get in to any of them. I was really disappointed with myself. I wasn't quite sure if I'd be legitimate without training for three years in a more traditional sense". Instead, she studied an arts degree at Sydney University. "I still have great memories of those days: studying, working, auditioning. Just being a jobbing actor trying to figure out life after high school". In 1999, Byrne studied acting at the Atlantic Theater Company, which was developed by David Mamet and William H. Macy. Career 1994–2006: Beginnings Byrne obtained her first film role in Dallas Doll (1994) when she was 15 years old. Throughout the 1990s, she appeared in several Australian television shows, such as Wildside (1997) and Echo Point (1995), and starred as an alterna-girl love interest in the film Two Hands (1999), opposite fellow up-and-coming actor Heath Ledger. A role in the award-winning film My Mother Frank (2000) was followed by her first leading role in Clara Law's The Goddess of 1967 (also 2000), which gained her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 57th Venice International Film Festival. Byrne revealed in a post-award interview that, prior to winning the Venice Film Festival Award, she was surprised by her own performance and found it confronting watching the film because her acting was "too depressing". Byrne admitted that "watching myself is confronting because I'm convinced I can't act and I want to get out, that's how insecure I am." On stage, Byrne starred in La Dispute and in a production of Anton Chekhov's classic Three Sisters at the Sydney Theatre Company. In 2002, she made her first appearance in a Hollywood film with a brief appearance as Dormé, the handmaiden to Natalie Portman's Senator Padmé Amidala, in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. She also appeared in the 2002 thriller City of Ghosts, with Matt Dillon. Byrne had flown to the UK to shoot I Capture the Castle (2003), Tim Fywell's adaptation of the 1948 novel of the same title by Dodie Smith. In it, she portrayed Rose Mortmain, the elder sister of Romola Garai's Cassandra. In 2003, Byrne starred in three Australian films; The Night We Called It a Day, with Melanie Griffith and Dennis Hopper; The Rage in Placid Lake, with Ben Lee; and Take Away, alongside Vince Colosimo, Stephen Curry, John Howard and Nathan Phillips. All films were comedies and opened to varying