KIRSTEN DUNST IN BIKINI

At 11, KIRSTEN DUNST IN BIKINIkissed Tom Cruise; recently, she became Spider-Man's belle. Now, at just 22, KIRSTEN DUNST IN BIKINIis turning her hand to tennis in Wimbledon. John Hiscock meets her

When you've been an actress since the age of three and shared a screen kiss with Tom Cruise at 11, it can be a little difficult to keep in touch with reality. You are surrounded by people whose job is to make your life easy and painless: a protective mother, assistants, managers, agents, financial advisers and relatives, all eager to share in your fame and fortune.

Until now it has been that way for KIRSTEN DUNST IN BIKINI, the pretty, precocious blonde who became the envy of every teenage girl when she beat 5,000 other hopefuls for the role of Claudia, the seductive little bloodsucker in Interview With the Vampire with Cruise and Brad Pitt and went on to play Spider-Man's girlfriend Mary Jane Watson in the hugely successful Spider-Man films.

Fortunately for her she has grown into one of the brightest and most intelligent of Hollywood's young actors. And, at the age of 22, she realises that she has to make some major changes and assume a few responsibilities.

After almost 20 years of work and more than 30 films, it has become important to her to have a life of her own away from the cameras, so she recently moved out from her mother's home and bought her own house in the Hollywood Hills which she is currently remodelling. She is also taking over the handling of her life and career and cutting back on the number of people who depend on her money for support.

"In the past it was all about making other people happy, but now it's about making myself happy," she says. "It was time to get away. It's still hard for my mom, I think. But things have changed. We still see each other every week but it's nice to have my own place and space because I never went to college and had that experience."

Instead she spent her New York childhood going to auditions and making television commercials – she appeared in more than 70 – before appearing in her first feature film at the age of seven as Mia Farrow's daughter in Oedipus Wrecks, Woody Allen's segment of New York Stories.

When she was 10, her family moved to Los Angeles so she could be nearer the film-making action; her parents divorced when she was 13. Her mother guided her career, choosing her projects and shielding her from rejections, although there were not that many.

While she is a mature and accomplished actress, wise in the ways of Hollywood, Dunst is still in many ways a child-woman with big gaps in her knowledge of life. "I grew up early in a lot of ways but I didn't at all in a lot of other ways," she says, with commendable self-awareness.

Her naivety shows itself in her joking remarks – she caused a stir by saying in a recent interview that she thought Spider-Man should die and Mary Jane should have spider babies – and her honesty: "I get all my really nice clothes free from designers for doing press and premières and stuff," she tells me with a giggle.

She now picks her own projects and is involved in managing her financial affairs, although, she confesses, this is not something that comes easily to her.

"All I know is that as a 22-year-old girl I have a lot more responsibilities than most 22-year-olds have," she says.

"I'm learning about money and financing and things that are very adult that I have to deal with but it doesn't make me feel more independent – it's just to know what's going on. But sometimes it's hard because you just want to be a 22-year-old with none of those worries."

She wears a short black dress and her blonde hair is cut short. She has just gone back to work, in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, her first film since Wimbledon, which she finished filming in London last October.

Directed by Richard Loncraine and produced by the Working Title team of Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, Wimbledon is a romantic comedy in which Dunst plays an American bad-girl tennis star and Paul Bettany is a journeyman player who is granted a wild card to play his final Wimbledon tournament.

The film was made with the co-operation of the All England Lawn Tennis and Crocquet Club and scenes from last year's Wimbledon tournament are intercut with the fictitious action. Commentator John Barrett and Wimbledon champions John McEnroe and Chris Evert play themselves.

Both Bettany and Dunst worked for three months with the Australian Wimbledon champion Pat Cash to perfect the art of looking as if they knew what they were doing on court. Because most of the tennis action was computer generated, the goal was to look good and not worry about where the ball went.

Characteristically, Dunst does not take the usual Hollywood route and pretend that she has any interest in tennis. "I'm an actress, not a tennis player," she says with a laugh. "As soon as I was done, I dropped that racquet and haven't picked it up again except to put it in a closet. I am so over playing tennis."

She does, however, appreciate that for some people walking on to Centre Court would be the experience of a lifetime. "It was completely empty and I couldn't believe that we had the run of the place. I am sure there are people out there who would probably cry with emotion, but because I didn't have any history of tennis within me and I hadn't been a tennis fan, it was a different experience for me than for a die-hard tennis fan."

She found a compatible on-screen partner in Bettany, who flew to California to do a screen test with her at the Chateau Marmont, the Hollywood hotel where she likes to hang out by the pool with her friends. "We got along right from the beginning," she says. "It was such a relief for me to be able to work with him every day. With him I felt totally comfortable. I'd love to do a more serious movie with him one day."

In Elizabethtown she is working with another British actor, Orlando Bloom, who plays a suicidal young man who returns to his small Kentucky hometown following the death of his father. Inevitably, because they have been seen together off the set, there have been rumours of a romantic involvement, which they both deny.

Dunst is currently unattached after her two-year affair with actor Jake Gyllenhaal ended recently. Their friends were not surprised because Gyllenhaal likes a quiet, low-key life while Dunst is, she says, "an out-on-the-town girl" who likes to dance and go to clubs.

Because she has grown up surrounded by celebrities, her romantic attachments have mainly been with people from the film world. Her dates have included Dustin Hoffman's son Jake, actor Ben Foster, with whom she appeared in Get Over It, and Tobey Maguire, her Spider-Man co-star. "It's hard to have a relationship in this business," she sighs.

Hollywood being the incestuous company town that it is, her romances with Maguire and Gyllenhaal came close to intervening in her professional life in an embarrassing way. When Maguire did not think he could make Spider-Man 2 because of back problems, the filmmakers replaced him with Gyllenhaal, his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend. Maguire hastily recovered and reclaimed the role, averting a difficult situation for all three actors.

Writers are already preparing a script for Spider-Man 3, which Dunst has committed to do and which will begin shooting in the autumn of next year. In the meantime, when she finishes Elizabethtown next month she plans to take six months off and will then move temporarily to Paris next spring to film Marie Antoinette for Sofia Coppola.

Now she is planning her own schedule, she is giving herself more free time between films and, consequently, she says, she enjoys working more than she did in the past. She has also come to realise that acting is perhaps not everything.

"I'm hoping there will be more to my life," she says. "I'm passionate about acting but the chance that it might not be what I do for the rest of my life is a comfort rather than anything else. I don't think my whole world would come crumbling down if I gave up acting."