped. "It's called The Smiling Suicide Club," she says, "and I was asked not to say anything more than that."
Felicia's Journey will be released in Ireland this Autumn.