Let's hope she can stay Dakota Blue Richards

The surprise is that Dakota Blue Richards is not an American. She ought to be, with a name like that. She ought to have been raised in a trailer park in Kentucky or, indeed, Dakota.

But she was born in London and lives with her 42-year-old mother Michaela in a modest flat near Brighton.

Dakota Blue Richards, it should be explained, is 13. She is also precocious and talented, having seen off 10,000 hopefuls to land the role of Lyra Belacqua, the leading character in The Golden Compass, a critically acclaimed family film that cost £90 million to make and looks set to become the Christmas blockbuster when it opens this week. She's signed up to do two sequels after this. She is, in other words, a bona fide child star, the latest in a line that can be traced back, via Daniel Radcliffe and Macaulay Culkin, to Shirley Temple.

The casting was partly to do with what the producer called her "intelligence combined with a feral quality", and partly with the shape of her gamine face, something about the way light fell on it. Her mother, a social worker specialising in drug rehabilitation, was told simply "her face fit". Only when the decision to cast her had been made did it emerge how strangely appropriate her background was.

Lyra Belacqua is raised in an Oxford college, unsure who her real parents are. Dakota was unsure who her father was when she was growing up (the space on her birth certificate is blank) and her mother was raised in an Oxford college, because Dakota's grandfather was studying for a doctorate there at the time.

Several factors make the success of this film almost guaranteed. It is an adaptation of Philip Pullman's bestselling novel Northern Lights. It is made by the team behind Lord of the Rings and among the special effects it has a CGI (computer-generated image) of an armour-wearing polar bear, voiced by Sir Ian McKellen, that children will adore. Parents will actually want to take their children because for mothers there is Daniel Craig, while for fathers there is old theatrical Viagra herself, Nicole Kidman in lamé and fur. The film has even stirred up controversy, which is publicity gold dust. The Catholic League in America has called for a boycott on the grounds that it is anti-Catholic.

Actually, the C word is never mentioned in the film. Lyra sets out with Mrs Coulter (Kidman) on a quest through a metaphysical universe to rescue a young friend from the Magisterium. In the books the Magisterium is a pseudo-Catholic order, but in the film it is just a vaguely religious and sinister cabal.

Richards seems to be taking the prospect of wealth and fame in her stride. She likes doing normal things children of her age like doing: texting her friends, listening to her iPod Nano, lobbying her mother to buy her a pony for Christmas. But her circumstances are anything but normal. Instead of going to school, she now has a private tutor. It is thought that she will have earned around £100,000 for this debut, but with the sequels she is expected to earn millions. Daniel Radcliffe, for example, is now worth £20 million.

It need not end in tears. Radcliffe is a good example of a child star who has turned out well adjusted. Christina Ricci and Jodie Foster both went on to have glittering film careers as adults. So did Christian Bale, the child star of Empire of the Sun, although he has talked about how stressful his life was as a child. But other child stars have had more wobbly experiences.

Drew Barrymore has a successful Hollywood career now, but after ET she endured a notoriously troubled childhood, ending up in rehab for alcohol and cocaine abuse at age 13. Among other wobbles, Macaulay Culkin was jailed briefly for possession of marijuana. And Jack Wild, who suffered from alcoholism after early success as the Artful Dodger in Oliver!, said of child fame: "It's very difficult and corrupting. You crave fame, but it comes at a very high price." He once warned Radcliffe "don't take anything seriously".

One problem child stars can face is that other children resent them. The director Ron Howard became a household name in America aged eight as the star of The Andy Griffith Show. Anxious that he should have a normal childhood, his parents sent him to a local state school.

When I asked him if he was bullied there he said: "Yes, I always was. Always. And it wasn't because I had red hair, it was just being on the show. I was shy, but other kids took this as me being aloof." There was an alternative. I asked the Brokeback Mountain star Jake Gyllenhaal how he had coped with being a child star. "Simple. My parents made me turn down every role I was offered until I was 16. That way I had to concentrate on school work."

Perhaps what will help Richards is that she doesn't seem to have wanted to be an actor especially. She wanted to be Lyra, ever since her mother read her the story and then took her to see the play at the National Theatre. "I feel I can relate to her. I like to think I'm quite brave. I stand up for myself. And I don't let other people tell me what to do. Well, unless it's my mum."

She clearly conveyed this impression to the film's director, Chris Weitz. He thought that Richards seemed nonchalant about becoming an actor. It wasn't quite true. At the time of the audition last year she was a student at K-Bis, a fee-paying theatre school in Brighton where she learned jazz tap, ballet and stage combat. Marcia King, the director, remembers her as "sparky but nervous to begin with. Very good at improvisation under pressure. Also her learning mime has helped because of having to work with special effects."

Her advice to her former pupil is: "Take it a day at a time and enjoy it while it lasts." She is not unduly worried on her behalf. "Child stars these days are very well protected," she tells me. "She will be scrutinised by the media but she will have a good press agent and will always be chaperoned."

Michael Wyndham Richards, an Emeritus Professor of Theatre, tells me he is immensely proud of his granddaughter. "Dakota is very sensible. And Dakota's mother is anything but pushy. A million miles from those mothers you see on X-Factor. I think the lack of pushiness helped.

Michaela actually said to Dakota that she would only take her to the audition on condition that she wouldn't make a fuss or get upset if she didn't get the part. Naturally one fears what might happen as a consequence of her becoming a household name, but I hope and trust she will keep her feet on the ground. I think it is safe to assume she will, given that she is now saying that she wants to be a primary school teacher when she grows up, rather than a Hollywood star."

Although her mother was with her for the eight months of filming in England, Norway and Sweden, Dakota found it quite lonely being away from her school friends. Also she went straight from that film into making another - The Secret of Moonacre. "As an actor you can't build up proper relationships with the people you work with, because after six months you're done," she says. "Also, it's harder to engage with the school work because you never know how long you're going to be away from filming - half an hour or three hours. One minute you're screaming and fighting with someone, while the next you're doing maths. It's very confusing."

Nevertheless she seems articulate and confident. Modest, too. She puts her casting down to her mother's advice not to brush her hair on the day of the audition so that she looked "untamed".

Her mother, by the way, chose the name while spending a year in America after reading American studies at Sussex University. She thought it sounded "quite cool and unusual". The Blue was Dakota's father's nickname. But that is all she is letting on about him.

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