WE'RE not on first name terms with Vera Farmiga just yet - but we soon will be. Considering recent roles in high-profile films such as Oscar-winner The Departed and Breaking And Entering, the actress, who prefers knitting with wool from her angora goats on her smallholding in rural New York State to nights out in LA, is unlikely to remain anonymous for long.

Whether she's playing a cleaner, a prostitute or a mother, the actress hides her real identity well, and it seems her level of anonymity hasn't hurt her career.

Even losing out on playing Bob Dylan in I'm Not There to Cate Blanchett, only sharpened her reputation's edge. Mark Herman, who cast Vera in last year's The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, for which she won a British Independent Film Award, said: "It helps with the believability if the stars are not superstars."

For those who can't picture the actress, imagine a hugely expressive face with a Blanchett-esque mouth and penetrating Maggie Gyllenhaal eyes.

Despite her simple home life, she can still turn on the Hollywood glamour when it suits.

Today, she looks like a Fifties screen siren, in a pale blouse with a big bow, with her long reddish brown hair swept up, and wearing bright red lipstick.

For her latest role, she's playing an adoptive mother in Orphan - a thriller/horror about an evil child - and found it perfectly natural to take her new mother-in-law to the screening. But then they do share a special bond.

"After the film I was pregnant and she was in the delivery room when I was in labour," says the 35-year-old, who became a mother for the first time in January, after marrying musician-turned-carpenter Renn Hawkey last September.

"I love scary movies, I love to be scared and I love to scare, ever since I was a little kid," she says, explaining why she chose to do Orphan.

"I had never read a story like this before, there was a twist in the film I'd never encountered in a script - and then Peter Saarsgaard was attached and I was in."

Vera and Peter play Kate and John Coleman, the parents of two children - daughter Max, who's deaf, and son Daniel.

WHEN recovering alcoholic Kate has a stillbirth during her third trimester, the couple decide to adopt a young girl named Esther.

It soon transpires that Esther (newcomer Isabelle Fuhrman) isn't as innocent as she looks and she quickly makes her new family's life hell.

While Vera was already gripped by the idea - and the opportunity to team up with her long-time friend Peter - she says her husband's reaction to the script was the real clincher.

"My husband's always a good barometer for this and he would whoop at certain scenes. He would whoop from the other room, and I just knew," she says.

For an actress who has only just become a mother in real life for the first time, Vera is the first to admit she's "made a career out of playing mothers".

Just last year, she was on screen as the wife of a Nazi death-camp commandment, played by David Thewlis, in The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas.

She certainly doesn't shy away from difficult emotional roles.

"Kate has a gaping hole in her womb and in her heart, but she's trying to persevere and to heal her marriage and her family," she says.

"It's no small feat to put back the pieces of a pieces of a broken heart after miscarriage. Her choice to adopt is an act of kindness. She needs to do something with all the love that she had for that child ... to give it somebody in need. Adoption is a way to heal and draw her family closer together again."

Vera always takes her preparation very seriously. For the role of the Nazi officer's wife Elsa, who goes into meltdown when she discovers the real nature of her husband's work, she spent a month reading accounts of the lives of Nazi officer's wives. For Orphan, she did most of her research online.

"The internet is a diary ... I wanted to explore the miscarriage grief and so I looked into that quite a bit and read lots of testimonies from women online. The ache is desperate, that of an empty womb and empty arms. The testimonies were eye-opening."

She also learned sign language so she could communicate with Kate's daughter Max, played by six-year-old Aryana Engineer, who is hard of hearing.

THE film, produced by Vera's Departed co-star Leonardo DiCaprio, was shot in Toronto during what was reported to be the worst Canadian winter in 30 years.

But the cast and crew didn't give in to the cold and snow - or the dark subject of the film.

"We kept it light-hearted between takes. The kids were just jumping on you and tickling you, and hanging off you. It was important not to make it a heavy environment for them.

"But it's tough, these films are harder to do than others, because you've got to sustain the emotion to a certain level ... it was exhausting. By the end of it you felt good that your family life is nothing like this."

So does she have a technique for transporting herself to a place of absolute fear?

"It's strange the things that you actually do think about," Vera admits.

"If our actual subtext was printed on the screen when you saw what we were doing, that would be weird. You just reach for anything that works."

And then there's the inevitable blood and guts involved.

"That's not fun, it's sticky and cold, it doesn't wash off easily. And they have to reset it, so Peter would never move, he would wallow in it," she jokes.

New Jersey-born Vera grew up in a Ukrainian community and didn't speak English until she was six.

At 16, she started acting in plays at school before studying at Syracuse University's School of Visual and Performing Arts.

Her acting career began on stage and she went on to land a role in TV series Roar, alongside Heath Ledger, which was filmed in Australia.

She married her French co-star Sebastian Roche in 1997, but the pair split up in 2003.

In 2001, she landed her first role in a big film, opposite Robert DeNiro in 15 Minutes, but it was as a domestic cleaner struggling with drug addiction in 2005's Down To The Bone, that she won critical acclaim and awards.

Vera's star is rising - months after giving birth to son Fynn she was off to film romantic comedy Up In The Air with George Clooney.