“I don’t think you could get anything worse than losing a child,” says Saoirse Ronan, frowning wisely as she perches on a sofa in a London hotel. “I think if my child died I would prefer it if I were dead.” Like any self-respecting 15 year-old, Ronan, who is up for a best actress Bafta for her lead performance as a dead child in The Lovely Bones, talks as if she were 20 years older. This preternatural articulacy, together with her extraordinary looks, combine to create a screen presence so potent you wouldn’t bet against her developing into one of the great film actresses of our time.

She already has quite a track record. In 2007′s Atonement, at only 12 years of age, she shone out from a cast that included Keira Knightley and Vanessa Redgrave; her intense portrayal of Briony Tallis earned her Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. She is even better in Peter Jackson’s new adaptation of the Alice Sebold bestseller, in which she narrates the life, murder and afterlife of teenager Susie Salmon in Seventies America.

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Indeed, so convincing is Ronan in both these films – with her flawless Thirties cut-glass English pronunciation in the former and soft East Cost American lilt in the latter – that it is a shock to hear her real voice, an Irish brogue so thick you could stand a spoon in it. “I am quite good at accents,” she says matter-of-factly. “I was actually born in New York. We lived there until I was three so I grew up watching Sesame Street and hearing the accent. You are a sponge at that age, soaking everything up.”

An only child – “just like Peter Jackson,” she points out, proudly – she was named after a figure in a painting bought by her aunt from a Maze prisoner, which now hangs on her own bedroom wall. Saoirse (pronounced Sir-sha) is the Gaelic word for “freedom”. After the stint in New York, her family returned to the backwaters of County Carlow in south-east Ireland, where they remained ever since. “We don’t even live in a village,” says Ronan. “It is just a house beside a river. There were only 50 kids in my primary school. It was wonderful.”

She got her big break by following her father, an actor, to auditions, and catching the attention of the casting directors herself. At nine, she appeared in her first Irish television drama, and has never looked back.

To get a feel for the Seventies provincial American setting of The Lovely Bones Ronan, who was born in 1994, listened to music and read teen magazines from the era. “It wasn’t a totally alien time for me,” she says. “I’ve grown up with my parents’ music tastes, listening to Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones. I think it was a really colourful time, when people were experimenting with life.”

Just as colourful was her wardrobe in the film, all yellow bell-bottoms and Peruvian knitwear, a far cry from the sequinned jacket and skinny jeans ensemble she sports for our interview. “The clothes are extreme but I actually loved them,” she says. “To me, Susie was a little bit goofy so the colours were perfect for her.”

It is the goofiness and joy that Ronan pours into Susie Salmon that makes The Lovely Bones a moving, almost romantically happy story rather than the dark tragedy it might have been. Jackson’s film has been criticised for leaving out some of the more horrific elements of Sebold’s story, including Susie’s rape, but Ronan believes it was the right decision. “That scene would have overpowered the whole film,” she says, “and I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing it. The rape scene is bad enough in the book but on screen it would have been an awful lot worse. You don’t need to see that.”

Rather, The Lovely Bones is a film soaked in colour, never more so than in Jackson’s fantastical depictions of the “in-between” realm from which Susie looks down on the world, but the colour that stays in your mind afterwards is the piercing blue of Ronan’s eyes. Despite mostly playing a girl who is dead, she radiates an almost celestial light from her pale face.

In the flesh, Ronan is willowy and gorgeous, but she wears her looks lightly. She is proud of her tough exterior (she played for the boys’ football team at primary school) and says she prefers characters like Susie who “don’t play the victim. Wimpy characters are not that interesting.” Yet, there is nevertheless a softness to her, and at times the grisly subject of The Lovely Bones was too much for her: “Near the start, I would come home from work and just cry,” she says. “It was upsetting to think this [rape, murder] happens to girls and children; it was hard to push away. But Mam and Dad are always with me and if I’m ever upset just to get a hug is good.”

The combination of her warmly protective parents and the rural anonymity of her hometown have clearly helped temper the potentially intoxicating effect of Ronan’s career. Despite having to drop out of secondary school – “Everyone knew who I was, it was just impossible” – she remains close to her old friends.

“I would never want to move to LA,” she declares. “I’ve seen kids get messed up [there]. They just stop being genuine people.” Though she has a wise old head on her shoulders, part of her, she says, is still very much a child: “I will always have a child in me. That is what Pete [Jackson] has got, what a lot of the directors I have worked with have. It is about knowing how to have fun – and that is something I always want to hold on to.”

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