I refused to take out my nose stud at school ..but it went the minute

PRETTY Irish actress Elaine Cassidy defied her senior school in north Wicklow by refusing to remove her gold nose stud.

The feisty fifteen-year-old weathered severe warning letters, threats of expulsion, and that uncomfortable feeling of being an outsider, to stand up for her individuality.

Four years later - when she was plucked from her local drama group to star alongside Bob Hoskins in the acclaimed film Felicia's Journey - Elaine was told once again that her gold nose stud simply didn't fit in.

This time she whipped it out like greased lightning.

Elaine said: "Having my nose pierced was a really important thing to me and my mom said, 'All right, at least you're not experimenting with boys or drugs'.

"But the school wouldn't leave me alone. They kept telling me to get rid of it and I didn't want to.

"When you get to a certain age there are lots of things you can't do any more because you have to be mature and I was trying to live it up while I could.

"The only reason the school didn't want me to have it in was because it didn't look right.

"It was a complete contradiction for people to think I'm a certain kind of person just because I have something in my nose. All of Asia can't be wrong.

"I was just standing up for myself and only agreed to take it out for Felicia's Journey because it didn't suit the character and I wouldn't have got the part otherwise."

"The hole had closed up by the time I'd finishedthe film and it wouldn't really be practical for my work now."

Elaine, from the tiny village of Kilcoole, near Bray, shot to overnight fame and found herself flying round the world to film festivals with stars like Fay Dunaway, Mel Gibson and Joe Fiennes.

She has just completed her second feature film, Disco Pigs, and flies to Spain next week to make The Others with Nicole Kidman and Christopher Eccleston.

Elaine, now 20, says her lifestyle and friends haven't changed at all in spite of her film success.

She still lives at home in a four-bedroom detached house with her trainee hairdresser mum, Phyllis, and sisters Gillian, 25 and Edele, 22.

Her boyfriend, a student at a Dublin college, is apparently unfazed by her meteoric rise to fame and the long separations involved with her filming.

Elaine, whose civil servant father Dermot left home when she was fifteen, has a philosophical approach to love way beyond her years.

She said : "I'm very realistic about love and I don't give my heart out too easily.

"The way I see relationships is that you go through life's journey with someone - you're two little travellers on the same path - but then all relationships come to an end.

"Either one person dies, goes off with someone else, or the paths veer off in different directions, and that's just the way it is.

"So I really don't know how long my boyfriend and I will be together, though I don't think we'll break up in the near future.

"I'm just enjoying life for now, looking forward to the future and remembering the past. But, most important of all, I'm enjoying it for now, because nothing lasts forever.

"I believe in marriage but only when I want to have children - for the sake of their security - but I'm really young at the moment so that's the last thing on my mind.

"I'd probably like kids in ten years time but I'm too selfish now. I'm still a kid myself - I might be 20 but I only feel 16."

Elaine believes she has been a "realistic thinker" ever since she was very young.

"I've never got too carried away with things," she said. "I get excited about new oppor- tunities and enjoy daydreaming, but at the end of the day I'm a down-to-earth realist.

"My parents separated after 24 years together but I don't think my attitude to love is because of that. I just think it's about living life to the young age I've got to.

"I was 15 when they split up and understood everything that went on so it was fine, I wasn't heartbroken."

Felicia's Journey was a huge stepping stone for Elaine and opened up plenty of doors for her. Now she is constantly sent scripts to consider.

"The money I got from it all doesn't really concern me," said Elaine. "It's a joke because I'd pay to do this.

"Every day I get to have the most fun enjoying what I've always wanted to do and then I get paid for it. It doesn't make sense.

"I try not to let the payments affect me because it's not the most secure of professions and maybe someday I'll have to go back to a nine-to-five job.

"If I get carried away by the money it will be much harder.

"I give my family little money presents every time I get a job so they're delighted when I'm working.

"But my lifestyle hasn't changed at all. My social and personal life is exactly the same as before Felicia's Journey."

"I love Ireland and don't see myself living anywhere else because I'd miss my friends and all I've ever known."

In Disco Pigs, with Dublin actor Cillian Murphy, Elaine plays a passionate, sexual woman named Runt who gets so close and enmeshed with her boyfriend that they enter a different world.