As the Golden Compass Hits the Silver Screen, Fresh Meets Its Young Star Igniting the Northern Lights Millions of Young Readers Have Dreamed of Living the Life of Lyra in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy. Edd Mccracken Hears How the Fantasy has Become a Reality for Dakota Blue Richards

Sunday Herald › December 04, 2007

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Summary

IMAGINE a world quite like our own same towns, same continents, same accents but in so many ways utterly different. This world is not very far from ours, but it takes a huge leap of imagination to get there. Glimpsed only through blazing space dust, this is a world where magic is real, where polar bears can talk, where flying witches actually exist, and where the adventures of a little girl can not only change her world but ours too. Dakota Blue Richards has imagined this world for years.

The 13-year-old first stumbled into this universe a few years ago in a place with doors to millions of other worlds: her local book store. "I'm one of those people who judges a book by its cover, " she says breezily. "So I was looking for books with really cool titles and backgrounds and I picked up Northern Lights." Her mum read the first part of Philip Pullman's amazing His Dark Materials trilogy to her every night, mimicking the voices of the characters: the icy Mrs Coulter, the dark and mysterious Lord Asriel, the brave polar bear Iorek Byrnison, and the hero of the piece, 11year-old Lyra Belacqua. She quickly devoured the next two books, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. "And since then I've always wanted to play Lyra, " she says.

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As the Golden Compass Hits the Silver Screen, Fresh Meets Its Young Star Igniting the Northern Lights Millions of Young Readers Have Dreamed of Living the Life of Lyra in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy. Edd Mccracken Hears How the Fantasy has Become a Reality for Dakota Blue Richards

Today, the Brighton teenager sits dwarfed in a grand hotel room in central London. In the book's parallel universe, the city is an art-deco playground, where people travel by zeppelin and dine in grand 1930s Weimarstyle restaurants. In our world, howev...

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