There's no question the revelation of this year's Cannes Film Festival was Rebecca Hall. So positive was the reaction to her role in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, as an American student on an extended sojourn to Barcelona, you'd think she was being discovered for the first time. In fact, the 28-year-old daughter of esteemed British theatre director Peter Hall and actress Maria Ewing has been proving her acting chops for most of the decade. When Hall (right) made her stage debut, as Vivie in her father's 2002 production of Mrs Warren's Profession, such was the impact it won her the Ian Charleson Award for outstanding performance by a young actor a year later. In 2006, after an adept turn in university-set comedy Starter for Ten, she provided much of the emotional core as the long-suffering wife to Christian Bale's illusionist in Chris Nolan's The Prestige. Still, it's in Vicky Cristina Barcelona that she truly flourishes, playing, as one journalist put it in Cannes, 'a sexy neurotic version of Woody Allen'. Certainly, as Vicky to Scarlett Johansson's Cristina, she plays the sensible one of the pair. Despite this, Spanish artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) does his best to woo her - as well as Cristina - into bed. 'It's interesting to start a part from the perspective of a stereotype - a prissy type of person,' says Hall. 'And then finding what isn't stereotypical or what's the complete opposite - the antithesis - and that's what interested me about her. 'That's where the comedy is. I think Woody writes ambivalence like that very well,' she says. Hall estimates her character has hidden depths after she succumbs to the painter's charms. 'Vicky is seemingly together, but she's a little too vehemently 'together', a little bit 'the lady doth protest too much'. She's capable of wanting all sorts of things, which are much more romantic and wild, but it's hard for her to take risks because she has always been very in control and she doesn't trust herself when things are outside her control. She doesn't know how crazy she might go.' For Hall, it was the perfect chance to shed her rather refined English image (she was head girl at prestigious English boarding school Roedean). 'That was a real attraction for me, to play an American, and play the type of American that's different to my experience,' she says. It was Allen's casting director who tipped him off to her. 'I came in and met Woody. He said, 'Can you do an American accent?' And I said, 'Yes' and then he said, 'OK, bye'. That was pretty much it. Two weeks later I got a call saying, 'Woody Allen wants you to be in his next film'.' Now just about everyone wants Hall. She is filming a new version of the classic Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and has already completed a role as poet Emily Dickinson in Official Selection as well as a part in the Ron Howard adaptation of Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon. As for inevitable comparisons with her father, Hall shrugs. 'I knew that if I went into the business, I would always be compared, and I didn't see the point in pretending I wasn't that, or not talking about it,' she says. 'It's what I want to do. And I'll take whatever criticisms people throw at me.' Vicky Cristina Barcelona opens today