Schoolgirl Rachel Hurd-Wood is set for movie stardom when Peter Pan – billed as this Christmas’s big family film – opens in cinemas worldwide this month.

The 13-year-old was picked from thousands of hopefuls to play Wendy Darling in the film, based on JM Barrie’s classic story about the boy who refused to grow up.

“One minute I’m walking across the playground to maths, the next I’m flying out to Hollywood to meet the world’s press. It’s a dream come true,” said Rachel.

A teenager plucked from obscurity to appear in the new Peter Pan film has said she is still shocked at her luck.

Rachel Hurd-Wood, 13, from Godalming in Surrey, beat hundreds of other hopefuls to play Wendy in the £65m film, which stars Jeremy Sumpter as the boy hero.

“I was so lucky to get this part and the experience was just amazing,” Hurd said at the London premiere on Tuesday night.

Her only acting experience before the film had been in a school play.

When Robert E. Howard penned stories in the 1930s about his comic book hero Solomon Kane, he would write of nubile lovelies in need of rescue by the ‘vengeful Puritan’ (as Kane was known).

Many feminists have complained that Howard demeaned women, and in his Kane tales that’s probably true (although he also wrote the Conan the Barbarian books, and there’s nothing subservient about Red Sonja). But this is the 21st century, so in the latest film version of the stories, the heroine, as played by 17-year-old Rachel Hurd-Wood, is not so much a damsel in distress as a very feisty young woman who doesn’t think she needs a hero to ‘rescue’ her.