Quotes of the Day

Prozac might have been invented for the Prozorov girls. Stranded in their Russian backwater town, the three sisters of Chekhov's play famously yearn for Moscow, their hopes for love and life all the while fading to gray. Perhaps the most in need of medication is youngest sister Irina, who clocks up dismal hours in the local telegraph office and whose loveless engagement to an army lieutenant ends when he is killed in a duel. With her limpid eyes and languid limbs, Rose Byrne was born to play Irina - as she did in a shrill but memorable Sydney Theatre Company production in 2001. Like a sunflower starved of light, her wilting heroine had barely enough energy to proclaim, as Irina does, "We must work!"

Three years on, Byrne has taken Irina's character to heart. "So sad," she says, recalling Chekhov's play. As are her dark eyes, which appear huge and heavy on this unseasonally wintry Sydney morning. And Byrne hasn't stopped working. Cast as the love interest in what seemed like every Australian movie last year (in fact, only three), internationally her star's on the rise. "But Star Wars was a really small part!" protests Byrne, who played teary handmaiden Dormé to Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala in 2002's Attack of the Clones. "I feel flattered that you bring it up."

Casting agents did, and the starlet quickly won leads in the English costume drama I Capture the Castle and the upcoming U.S. remake of the French thriller L'Appartement. Brad Pitt's virginal sex slave in this month's Troy is a role with considerably more heat. And so, at 24, Byrne finds herself on Vanity Fair magazine's "Coming Attractions" list, and the cover girl for "Hot to Trot '04" in the New York Daily News. So will she attain her Moscow - that longed-for thing over the horizon called stardom?

"I've never waited as much in my life," says the Sydney native, who's now based in Los Angeles. Byrne is talking about last year's shoot of Troy, on which she spent much time holed up in a trailer outside Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. "And even when you get on set, you wait for days and days and days. Everyone was waiting. Brad was waiting. There was no discrimination. There was one point where people were like, 'What's going on down there?' "

The waiting is over. In the role of Trojan priestess Briseis, who is captured by the Greeks and served as one of "the spoils of war" to Achilles, Byrne acquits herself commendably in the film's only fully fleshed female role (in contrast, Diane Kruger's Helen of Troy parades around like some kind of supermodel, which in fact Kruger was). As for Byrne's love scene with Pitt, nine years of yoga helped with any performance anxiety she might have felt. "It's really important to try and come from a place of relaxation," she explains, "because only if you're relaxed will you be able to perform at your highest peak." In effect, the Balmain-raised Byrne has been in training since the age of 8, when she joined the Australian Theatre for Young People in Sydney. There she was talent-spotted by the producers of Dallas Doll, her feature film debut opposite American comedienne Sandra Bernhard in 1994. Five years later, with blond streaks and a bikini, her career was launched as Heath Ledger's love interest in Gregor Jordan's King's Cross crime caper Two Hands. Another five years on, she's the first to admit that Troy "is not much to do with the women." It's all about Brad. "He's really actually ugly in real life," she says deadpan, before letting out one of her donkey-like laughs. "I'm just kidding. In real life he's like a horse."

In an industry based on looks, Byrne's open face (of Irish-Scottish ancestry, she can appear almost Asian) should take her places. But it's her sense of humor as much as anything else that will see her through. As the brainy foil to Ben Lee's hippie wildchild in last year's The Rage in Placid Lake, she wisecracked like Doris Day on Benzedrine. Her ego won't get in the way, either. Director Clara Law, who cast Byrne in The Goddess of 1967 (2000), calls her "shy and very humble. She's got this thing about herself, that she doesn't think she's good. She needs a lot of encouragement."

Note to Rose: whenever you're in doubt of your abilities, just take out a copy of Goddess. Nowhere else is her loopy sadness and extraterrestrial beauty put to better effect. In Law's underrated art-house flick, Byrne plays a damaged blind girl who lures a young Tokyo man across the Outback; her hair squirrel red, the color of the DS-model Citroën he has journeyed to Australia to buy. Even before the cameras rolled, Byrne surprised her director by coming into rehearsals "not learning to be blind, but already like a blind person," Law recalls. With downcast eyes, she had to survive on talent alone, in the process taking out the Copa Volpi prize at the 2000 Venice Film Festival. If Troy makes Byrne a star, Goddess has shown that, deep down, she's also an actress.

And a masochist. Here we're talking about Byrne's passion for performing live on stage, which she did earlier this year in a festival of short plays at a grungy inner-Sydney theater. For the actress, Moscow remains a few years off - in a much hoped for stage debut on Broadway or the West End. "Opening night is terrifying. So scary. It's like a car crash," she says. For this goddess of 2004, it's crash and Byrne time.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• In Troy, Rose burns