Barely 19, Mia Wasikowska has already been attacked by a killer crocodile, raped by her gym teacher, been a refugee, undergone intensive therapy and attempted suicide.

Fortunately, these traumatic events were only in film. The native Australian has already gained an American following and a number of fan sites that are eagerly awaiting her performance as Alice in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

"We met a lot of people," said Burton told The Mail Online, "but she just had that certain kind of emotional toughness, standing her ground in a way that makes her kind of an older person with a younger person's mentality."

Wasikowska actually had a relatively placid early life in the Australian capital of Canberra. Born Oct. 14, 1989, she was first interested in dance, switching to acting "because I could connect as an actor to emotion."

She also discovered a talent for pretending to be someone else.

"I was probably a bit of a mimic when I was a kid," she said in a Variety interview, "and I used to imitate people."

Of Polish descent, she picked up an Eastern European accent from an aunt and an American way of speaking from watching U.S. television programs.

Wasikowska's breakthrough in the U.S. came with "In Treatment," an HBO series starring Gabriel Byrne. Wasikowska played a troubled, suicidal Eastern European gymnast who had been sexually molested by her coach and tried to cut her wrists. The show tried to recreate what it was like to be a regular psychiatric patient, even to the point that Wasikowska’s Sophie appeared just on Wednesdays.

"I have an American agency in LA and they sent me the script and I went up to my agent in Sydney and I put myself on tape and did a test and then I sent it over to my [LA] agent and she gave it to [executive producer] Rodrigo [Garcia] and about a week later, I was in America," she told Variety.

It was grueling schedule for someone so young -- each of the show's 43 episodes took two days to film. But Wasikowska, who was never a gymnast, climbed into her character to the point of demonstrating her balance beam technique to Byrne's psychiatrist on the back of his office couch.

In Burton’s psychedelic version of “Alice in Wonderland,” set for release in March of 2010, Wasikowska will be appearing along with Johnny Depp, Helen Bonham Carter and 2008  Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway. Depp, not surprisingly, portrays the Mad Hatter and Carter the evil queen.

Wasikowska already knew about becoming someone named Alice – that’s the name of her character in the 2009 film “Defiance,” in which she plays a Polish refugee opposite Daniel Craig, the latest James Bond.