With two films out, a TV series following and a stint with the RSC in the West End up next, Amara Karan is going places. She tells Katherine MacAlister how her time in Oxford set the precedent for everything that was to follow Promoting two new films while rehearsing for a Shakespeare lead in the West End, you’d expect Amara Karan to be harassed at best. Instead she’s funny, lively, eloquent and cool as a cucumber.

But as an Oxford graduate who cut her teeth at the Playhouse and OFS, she said her time here set her up for life. And she’s going to make the most of it without a great song and dance.

A Fantastic Fear of Everything, Simon Pegg’s new film in which she plays Sangeet, is due out this week, and All in Good Time, a comedy drama set in Bolton about a newly-married couple who struggle to consummate their marriage, is in cinemas right now.

Amara will also be seen in the ITV drama Kidnap & Ransom II, reprising her role as a British hostage negotiator. So promotion is the name of the game for the 30-year-old at the moment. “Yes, there’s lots going on but that’s they way it goes, like buses – all the good parts come together,” she says, flashing her perfect white teeth as she smiles.

“But it’s just really great that while both films are out, I play such different roles in them both, and get the opportunity to demonstrate my range.” And what a range. Amara made her film début as the love interest in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, then as schoolgirl Peaches in the 2007 film St Trinian’s, followed swiftly by her stage début in 2008 as Jessica in an RSC production of The Merchant Of Venice and as Bianca in an RSC production of The Taming Of The Shrew.

Pretty impressive then? “I don’t see it as a meteoric rise,” she says. “I started off quite strongly with Darjeeling and St Trinian’s and have been steadily working ever since over the past few years. And I’m very lucky to have such a steady start, but you do have to work hard – it’s all hard graft,” she points out.

But then having studied at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, the experience set her up for life. “Oxford helped because it’s very tough and you have to work very hard and be smart about what you want. So when I wasn’t working or revising that’s what I did, that was my routine. So I learned to be super-organised with my time.

“I also met lots of people like me there who loved theatre and would tell me what plays were coming up and what auditions were going on, and slowly you develop a reputation for yourself and they start coming to you. And that’s what’s happened with my career as well. It’s been echoed in real life.

“So I did treat Oxford like a drama school and chose St Catherine’s for its outdoor theatre,” she admits. And yet Amara didn’t consider becoming an actress until she was well ensconced in the City earning a fortune – to an observer the writing was on the wall. “I know, I know,” she shrugs. “But growing up [in Wimbledon] I never said I wanted to be an actress because I had no notion that it was a way of making a living. It was so removed from my reality that it would have been like saying I wanted to be a pop star when I grew up,” she laughs.

“So although I acted the whole way through school and university, being an actress always sounded too far-fetched. “I didn’t have any actors in my family so even though it was what I wanted to do in my heart of hearts and I should have just taken the plunge, instead I decided to use my degree from Oxford to go to the City and earn loads of money. I decided I could have a happy life there rather than struggle being an unemployed actress,” she sighs.

Except that she found working in an office interminable. “I just didn’t enjoy that way of working. And that’s the thing about acting – it doesn’t feel like work. I thrive off it instead. So I’m fully out of the closet now,” she smiles.

That much is obvious. But even then it wasn’t easy: “My parents were really worried obviously, but I would be if I was a parent with a daughter who wanted to be an actress. Because we didn’t know the first thing about the industry, agents or casting directors.

“I was starting at Ground Zero so they were suitably concerned,” she recalls.

“And I still wouldn’t advise anyone to go into this lightly because you do come under scrutiny and rejection, and it’s really, really tough because you never know where your next job’s coming from. So for me it’s not about meteoric rise,” she says, bringing the conversation to a neat end, “but about having a sustained career and doing things that challenge me. Which is why I’m playing Hero in Much Ado About Nothing in the West End next and getting back on stage. It’s time to do something different and I like variety.

“The acting is the release but you have to stretch yourself, focus, prepare and challenge yourself. That’s the thing about acting, it’s all-consuming.”

An Oxford girl through and through then.

* A Fantastic Fear of Everything is released nationwide on Friday June 8.