Holly Valance was just 16 when she set teenage boys’ pulses racing as Felicity “Flick” Scully, a coquettish, conniving teenager in Neighbours. Three years later she employed the same devilish charms to propel Kiss Kiss, her debut single, to the top of the UK charts, bagging GQ’s woman of the year award into the bargain. Then her second album flopped, she fired her manager, got taken to court for breach of contract and, within months, seemed to vanish in a puff of dry ice and bad PR.

Five years later, Valance is back on our radars. Still only 25, she’s currently appearing with Liam Neeson in the film Taken, a thriller written and produced by Luc Besson. She plays a pop star - hardly a stretch - but carries off the role ably enough, has other acting roles in the pipeline, and, most importantly for all those now grown-up “Flick” fans - she still looks the part.

That on-screen naughty streak runs through into real life, though, and nowhere is it more evident than in Valance’s passion for fast cars. As a naive car-mad 16-year-old, she found herself sharing a flat with a group of “cool and bad” girls in their mid-twenties. When her flatmates discovered she could drive, they took no time in recruiting her as their chauffeur. In exchange for collecting them from parties, Valance was given the chance to get behind the wheel of their cars. “I was driving around underage without a licence,” she admits sheepishly. “Very naughty. From the age of five, all I wanted to do was drive. I would drive around with a friend in a cool car and then get a call [from my flatmates] at three or four in the morning and I would go and pick them up.” She bought her first car - a A$20,000 Mitsubishi imported from Japan - at 17, still a few months shy of the legal driving age. Fortunately for Valance, she escaped any incidents and now regrets her impatience. “It was foolish,” she admits. “I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to do the same thing. I was just too desperate to drive.”

Valance grew up in Melbourne and attended a Roman Catholic high school before Neighbours made her an overnight star. Her mother is English, and a relation (a cousin twice removed) of Benny Hill, the late comedian. Her father, Rajko Vukadinovic, is a musician, originally from Serbia (she’s Holly Rachel Vukadinovic - Valance is a stage name). Coco and Olympia, her younger sisters, still live at home with their mother (her parents are divorced) but Valance was always in a hurry to get on with life. “I seem to have been in a rush since the age of four,” she says. “I feel that I’m never doing enough.”

When her pop career took off in 2002, things moved a little too quickly, even for Valance: “When you’re famous in the UK, it’s like ‘whoa’. I would get nervous when I left the house.” She took up kick-boxing as a way to boost her confidence. “I did 2½ hours a day, five days a week, in London,” she says. “It was the thing that kept me sane.”

She remains car crazy, however, and now has a BMW X5 parked in the driveway of the gated apartment in West Hollywood she shares with boyfriend Alex O’Loughlin, a fellow Australian actor. “I met him at a girlfriend’s house, when he was helping her out repairing things,” she says. “I took one look at this gorgeous Aussie, with his top off in the sunshine, standing in the back yard hammering some nails into a fence . . .”

Valance seems to have pulled off the move to Los Angeles; she has won roles in CSI and Prison Break over the past few years and is to be a guest star in Valentine, a new TV show that starts in the US tonight. But she has a word of warning for other young wannabes. “I see so many mess-ups in LA,” she says. “Most people say, ‘I just want to be famous.’ My sister says the same thing and I say, ‘Careful what you wish for.’ I have craved normality. I have always wanted love and attention from those who know me.”

MY STUFF...

ON MY CD PLAYER

I prefer to drive around listening to my satellite radio, which has about 170 channels. It’s mostly on hip-hop or jazz. I have to be careful what I listen to. Radiohead’s music, for example – which I love – puts me into a strange place. I can feel dark for the rest of the day

ON MY DVD PLAYER

I have just bought every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. There can be a lot of downtime, waiting to be called on set

I WOULD NEVER THROW AWAY

I throw everything away. I have an obsessive compulsive disorder about it. But I keep religious icons. I have lots of crosses, wooden icons and things in my car. I also have many rosaries from Italy and Romania

HOLLY VALANCE: MY LIFE IN CARS

HONDA PRELUDE This sporty coupé was Valance’s first brand new car and cost her about £26,000 when she was 18

BMW X5 She now keeps this luxury 4x4 on the driveway of her gated apartment in West Hollywood

PORSCHE 911 This is Valance’s ideal car and she recently took one for a test drive around Los Angeles

Explore Features

• Porsche

• BMW

• Mercedes

• Ferrari

• Bentley

• Audi

• Maserati

• Aston Martin

• Jaguar

• VW