KIRUNA STAMELL was just 18 when she auditioned as an extra for Baz Luhrmann’s extravagant movie Moulin Rouge! and, in the blink of an eye, was given one of the principal parts.

In her first professional film role, as La Petite Princess, she met Nicole Kidman and went for beers with Ewan MacGregor.

“Not that he’d be able to say my name now,” she says on a break from rehearsing her one-woman show Coffee and Sheep.

The Australian actress says the experience took her by surprise.

“It felt like the Tardis rocked up on my doorstep. I skipped into it, went away and had an adventure for four months that nobody else was privy to that was full of burlesque performers, dancers and Nicole Kidman,” she says.

“Then the Tardis arrived in my back yard and my family and friends had no idea what had happened.”

Kidman was lovely, adds Stammell, who debuted her new show at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, last night and will perform it again at the same venue on Saturday.

Yet she felt emotionally distanced from the experience and occasionally lonely.

She recalls being lifted five storeys high on a hoist and looking down at the filming below.

“I remember that moment and how weird it was for me,” she says.