Carey Mulligan is touted as an Academy Award frontrunner for her role as a naive schoolgirl who falls for an older man in the coming-of-age drama, An Education.

Few rites of passage are as public as the spanking machine we call fame.

Enter Carey Mulligan, who in less than a year has gone from little-known British actor (unless you count an episode of Doctor Who or a supporting role in Pride and Prejudice) to Oscar front-runner, much-lauded heir to the throne of Audrey Hepburn and rumoured girlfriend of Transformers dude Shia LaBeouf.

“It’s a little daunting,” the 24-year-old Londoner tells Sun Media during a day of interviews for An Education following its bow at the Toronto film fest.

It’s the last stop on the festival circuit for the coming-of-age drama, which electrified this past January’s Sundance, and has propelled Mulligan onto many an A-list. Earlier this year she shot the science-fiction parable Never Let Me Go with Keira Knightley and, on this day, she is preparing to travel to New York City to begin work on Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps starring Michael Douglas and LaBeouf. Already Mulligan’s reported off-screen relationship with LaBeouf is going viral, with photos of the pair — and accompanying speculation — plastered across gossip sites.

Not that Mulligan will have much time to absorb it all. An Education is now rolling out across North America — it opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on Friday before expanding into the rest of Canada in the coming weeks — in advance of an Academy Award campaign that is expected to result in a best-actress nomination for Mulligan, and she is tirelessly promoting it.

This month, she even made her late-night debut opposite a post-scandal David Letterman. The television legend appeared surprised when Mulligan informed him she’d never done a talk show before. You almost expected him to ask her — as an audience member did during the question-and-answer session following the TIFF premiere — “Where did you come from?”

“We pretty much looked at everyone who was available,” remembers Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) of the search for an actress to play Jenny, a bright British schoolgirl in 1961 seduced by a worldly older man (Peter Sarsgaard). Novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) adapted the screenplay based on the memoir by journalist Lynn Barber.

“We looked at all the girls of that age who had done anything professionally, as well as girls who hadn’t. There were also girls who had done major roles. But Carey seemed right from the very beginning,” Scherfig says. “She has really good taste. There were other good actresses, but they would come up with ideas that were overly sentimental or not as funny as they thought. It’s easy to direct someone like Carey because the way she pitches things is precise from the beginning. She would remind me of how a girl that age would be because she’s much closer in age to Jenny than I am.”

So apparently while love can happen at first sight, so can film careers.

Of course, Hollywood’s history is papered with unknowns who were catapulted into celebrity, only to be plunged back into obscurity (and maybe a TV deal). But in Mulligan’s case, the prevailing wisdom is that her stardom will stick. And with good reason —¬ her transformation in An Education from a naive teenager to a world-weary woman is as seamless, tender and bewitching as the critical hoopla would have you believe. And it’s all the more crucial to a movie that, despite potentially troubling subject matter, radiates witty, effusive energy.

“I’d much rather have a light film and it stays with you then the other way around — some director trying to prove themselves,” Scherfig says. “Nick’s point was how much Jenny is like her time. This could only happen to someone then. And you see London through her character.”

Along with Mulligan and Sarsgaard, the cast includes Alfred Molina as Jenny’s strict, protective father and Emma Thompson as the judgmental head mistress of her private girl’s school. “There were no big egos there,” Scherfig says. “They’re just people who want everything to work. It was a pleasure just to give (Carey) people to play with. Tuesday will be Emma Thompson day and then Alfred (Molina) flies in. So she always had a lot to look forward to.”

And, presumably, she still does. Yet just because the critical and industry kudos are deserved doesn’t make the attention any less mystifying to Mulligan. “I had never been to a film festival before Sundance so that was wild and I had never played a lead in a film before, so those were two big scary things. My main thing (at Sundance) was whether or not it would be sold. I thought, ‘If nobody buys it, my parents will never see it!’ ”

That was of particular concern, she reveals, because it wasn’t so long ago they wanted her to put an education ahead of acting.

“My parents didn’t want me to act until I finished school or until I’d gone to university, in fact. In retrospect, I completely understand their concerns. It’s such a tricky thing to get into and if you do, you’re so lucky. But they’re amazing now. They wanted me to go to university just to get a degree so that if something went horribly wrong. But there was nothing else I wanted to do. I thought if I go to university I’m going to spend three years doing something I don’t care about or I’ll drop out and that’ll be even worse because I’ll have wasted everyone’s time and money. It’s hard when you’re 18 to decide to do something exclusively for three years. A lot of my friends did it and they did it for the university experience, so maybe I missed out on that, but there was nothing else I could do.”

Besides, it’s not like there isn’t much yet to learn about the mechanics of stardom. “I’m not particularly good at the photo stuff. When I was a teenager, I had braces, so I trained myself not to smile with my mouth open. So now when I stand there and they go, ‘Smile!’ I can’t. So there’s all these strange photos of me, so I’ve given up at looking at them.”

Scherfig, though, is confident Mulligan is capable of coping with her burgeoning fame. “She doesn’t have an acting education and she hasn’t gone to university, but she wasn’t born yesterday; she’s a wise girl. She gets the most out of everything.”

Greed is being good to Carey Mulligan

She’s currently shooting the Wall Street sequel, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, in New York City opposite Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf. She plays the girlfriend of LaBeouf’s Wall Street broker, whose life is disrupted when her estranged father, notorious corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Douglas), is released from prison. (Off-screen, Mulligan and LaBeouf, who met on the set, are reportedly an item, as well.)

“It’s a completely different story from anything I’ve ever done. I’m playing an American and I’m playing an adult, which is nice. There are amazing people in it,” she says of a cast that includes Susan Sarandon, Josh Brolin and Frank Langella. “But I’ve always been lucky that way. I’ve always worked with really great people.”

She was offered the part after director Oliver Stone saw her performance in An Education. “It’s a (crazy) phone call to get. I got a phone call, ‘Oliver Stone’s going to call you.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ A year ago, I wouldn’t have been doing Wall Street if it wasn’t for An Education, so that’s brilliant … To work with Oliver feels like an honour, but it’s also a big challenge. I’m also one of the only girls in the film — Susan and I are really the only girls in the movie. So it’s a man’s world and really about man stuff, so everyday I have to go in being manly about it.”

kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca

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