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If you asked Drew Barrymore what she got up to as a 12-year-old, she'd probably spin a yarn about bourbon and cocaine. Ask 12-year-old Charlotte's Web star Dakota Fanning, and the vices are a little different.
"Nothing much," she says, peppily. "Just school and piano lessons and Spanish lessons. It's really an interesting language. I took the Mexican Spanish and the French Spanish and now I'm taking Sicilian which is the Spanish they speak in Europe."
Fanning has been home-schooled since she was 4, but the Spanish lessons were her idea. That should give you an idea of how precocious she is, if you haven't already had the pleasure of watching her on film.
So far she has won a Bafta for her role in I Am Sam, a second nomination for Man on Fire, and appeared genuinely terrified of the aliens in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise. Last year, US TV host Barbara Walters named Fanning one of "the 10 most fascinating people of 2005". She might not be old enough to drive but she can command $3 million a film.
Her latest role, in which she forms a bond with a pig, is warm-fuzzies territory. Fanning plays Fern in Charlotte's Web, the partly computer-animated blockbuster, with the voices of Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Buscemi and John Cleese. It's her first in-the-flesh leading role that should appeal to people her age. Fanning says she's read the book four times.
"The film is told just like the book is written," she says. "Everyone loves it and knows the story."
That would be enough to put most actors into a mild panic but when producer Jordan Kerner said Fanning "combines great wisdom with youthful glee", he wasn't just talking about her on-screen qualities. She exudes both on the phone.
Here's the wisdom: "It was, y'know, a responsibility to the audience and to [author] E.B. White to portray Fern the way that everyone knows her and loves her," she says.
And here's the glee: "We were shooting the film in Australia for three-and-a-half months during the school year so I was doing school and it was really exciting and I loved being in Melbourne and I had a really good time."
Fanning's classic Aryan features also express that contrast between innocence and insight. Even as a spoilt rich girl in the fluffy comedy Uptown Girls with Brittany Murphy, she imbued her character with a sense of loneliness and vulnerability, enough to turn viewers to tears.
She's had an extraordinary career, yet Fanning has never had formal acting training. Her talent was discovered when she attended a kids' theatre group; the people running it suggested she go to Los Angeles. After landing TV ads and a couple of films, her breakthrough role came in I Am Sam, for which she also became the youngest actor nominated for a Screen Actors' Guild Award.
So where does her ability to embody other people so vividly - and articulate the experience - come from? "I think it's just part of being an actress," she says. "You get to do different things that you never get to do in your own life and learn about different types of people. I've got to learn about different cultures. I've travelled to so many different places and learned about different things and realised there's not just one kind of person in the world. Maybe that's why I seem that way."
She has also learned from the best in the business. Aside from Sean Penn and Denzel Washington, she has worked with Oscar winners Holly Hunter (Dreamer), Charlize Theron (Trapped), Reese Witherspoon (Sweet Home Alabama) and Robert de Niro (Hide and Seek).
Her career may seem out of this world but Fanning insists her everyday life is not. She has school on set with a tutor, she collects dolls, she tinkles the ivories. She is so well-adjusted it's hard to imagine her in Lindsay Lohan's shoes in seven years. "In February I will be 13 so I guess you could say I'm growing up a little bit. I think Fern and I are at the same stage in our life - in between being a child and a teenager, at that awkward stage as everybody calls it. I think Fern is wanting to rush to be older but I'm not trying to rush things, I'm just taking everything as it comes."
Fanning's fans seem in no way ready for her to grow up anyway. There was outrage at the news she filmed an explicit rape scene and appeared in her underwear for the film, Hound Dog (also referred to as the Untitled Dakota Fanning Project). Fanning says she doesn't see what all the fuss is about, even if she sounds somewhat rote-learned in her response.
"There's really no fuss to be made. It's a wonderful, wonderful movie and something that I'm very proud I got to do and it's really about triumphing over adversity and coming out the other side and still being whole after something terrible has happened to you."
The jury is out until the film's release in 2008 but in the meantime, Charlotte's Web should solidify her reputation as an American sweetheart.
"I don't think I'll ever get used to, y'know, seeing myself on screen. It's always something to be stunned about. It's so surreal and neat. I just hope to do this for the rest of my life."
