Evangeline Lilly adds fantasy girl power to The Hobbit legacy

, Evangeline Lilly decided she was done with acting. The 34-year-old had rocketed to worldwide fame on the back of her role as Kate on Lost, had wrapped her first big budget movie, Real Steel, with Hugh Jackman, and had just given birth to her first child, Kahekili. As far as she was concerned, she had retired. Then the phone rang.

Two months later, Lilly was jetting off to New Zealand, where she would spend the next year playing elf warrior Tauriel in part two of Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug.

For Lilly, being asked to play the part was approaching fantasy itself. She has been a fan of JRR Tolkien for as long as she can remember, and her favourite characters in the books were the woodland elves. She says she used to dream about being one and would make up little stories about them in her head. So even though she had convinced herself she was done with acting, she says she spoke to her partner and said, "I really have to do this."

For hardcore Hobbit devotees the addition of a new character could be perceived as nothing short of sacrilegious. "People struggle with it - purists who want to keep Tolkien exactly as it is," the actress acknowledges. "I respect that. But I am content that as a huge fan of Tolkien myself, the changes they have made just make the film better."

For Lilly, incorporating a strong and capable female figure into a film where men make up most of the cast was simply the right thing to do. "There are no women in the book," says Lilly on a recent afternoon in Beverly Hills.

"I don't mean to undermine Tolkien, because he wrote these books when women were sub-citizens," she says. "[But] … to make nine hours of cinema in 2013 where there is not a single female on the screen, what message [would] that send to that 10-year-old girl who goes to the movies?"