Jodie Whittaker of 'Venus': A Star on the Horizon

Jodie Whittaker needs to buy a dress. There's a wedding coming up, and she doesn't have the right thing to wear. But her rent is due on her London flat and money is tight, and even though she takes the bus all over town, she's in a "right panic" about the very real possibility that her bank balance will hit zero.

Also, she is seven days away from the opening of a film that will place her name just inches from Peter O'Toole's on a glittering marquee.

A film called "Venus," which is what he calls her (see review on Page 38). A film that makes serious, loving study of her hands and lips and that soft slope leading shoulder to neck. A film that sees her compared, by master quoting master, to a summer's day.

They're strange, these feverish days between obscurity and what could be something very different, something like fame.

"Thou art more lovely and more temperate . . ."

Jodie Whittaker is 24 and bursting. If exuberance and wonder exist in limited quantities, she has absorbed more than her share.

Also, she is looking for an outlet. This silly cellphone has run low on batteries, and she is here in a coffee shop to find some quiet, but she'll need to rearrange the tables to get her cord to reach and -- oh, there we go.

"I'm really disorganized and sometimes I forget that I'm, like, doing a phone interview. And I'm standing in the busiest part of London, expecting people to hear me," she says, letting out a laugh at her own expense.

It has been a strange stretch of life for Whittaker, and it's about to get a lot stranger. Hers is, in some ways, the classic tale of an English actress. Raised in a northern industrial town with dreams of the theater, she left school at 16, spent a few years mucking about, traveling and working odd jobs, before heading to London for a serious bit of training at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

"There's no history of arts in the family," she says in the midst of a flurried stream of stories. "I was just really loud and showed off a lot, so I think it was just healthy for me to try and channel it somehow -- 'cause otherwise I think I'd be a nightmare."

And so to the world of agents and directors, a couple of quick takes on television shows and a coveted role on stage at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. And then a script over which she became obsessed. It offered the chance to play a ragged, churlish, marginalized wisp of a young woman who swoops into the life of an old man and transforms both of them.

"To have such an amazing character journey, such an emotional arc -- you really don't get that in a lot of films, or scripts even, to have such a fantastic role for a young girl," she says.