Kate Mara

iHaving carefully laid the groundwork, her passion for acting also inspired her younger sister Rooney, 28, whose splashy roles in The Social Network and David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo almost threatened to eclipse her own career. The US media enjoys depicting them as rivals, almost like opponents on the family’s NFL teams, so when you ask about her sister, you almost hear the inner sigh, like she imagines she will be answering this question for the rest of her life.

“Of course it’s complicated,” she ventures. “It’s complicated even if you just have a friend who’s an actor because the whole business is competition. You’re constantly being compared to other actresses and if you don’t have a good perspective on that then it can be confusing.

“But luckily my sister and I know that, while it may be both of our passions, it is just a job at the end of the day. It’s not the most important thing to either of us.

“It’s quite surreal that we both are so lucky in the success of it all,” she says, adding that she would even like to work with her sister.