JANEO'CONNELL stands back to talk to stunt-double Nikki Berwick, who is fighting her way to film stardom

Nikki Berwick is cutely pretty (big blue eyes, blonde ponytail), and bubbly.

But this epitome of girl-next-door sweetness could kick your teeth in with one well-aimed movement from a shapely leg.

At just 21, this karate black-belt already has several credits to her name as a stunt double and has just returned from China after playing the part of an assassin in a martial arts film called Black Mask II.

It's a career which is not for the faint-hearted. Stunts involve fierce fights using weapons which she admits leave bruises and which could be lethal were the scenes not minutely choreographed.

Even so, she has had accidents. She ripped the fleshy part found between the gum and the upper lip during a fight on set. Fortunately there were no stitches and she took just two days off.

Indeed, she counts herself lucky that it wasn't her nose or teeth which took the brunt of the slightly out-of-kilter move by her opponent.

She was also recently very badly bruised on her leg - she shows me a shin which is mostly yellow - after a misplaced camera got in the way of a kick. The impact was so great that the area is now swollen and needs hospital attention.

However, Nikki, of Winterswyck Avenue, Canvey, remains unfazed by the potential hazard to her looks: "It's part of the job.

"We are professionals and it goes wrong very, very rarely anyway." And because of the adrenaline rush, she says she doesn't really feel the pain.

It's fair to say this former pupil of the island's Furtherwick Park School is a trouper. She only went to her first martial arts class, aged eight, to keep her best friend company and at first it didn't really didn't appeal to her.

However, her naturally good balance and co-ordination, plus the flexibility which had been built up through doing gymnastics from five, stood her in good stead. Her friend soon dropped out and Nikki started going to lessons alone.

Her potential was soon spotted and the training began in earnest. She was entering competitions when she was 13, which involved martial arts sequences set to music.

Such was the young Nikki's motivation that she would come home from school, eat her dinner and then train from around 5pm to 9pm. Every night.

No surprise then to learn that she weighed just 5st 7lbs by the time she was 14 years old, despite eating healthily, because whatever she consumed was being burned off by exercise.

Her GP advised eating her meal before going to bed, which did enable her to put weight on. However, Nikki says her GP believes she has stunted her development by such exertion while she was growing up.

A fall-out with her instructor means she has been her own trainer since her mid-teens. She certainly doesn't lack motivation; her training schedule is rigorous.

Mondays see her at Waterside Sports Centre gym (this daughter of Castle Point has free use of facilities), where she puts in a two-hour session lifting weights, and running. In the afternoon she'll do an hour's kick-boxing and two hours of gymnastics in the evening.

Most days she'll put in a two-hour gym session, plus two to three hours martial arts training, plus a couple of gymnastic classes. "I love it," she smiles.

While the film work pays well, Nikki's bread-and-butter work comes from the martial arts shows. She is sponsored to go all over the world to appear in the productions by Qwon, a martial arts and fitness wear and equipment company.

In her five years with the company she has been to Holland, Chicago, Atlanta, Japan and France. It's glamorous, but it's also hard work and she misses her boyfriend, who lives down the road.

She has been with him for four-and-a-half years and they are engaged. "He's very supportive. I can't tell you his name because he wouldn't like it."

Nikki's break into films began in September 1996 after she was picked as a stunt double for the film Mortal Kombat II. Her double was martial arts actress Sandra Hess, who plays a character called Sonia Blade.

Filming took place at studios in Watford and in the less than glamorous surrounds of a quarry in Wales, where there was plenty of mud for wrestling and rocks to pretend to smash your opponents against.

Nikki shows me a clip on video of a fight sequences. The kicks, punches, jumps and weapon thrusts are razor quick. The line between a beautifully-executed move and disfigurement is about a millimetre wide.

It finishes with Nikki, plastered in mud, being flung against a pile of rocks. "They were polystyrene," she tells me, seeing me wince.

Her next - and biggest - break came last May when she was competing in a show. She was spotted by an agent, to whom she signed with three months later.

Last autumn she flew out to China (don't ask her where, all she knows is that it was about 30 minutes drive from Hong Kong) to film Extreme Challenge.

Not so much a film as a Gladiators-goes-East extravaganza, the action could only be watched by those with access to the internet.

Fifty contestants were put through an elimination course which involved swinging across water on ropes, being pushed from platforms and into water, which is where Nikki, now whittled down to the last eight, had her demise.

However, she did well enough to get a part in a trailer for the martial arts film Black Mask 11, and flew out to China again for ten days earlier this month.

If the trailer gets a good response from the film industry, it will be made into a feature-length movie.

In it Nikki plays the part of a killer, dressed in traditional Chinese silk sheath dress, who is possessed of six bionic-type arms which are created by computer overlay.

Future film work may well be in the pipeline and her ultimate ambition is to make the transition from limited-audience films into Arnie-type Hollywood action features.

Certainly, although a stable home life beckons, Nikki is in no rush for children. "I would like them but not yet," she says firmly. "I've dedicated 13 years of my life learning how to give and take kicks and I want to carry on."

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.