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Lauren Quaintance

The last time Anna Paquin performed live she played a skunk in a school play in Lower Hutt.

Now the Oscar-winning film star has impressed some of the world's toughest theatre critics in her professional stage debut in New York City.

The New York Times described Paquin's performance last week in the off-Broadway show The Glory of Living as "luminous" and the New York Post described it as "electric".

The acclaim is a coup for Paquin who has appeared in 15 films since she won an Academy Award at the age of 11 for The Piano.

Based on the real lives of an Alabama couple, Paquin, 19, plays an abused trailer trash teen who embarks on a sex and killing spree with her abusive ex-con husband.

In a review published yesterday the Times top critic, Ben Brantley, said Paquin "still commands that uncanny quiet centredness that first mesmerised movie audiences.

"There is little doubt that Ms Paquin's rare combination of luminosity and subtlety is made as much for the stage as the screen."

Paquin has taken a semester off from Columbia University, where she studies literature and romance languages, to star in The Glory of Living and film a sequel to X-Men.

She lives alone in an apartment near the university in uptown Manhattan. "I absolutely love living in New York even if the last month or so has been terribly sad," she said in a recent interview.

She has never had an acting lesson and she said the transition from film to stage had not been easy, but it was very satisfying.

Paquin told the Sunday Star-Times yesterday: "I'm having the best time of my life."

Stuff NZ, November 2001