Montreal actress plays bride Hoffman can't give away

The role of the young bride who refuses to be given away by Dustin Hoffman in Last Chance Harvey is proving to be a breakthroughfor Montrealer Liane Balaban.

The actress who began her career in 1999's New Waterford Girl has had a string of roles in quirky Canadian films and more recently appeared in the mainstream feature Definitely Maybe.

But Last Chance Harvey, where she plays opposite Oscar-winners Hoffman and Emma Thompson, is a much bigger leap for the 28-year-old.

"I'm really excited for the film to come out," she told CBC's Q cultural affairs show on Friday. "It is the first movie that I've been in that will have a really big audience."

She describes the movie as a kind of 24-hour romance in the tradition of Before Sunrise, but involving an older couple played by Thompson and Hoffman, a man down on his luck who is in London to attend his daughter's wedding.

Her most difficult scene as theprospective bride, Susan, is to tell Hoffman, her biological father, that she doesn't want him to walk her down the aisle.

Balabansaid talking the role over with Hoffman, who she described as a "gracious, wonderful man," helped her strike the right note in her performance.

"We talked about our own lives and where our lives intersect with the character. There's a lot of coincidental overlap between my own life and Susan's role," Balaban said.

"My parents are divorced and it would be a little awkward for both my parents to come to my own wedding and I just imagined how hard it would be to do what Susan does in the film, which is to tell her father, who she loves, that he isn't going to be walking her down the aisle because he wasn't really her father when she was growing up."

Balaban admits she was nervous about working with Hoffman, but found him so genuine and down to earth that he put her at ease.

"He was really sweet and supportive and gave me little gems like 'if a director asks you do something and it doesn't feel right to you and it's not your truth, don't do it. Don't compromise for them trust yourself,'" she said.

Balaban, who grew up in North York, Ont.,and studied journalism and political science at Ryerson and later Concordia University, said she did not originally think she would pursue a career in acting.

"Most actors I work with have known from a very young age that they wanted to be an actor. I was struggling with that for a while. Do I deserve to be here? Is this really what I want?" she said.

Landing a role in New Waterford Girl was just a lucky fluke, she said.

"I was in high school. I'd done high school plays, but I never considered being an actor as a career. I thought it's too hard. People can't make a living as an actor. I wanted to be a journalist," she said.

But her performance as the conflicted 15-year-old yearning to get out of her home town in the Canadian film was highly praised.

Itwas enough to get her roles in films such asWorld Traveller, Seven Times Lucky andthe miniseries St. Urbaine's Horseman as she pursued her studies.

It was just three years ago that she realized she was ready to commit to acting, she said.

"Last Chance Harvey is a dream project. If I can keep on working on films as good as Last Chance Harvey, I won't be doing too badly," she said.