The `Blue Valentine` actress - who sought legal emancipation from her parents at 15 to make it easier to embark on an acting career - thought it would be easy to go off the rails if she didn`t impose restrictions on herself when she was first starting out.

She said: "There were no limits, no rules. I made mistakes and tried to implement my own safety rules.

"I thought of it like those partitions you have at bowling alleys - the stuff I will do, the stuff that I won`t do. Although I still veered crazily across the lanes, I didn`t fall in the gutter."

The 30-year-old actress - who has five-year-old daughter Matilda with her former fiance, the late Heath Ledger - found Los Angeles life didn`t suit her, and she was glad when she landed her breakthrough role in TV show `Dawson`s Creek` in 1997 and could move to North Carolina.

She admitted: "I kind of slugged my way through, but I didn`t enjoy life in Los Angeles. In North Carolina you could crawl into a shell like a snail and not come out. It was quite a contrast."
sections: Celebrities