Reluctant ingenue

Johnny Depp will have teeth removed, Robert De Niro will gain weight, and Tom Hanks will starve himself. What would a 16-year-old actress do to show her commitment to a role? If you’re Camilla Belle, whose heart-shaped face and exotic eyebrows have long been framed by a waterfall of long, raven-colored hair, you get the scissors out.

“That was a little frightening,” says Belle, who is now 18, referring to a pivotal scene in the new film “The Ballad of Jack and Rose.”

Belle portrays Rose, a girl raised in a blissful but isolated world of self-sufficiency by a commune-minded dad (Daniel Day-Lewis) who is fearful of the world at large. Rose signals a newfound sense of rebellion by getting her locks shorn.

As a student of old movies the actress found special strength in the experiences of one of her cinema idols. “I’ve always loved Elizabeth Taylor, and ‘National Velvet’ has been one of my favorite films since I was a little kid, and she gets her hair cut off in that film,” says Belle, who took her DVD of the 1944 classic to Canada’s Prince Edward Island, where her film was shot. “I thought, [if] Liz Taylor can do it, I can do it!”

For the film’s writer-director, Rebecca Miller, it was easy to see the elements of old-fashioned star presence in Belle. “There’s really something timeless about her,” says Miller, who picked Belle out of hundreds of young girls to play Rose. “It’s a lack of self-consciousness. There’s no vulgarity in her, no kitsch, and that’s priceless. It was also important because [Rose is] somebody who had no influence from the outside, no TV. And [Belle] really had that quality about her.”

Nonetheless, Belle is also unequivocally a teenager in demeanor. Words and thoughts unroll in fragmented torrents, hands flutter for emphasis, and she displays a general sense of excess nervous energy that would be unknown to her on-screen character, a young girl whose haunting stillness seems to encompass everything from peacefulness to worry to cheekiness.

Belle was initially anxious about working with Day-Lewis, whom she reveres. “My mom had to calm me down,” Belle says about having to read with the Oscar-winning actor. He made her laugh, though, and eventually she was swept up in his famed dedication to a role, which in this case was thankfully a doting father and not a ruthless killer a la “Gangs of New York.” She found him an endless inspiration.

“It’s made me more courageous about playing someone 100% opposite of me, like I could maybe conquer that [in the future].”

Day-Lewis was equally taken by his on-screen daughter. “One gets so much pleasure from seeing somebody still vibrating with possibilities,” he says. “What you see is someone discovering herself, just as Rose is discovering herself. She has immense natural ability.”

As young as she is, Belle considered Rose a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “It’s difficult to find complex female roles that have meat to them,” she says, a beef typically heard from actresses twice her age. But then again, the parts that usually define ingenue stardom in Hollywood don’t appeal to her.

“I’m very picky. I don’t think you have to work back to back. Then people start to get sick of you.”

Belle has been in front of cameras since she was 9 months old, when someone suggested to Belle’s mother (and manager) that her grinning, outgoing baby was made for print and commercial work. The peculiarities of acting became apparent at age 5, when she shot her first film, a TV movie about an L.A. earthquake.

“I’m trapped in an elevator where water’s coming up, and I was having a ball ‘cause I loved swimming,” she says. “I wanted to smile and laugh, but I had to be scared and upset. It was kind of funny.”

Belle, whose child credits went on to include discovering a dinosaur at the beginning of “The Lost World” and playing the young Sandra Bullock in “Practical Magic,” says ambition or hand-wringing over “craft” never interfered with her approach to show business. The idea was to have fun, to travel, to meet people. “It was kind of a hobby,” she says. “Like singing and sports for my friends. It was trying to enjoy myself as a kid.”

She took three years off, though, starting at 13, to squeeze in some normal formative years in Los Angeles. “I stayed in school, did plays, danced, sang choir, made friends, and then I started to really, really miss it.” “Ballad” was the Los Angeles native’s first film after the absence, and she realized her feelings for acting had developed into a passion.

“I now realize that it’s serious and intense and takes a lot out of a person emotionally, and I need time to recuperate after each project.”

Belle’s life may be about to take a big zig -- she’s applied for college in the fall, and the prospect of a change of scenery appeals to her. She’s applied only to East Coast schools so she could be close to the theatrical and restaurant mecca of Manhattan. But with her newly invigorated love of acting, will she be an off-and-on student?

“I would love to avoid making my education prolonged for 10 years and never end up graduating,” she says. “But if there’s a great project, it’s hard to refuse. I’d rather work in summer and graduate in four years.”

Those in her cheering section from “Ballad” may believe that a big movie career is hers for the taking, but they also sense she’d handle the attention better than most. “One problem with young actors is sometimes when they get successful, they have very narrow lives, and the lives don’t feed them,” Miller says. “I think her life feeds her. Her interests are wide, she’s very close to her mother, and she’s going to have a very rich life.”