LOS ANGELES—Thirteen-year-old Abigail Breslin is not yet a household name despite having accomplished something that several more famous child stars of recent vintage have been unable to achieve. She has won an Oscar nomination, an honour that evaded high-profile child actors like Dakota Fanning, Macaulay Culkin, and Lindsay Lohan. Breslin scored her nomination for 2006's Little Miss Sunshine.

Three years later, she has appeared in seven movies and has three live-action films and two animated movies scheduled to be released in the near future. The first of these is My Sister's Keeper, which opens June 26. In it, she plays Anna Fitzgerald, an 11-year-old who was conceived to help her older sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) survive leukemia. Anna rebels against the use of her blood and body parts without her permission and goes to court seeking emancipation from her parents (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric).

In an L.A. hotel room, Diaz tells reporters that Breslin's success as a child actor is owed to the fact that she is “a warrior”. Later in the day, Breslin tells the Straight that she is unsure of how to react to what she assumes is a compliment. “I don't view myself as being that tough,” she says. “I think of myself as being more of the observer. I guess I try to be a warrior, but I have always felt that people laughed at me when I have tried to be tough. They say, ‘You can't talk to me like that.' But I think my whole family is pretty strong, and I have learned to be that way.”

Whether or not Breslin can continue to be the first choice of directors casting for young girls will depend on the image she projects to child audiences. Until recently, she and her mother, Kim, who reads the scripts first, have been fairly conservative in choosing projects, a list that literally includes an all-American girl in Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. She says she likes to take risks, and that is evident in the choice of Vengeance: A Love Story as one of her upcoming films. In it, she plays a girl who has been gang-raped.

“I like characters that are strong and take care of themselves,” she says. “I think that is really important, but I also want to have them be different from others that I have played. I think that it is fun to be a different person all the time. That doesn't mean I hate myself. But some of the stuff that Anna goes through in this movie I don't know if I could do. I don't know if I could be that brave to go to court. But I always try to play people who are strong and brave, and, hopefully, I have learned how to be strong on my own through those characters. I want to try things that I have never done and do new stuff because it's more fun. The one thing that is always similar is that they are people I would want to know.”

There is a career risk that comes with a child star taking on a role that fans are not interested in seeing him or her play. Fanning was 13 when she played a rape victim in Hounddog, and interest was so limited that the film was only released in a few markets. Kim Breslin says that the roles that she and her daughter are most interested in pursuing are those that allow her to grow both as an actor and a person. “I know what Abby likes, and when she talks to me about what she wants to do, she makes it clear she does not like to be a victim. That is not to say that she can't be in a position where someone is hurting her, but in the end she likes her character to be intact and not to have been destroyed by something. While I don't know why she makes that choice, I support it because that is a great way to portray a young girl.”

Breslin probably won't give up her life to an acting career. Instead, it appears she will be taking the route previously chosen by her Nim's Island costar Jodie Foster, who took time off from her career as a child star to pursue a college education. Breslin says that although she hopes to continue acting during summer vacation, she has already chosen the university she will attend, her roommate, and even the location of their apartment.

“When I turn 18, I am going to college. Me and my cousin Jan have already picked out what street we will live on and the colour scheme for our apartment, and she is going to Columbia and I am going to NYU. It's all set.”