She has also returned to television, playing the supporting role of Queen Sophie-Anne on True Blood from 2009 to 2011 and playing Kate Winslet's character's daughter in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), a role for which she was nominated for the Golden Globe and Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

As of 2016, she plays the sentient android Dolores Abernathy in the HBO television series Westworld, for which she won a Critics' Choice Award and earned a Golden Globe nomination.

Dexter, meanwhile, goes travelling, then falls into tele-vision and finds dubious celebrity presenting vapid youth programmes, but soon spirals into the hinterland of cable gaming shows, relying on drugs and alcohol to prop him up.

And it charts their emotional lives: Emma longs for Dexter but finds herself living with a man she doesn't love, a failed comedian called Ian, while Dexter keeps his feelings for Emma at arm's length and instead moves between conquests before marrying Sylvie, an ice blonde from the Home Counties.

Since 2008, Wood has appeared in more mainstream films, including The Wrestler (2008), Whatever Works (2009) and The Ides of March (2011).

Her personal life, particularly her relationship with Marilyn Manson, to whom she was previously engaged, has attracted press attention.

Her father, Ira David Wood III, is a locally prominent actor, singer, theater director, playwright, and from a Christian family; he is the Executive Director of a local regional theatre company called Theatre in the Park.

The production team behind the film has taken no chances: David Nicholls, already a successful screenwriter, wrote the script; Lone Scherfig, who caused a sensation in 2009 with the Oscar-nominated An Education, directed; and Anne Hathaway, a bankable Hollywood star, was chosen for Emma. 'It was really important to find an actor who could be touching and appealing and attractive,' Nicholls says, 'and convey all that in a character who isn't particularly eloquent or full of self-knowledge, who at his lowest point is pretty repulsive.' That person is Jim Sturgess.

Probably best known for his first feature film, Julie Taymor's Across the Universe (2007), a musical love story told through Beatles songs, Sturgess could be described as an industry secret, whose career to date has been an intriguing mix of Hollywood (The Other Boleyn Girl and 21) and independent films (Fifty Dead Men Walking and Heartless).