"I had tears in my eyes," Dominique says with a shudder. "She is the one person in the world who's been there for me all the time. We're mates. And then she hangs herself and when I saw her little feet..."

Dominique's real-world dad id David Swain. Once a dedicated athlete, Dominique played for the boy's school soccer team, and her strong swimming earned her a role as the stunt double of Quinn Culkin, whose character was almost drowned by brother Macaulay's in TheGood Son.

Dominique had lots of auditions prior to Lolita and was even a finalist for the child vampire role in Interview With the Vampire-a part that established Kirsten Dunst. "Auditioning and meeting casting directors is a whole different skill from action. I don't think very much of them, "Dominique says with a grin.

Though more than 2,500 other girls auditioned, 14-year-old Dominique ingeniously chased the Lolita role. Her older brother, also named David, shot a video in which she read book passages not used in the script. "I think I understood the character. On my videotape audition, I said, 'Nabokov didn't give Lolita a point of view, so here's mine,' which I think was a bold statement for a 14-year-old."

Once she was cast, any fears her father had about the material disappeared during dinner meetings at director Adrian Lyne's home. "Adrian's daughter was my age, and I felt he treated me as a daughter," Dominique says. "He was very careful that I wasn't going to be corrupted as I hadn't had any sexual experience at that point in my life."

At the time Dominique played the nymphet obsession of tortured academic Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons), she was 15. Unlike Sue Lyon's pouty Lolita in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 version, Dominique's is joyful and willful, always testing boundaries to see how far she can push Humbert. She has a fun chemistry with the bemused Irons. Working opposite the renowned actor didn't faze her because, like Chelse's audio recall of James Woods' Disney voice, Dominique knew irons only as The Lion King's wicked Scar.

"Dominique was a natural really," Lyne says. "She'd done nothing and yet had less nerves than any actor I'd ever worked with. And she really kind of played herself and kept inventing things." Her spontaneous bits include dropping her dental retainer in Humbert's glass, and funny chin-quivering facial aerobics.

Though well received overseas, Lyne's Lolita premiered on Showtime because U.S. theatrical distributors were skittish about the subject matter. Despite the brouhaha, Lyne's adaptation is unexploitative, well cast, and faithful to the source material. That said, it can't eclipse the mordant humor of Kubrick's version, which breezes by much faster, even though it's 15 minutes longer.

Dominique followed Lolita with roles in a string of movies including Face / Off (she played Travolta's daughter) and Girl. The past year has been especially hectic for her. Along with a showy supporting role as a lesbian swinger in the upcoming Mary Jane's Last Dance, Dominique has leading roles in three new movies. She's a camp counselor in Happy Campers. She's a gofer who rises through the pissy world of Conde Nast fashion magazines in the comedy The Intern. ("The only thing I learned about the fashion industry from that movie is to stay as far away from it as I possibly can," Dominique says.) And she gets to share the screen with Chelse in Tart, a story about drugs and murder populated by "Upper East Side high school kids who have way too much money and way too much time," Dominique says. Not only do the sisters play a scene together, but they get to fight over a boy.

Dominique's rise wasn't lost on Chelse, who decided at age 5 she wanted to be an actress. This was a shift from her earlier career goal of being a waitress. " That was my goal in life," she says with a laugh. "I had a little apron with a bear on it and I'd take a pad and ask my mom if she wanted anything. Then I'd make her pay for her own food."

Chelse observed how Dominique handled her success in that malicious social melting pot called high school. "From an outsider's point of view, I was able to watch how the students treated her, " Chelse says. She mimics how classmates would whine things like "Can I get you a pencil?"

So it goes growing up in Malibu, where everyone seems linked to the Industry. Indeed, when I return to a coffee bar after taking Dominique to a photo shoot, a push stranger who knows a little too much about her grills me with questions. I figure he's a stalker. He turns out to be her former agent.