Mrs. Hurtle Miranda Otto Assets: a dangerous American lady who once shot a man in Oregon. Prospects: depends on whether she gets her man. When Mrs. Hurtle comes riding into Victorian London from America, society gossip soon discovers she is on a manhunt... she and the young railway engineer Paul Montague share a past. "Mrs. Hurtle is a dangerous and scary woman," says Australian native Miranda Otto, who plays the beautiful outsider in her first UK production. "She lives by different rules and has had a different background to the social set she finds in London. But she can play the game and cut the crap. She's had to look after herself and she's not afraid to go for what she wants... and that's Paul." Otto's mother was an actress and her father is the distinguished Australian actor Barry Otto, perhaps best-known in the UK for his role as the dance teacher Doug Hastings in the Australian hit movie Strictly Ballroom. Next year, Otto will be seen as Princess Eowyn in the second of Peter Jackson's trilogy of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Trained at the Australian National Institute of Dramatic Arts, she starred with Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath, and with Sean Penn and Nick Nolte in Terrence Malick's World War II thriller The Thin Red Line. Other films include the western The Jack Bull and Michel Gondry's Human Nature. Otto is a bit of a global citizen just now, commuting between Australia, the UK, and USA. "I have an apartment in Sydney, but I'm not based anywhere, really. So I'm not tied to any place or person just now. A bit like Mrs. Hurtle, really."