Paquin the heroine

On the back of recent success as Sookie Starkhouse in vampire series True Blood, New Zealand Golden Globe winner Anna Paquin turns her talents to a made for television film taking the lead role in The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler. Irena Sendler, who died last year at 98, was responsible for saving the lives of 2,500 Jewish children during World War II, smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto and delivering them to Polish Catholic families who reared them until they could be reunited with their parents after the war. Would Paquin herself have survived the surrogate anti-Semitism suffered by Sendler when the Nazis accused her of conspiring to con them? “I would love to think that I’d be fantastically brave but,” she adds, “it’s impossible to guess.”