A Stiles of her own

Julia Stiles

Famously dubbed "the thinking teenager's movie goddess", the former teen actress Julia Stiles is now all grown up and fully in control of her career.

At 26, she refuses to compromise her integrity, even if it means losing out on roles to actresses more willing to flaunt their flesh. "It's not that I'm prudish. It's just that I don't really want to go to work and take off my clothes," says Stiles, explaining why she will never compete with Hollywood's sexy young stars.

Co-starring with Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum, the last of the Bourne trilogy, the actress commends the film's intelligent style. Spy movies for grown-ups, the Bourne films have never required their actresses to run around in bikinis a la Bond.

"I think people appreciate that these films don't fall into the conventional traps that most action films do. I love that Jason Bourne is not your typical action hero in that sense, because most assassins or hitmen are made to look really cool and tough in terms of the crimes they commit.

"Whereas Bourne is struggling with how guilty he feels about what he has done.

I like that Bourne has a conscience."

Better still, Stiles likes how all the Bourne women are smart and self-confident. And fully clothed.

"You'd be surprised how much nudity is called for as an actress," she continues. "I don't have a problem with it or a problem when other actresses do it, but I'm a modest person and generally steer away from nude scenes and love scenes because, more often than not, I find they're gratuitous."

She is wary of how "art" can easily become pornography: "People in the film lab can do something with the footage and, no matter what the context is in the actual film, it can end up as pornography on the internet.

"I've worked with foreign directors who think that it's an 'American thing' [her reluctance to do nudity] and they don't understand why it would be such a serious issue for me. But it's not my own hang-up; it's the hang-up of the audience."

Stiles realises that by setting such boundaries she limits the range of roles offered to her; recently she lost out to Jessica Alba for the role of Sue Storm/Invisible Girl in Fantastic Four. "But I think that, for young women especially, the roles are very limited, anyway.

"They are generally the appendage of the main character, who's a guy, so you get to play the love interest or the girl that he has a crush on but she doesn't have her own defined character."