VIRGINIA NICHOLSON, the great-niece of Virginia Woolf, has wrestled with the complexities of art imitating life ever since she took an interest in the forthcoming film about her great-aunt, The Hours.

Focusing on a day in the life of Woolf, and starring Nicole Kidman as the tragic literary heroine, it has already won two Golden Globes and looks set to achieve further acclaim at the Oscars.

But Nicholson has deep reservations about the casting (even though Kidman is widely tipped to win the Best Actress award), and believes that many factual details have been distorted woefully.

“Just imagine if someone had made a film about your relatives. How would it feel if you were watching a film featuring three of Hollywood’s biggest stars and your father, brother and aunt were portrayed in it? How can I possibly look at the film objectively? From my angle, whatever they do is going to be wrong.”

Nicholson’s Bloomsbury credentials are faultless: her grandmother was the painter Vanessa Bell, Woolf’s sister, and her father the painter and art historian Quentin Bell.

Some of her earliest memories are of idyllic summer holidays spent at her grandmother’s much-loved Sussex retreat, Charleston, near Firle, and of being painted by Vanessa and her bisexual lover Duncan Grant in their studio.Their art and values have pervaded her life since childhood.

“I grew up in a world where people threw pots and painted them in bright swirls of pattern, where books, art and conversation were admired above television and sport,” she says, sitting in her cosy Sussex living-room, dotted with Bloomsbury-style, hand-painted furniture. “For me, this is their legacy.”

One senses that it is a legacy she could not have escaped, even if she had tried.

The fact that she was christened Virginia is, of course, no coincidence, and her tall, willowy frame and fine, delicate features bear more than a passing resemblance to those of her namesake.

The Hours explores the reverberations which Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway has on the lives of two disparate women in the middle and at the end of the 20th century.

With a script by David Hare adapted from the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by the American writer Michael Cunningham, and direction by Stephen Daldry, the project had sufficient allure to attract Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and, more controversially, Kidman.

She had been reluctant to take the part, intimidated by the iconic aspect of Woolf’s reputation and fearful that she would not be up to the job. And Nicholson, while having the greatest admiration for Kidman’s acting abilities, finds herself in agreement.

“Well, I think it was very odd casting,” she says bluntly. “She’s not the right age and she has a very different kind of beauty. If they had left it to me, I would have cast Meryl Streep — but Streep already plays another role. And let’s not kid ourselves, they cast Kidman because she’s a star.”