Tara Fitzgerald likes to think the decision to choose acting as a profession was her own, but she recognizes that her path was probably predestined from birth.

For starters, her great aunt, Geraldine Fitzgerald, was the star of more than 50 Hollywood movies.Her stepfather is noted Shakespearean actor Norman Rodway, and several other members of her clan are also actors. 'I guess there was a subliminal thing going on,' says Fitzgerald, who plays Hugh Grant's love interest in the recently opened film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain.

Fitzgerald believes that her upbringing also played a strong role in her choice of careers. The daughter of an Irish photographer 'with a touch of the gypsy in her,' she spent much of her childhood on the move, including three years in the Bahamas. 'I had a wonderful time going from place to place and seeing lots of environments,' she said. 'It really is a wonderful foundation for acting, because that's all you're really doing. You become accustomed to bonding with an area and the people and then moving away and not feeling a sense of loss, but viewing it as something that adds to you.'

Fitzgerald's first audience was her mother and 'anyone else who came over for Sunday lunch. I was very precocious.' After graduating from London's Drama Centre, she made her professional debut onstage in the Irish drama Hear My Song five years ago and then bounced from the period film Sirens, which also starred Grant, to last year's A Man of No Importance starring Albert Finney. Her latest coup was the role of Ophelia in Hamlet opposite Ralph Fiennes,now playing on Broadway.

In The Englishman she plays Betty, a woman hired to seduce Grant's character into staying in a Welsh village long enough to resurvey the height of a local landmark.