A young, almost unknown British actor has been catapulted to stardom in America this weekend with the release of a low-budget vampire film called Twilight.

Robert Pattinson, 22, who has never played a film lead before, is set to become a multi-millionaire as cinema managers start to count the receipts.

This weekend, while Pattinson listens to rock music in a rented flat in Los Angeles, besieged by teenage girls, his Hollywood agents are negotiating a deal for sequels that could earn him $10m (£6.8m).

Pattinson, whose first big screen roles were as Cedric Diggory in two Harry Potter films, plays Edward, a handsome, brooding vampire. He lives off animal blood while wooing the accident-prone human Bella, who has just moved to a lumber town called Forks.

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BACKGROUND

• Stephenie Meyer's Twilight book scrapped after Internet leak

• Fancy man: Robert Pattinson

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• The sexless vampire who’s so seductive

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BACKGROUND

• Twilight

Related Links

• Release of new Harry Potter delayed

• Last Potter turns into two films

The story was the work of Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon housewife, who has said that it came to her in a dream. She visited the real town of Forks, Washington, only after finishing the book.

The film will open in Britain on December 19.

Meyer, 34, who said she wrote the book to pay off debts on her minivan, has sold 25m books since Twilight was published in 2005. Some have called her the next J K Rowling – although the Harry Potter series has sold 400m copies since 1997 and has a wider appeal than the teenage girl fans and their mothers, who call themselves “Twilighters”.

They block-booked hundreds of cinemas in advance and turned up to queue hours before performances started at midnight last Thursday to sing songs from the soundtrack, which had sold 250,000 records in the fortnight before the film’s release. The music includes tunes sung by Pattinson, who describes himself as a Van Morrison fan.

Camera crews filming the celebration noted that most of the girls were wearing Pattinson T-shirts and chanting “We Love Edward”. The 6ft 1in actor admitted he has been taken aback by the attention, which started in July when teenagers mobbed shops selling Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the Twilight series. It sold 1.3m copies on the first day.

Pattinson has said his life has largely been that of a typical middle-class Londoner. He was educated at The Harrodian school, west London, “where I discovered hair gel and aspired to be Jack Nicholson”.

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