YOUNG Sandbach actress Leonora Moore has just finished working on two feature films.

Leonora, a former pupil of Sandbach Girls School, didn’t follow the traditional route into acting.

Instead she studied physics at Wadham College in Oxford, specializing in astrophysics and particle physics.

Four years later, she graduated with a masters and then flew off to the East, where she lived teaching English in Japan.

Now back in England she has already finished shooting on two feature films.

Her first feature Dark Waters, shot in Llangollen, saw Leonora playing a ‘free spirited punk druggie’ in a small Welsh town.

She said: “Josie, my character, was so much fun to play. She had this wild hair with red streaks in and she was always on a bit of a high.

“She wasn’t exactly bad, but kind of reckless. It’s great to play a role like that, because it’s like you’re allowed to let that inner reckless side of you out to play.”

The film has recently been accepted into this year’s Raindance festival.

Leonora said: “It’s so exciting, because I feel like I’m only really just finding my feet in this business, and just starting out, and then suddenly I’ve got a lead role credit in a film that’s been entered into the UK’s biggest independent film festival.”

She has followed up Dark Waters with British-Polish horror/thriller Sparrow, which was shot in Ledziny, Poland in June.

The thriller follows a group of campers who head into a forest presumed to be the site of an historic murder.

Leonora said: “It was such a surreal experience being in the middle of this huge forest in Katowice, surrounded by a Polish crew and having gore and make-up applied to me for my gruesome death scene.

“I didn’t know what to expect, what with the crew being entirely Polish, and the cast and director all being English, but we all just clicked, and everybody got on really well.”

Sparrow is now in post-production and will receive its first official showing on Halloween, shortly followed by a British premiere in London.