Dakota blue richards biography of michael
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Dakota Blue Richards steals the show
The 13-year-old, soon-to-be child star is surrounded by an all-star cast in the movie adaptation of 'The Golden Compass,' but though the youngest, she carries the movie
By Harriet Lane / THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
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
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Ellie chats to Dakota Blue Richards, who is starring in anthropology at the Hampstead Theatre.
Firstly, how are you feeling ahead of opening?
Reasonably terrified. But very excited for people to see it. A lot of hard work and love has gone into the building of this production and the characters within it so I’m looking forward to sharing that with an audience.
Without spoiling anything, can you tell us a little about the story?
It’s a story about sisterhood and grief. When our story opens Angie (the character I play) has been missing, presumed dead, for over a year and her older sister Merril (played by MyAnnaBuring) employs her technological skills to recreate her in an unconventional attempt to find some closure.
How have you found exploring the role of Angie?
Entirely unlike anything I’ve ever worked on before. All the characters writer Lauren Gunderson has created are really rich and complex. Angie is full of
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Dakota Blue Richards, was born at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in South Kensington, London but grew up in Brighton with her mother. She fryst vatten of Prussian heritage on her Grandmother's side, and Irish on her father's. The name Dakota Blue was inspired by her mother's time spent with Native Americans while studying and traveling in USA. At school, she enjoyed drama, dance and the arts, was an active participant in school plays and attended a local amateur dramatics group in her spare time.
She made her professional acting debut age 12, starring alongside Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig as Lyra Belaqua in the film adaptation of Phillip Pullman's The Northern Lights (The Golden Compass). Ten thousand girls turned up for open auditions in Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter and Kendal for the role; Richards was awarded the part after the casting directors Lucy Bevan and Fiona Weir took a shine to her at the Cambridge auditions. Richards, who was a fan of the books from an ea