‘Bright Young Things’ keeps her party going

Fenella WOOLGAR may possess a pitch-perfect British accent, but she really used to be an all-American girl.

“I was born in England but had a dad who went all around the world,” says the effusive actress, who makes her film debut as a madcap and mad British party girl in Stephen Fry’s period drama “Bright Young Things.”

“I grew up in Connecticut, in New Canaan,” she says. “We were there until I was 6. I had an American accent for which I was horribly teased when I got back to England. It was a massive culture shock [returning to England] because I was at a Montessori school in Connecticut. I didn’t understand in England we had to wear uniforms and sit in rows and put up your hand if you knew something. People say your real personality lies in your first accent!”

Woolgar, who is guarded about her age -- “like most actresses, I’m 29!” -- is heading back to the U.S. early next month as the star of a new stage production of E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India.” She’ll be performing in New York during the first two weeks in November.

But this isn’t her first time back to America. Four years ago, she visited her childhood home. “My parents’ neighbors started crying when they saw me,” she says. “The weird thing is that there was an English family living in our house.”

Since “Bright Young Things,” Woolgar has barely been able to catch her breath between projects. She’ll also be seen on the big screen this month in “Stage Beauty,” in which she plays a “nasty piece of work, really,” and in a “tiny part” in Mike Leigh’s new film, “Vera Drake.”

Woolgar, who graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1999, caught the acting bug while she was still living in America. “We went on a big road trip with my folks before we came back to England,” she recalls. “We went to some theater somewhere Oscar Wilde had been to. It was empty and deserted. I remember going onstage and feeling at home, which sounds so silly and so self-important and ridiculous -- but it was really true!”