Rosario Dawson says she’s amazed to still be working in Hollywood 20 years after she made her debut.

Diego Luna and Rosario Dawso
Diego Luna and Rosario Dawson (PA)

The 35-year-old Sin City star, who hit the red carpet in LA to announce the nominations for the Film Independent Spirit Awards, first arrived on the big screen in the 1995 independent film Kids, about a group of teenagers in New York.

Rosario, who announced the honours alongside Milk actor Diego Luna, said independent cinema changed her life.

“I was hanging out on my stoop at 15 years old when Harmony Korine and Larry Clark (the writer and director of Kids) came up to me and said ‘we are making a movie, do you want to be in it?’ I auditioned, got the part and I worked four days on that movie and it came out a year later…

“We had a big premiere in New York and I got flown up Pretty Woman-style and all of a sudden I got an agent and finished up high school.”

She added: “This summer was my 20-year acting anniversary and the summer coming up is the 20-year anniversary of Kids coming out and it’s amazing to still be here and amazing to be able to talk about it and share it with people and say your dreams can come true.”

Birdman led the pack with six nominations for best feature, lead actor Michael Keaton, supporting actor Edward Norton, supporting actress Emma Stone, director Alejandro G Inarritu, as well as its cinematographer.

Boyhood and Martin Luther King biopic Selma, as well as Nightcrawler, Whiplash and Love Is Strange also received multiple nods from the nominating committee.

Rosario will next be seen in Chris Rock’s comedy Top Five, which sparked a bidding war between film studios when it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year.

“This was Chris’s vision. He wrote it, directed it, he stars in it, he produced it, he believes in it, he wrangled all of us together and what could have been a noise of comics into something really brilliant and poignant and smart and awesome,” she said.

Top Five arrives in UK cinemas on March 20, 2015.