Getting ready for the upcoming release of Domino movie which is reportedly based on a real story of Domino Harvey, a top model turned bounty hunter, we scrapped the Net for every bit of information about this mysterious figure.

Domino Harvey left the cushioned Beverly Hills lifestyle she knew as the daughter of a famous actor and a Ford agency model to become a bounty hunter and pursue criminals for a living.

Domino Harvey was born in London’s Belgravia in 1970, the product of a three-year affair between her father and Pauline Stone during his second marriage to the American multi-millionairess Joan Cohn.

Laurence Harvey, Domino’s father, had been a major star of the late 1950s and early 1960s, earning an Oscar nomination for his role as the unscrupulous social climber in Room at the Top (1959) and starring as the brainwashed assassin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). After his divorce from Joan, he married Pauline shortly before his death from stomach cancer in 1973.

After Harvey's death, Pauline married Peter Morton, the owner of the American Hard Rock Café chain, and moved to Hollywood.

Domino attended public school in England, but found it difficult to conform to normal standards of behaviour. "I was fighting boys by the age of 10," she recalled. "I was a natural ringleader and troublemaker."

Domino was expelled from four public schools before her gamine beauty won her a job with the leading model agency, Ford. But she hated life on the catwalk and became a girl-about-town, DJ-ing at a nightclub and selling T-shirts at Kensington Market. She also took method acting lessons at the Lee Strasberg drama school.

Yet again Domino was unable to settle. "I was so unhappy trying to be someone I wasn't," she told an interviewer. "I remember thinking one night that my life was meaningless."

Aged 19 Domino Harvey moved to Hollywood, where she assumed a number of roles - running a nightclub, working as a ranch hand and later as a firefighter in San Diego, where she was known as "Dagger Baileys" for her habit of wearing a hunting knife and drinking Irish Cream Liqueur.

To feed her thirst for dangerous thrills and what had now become a full-blown heroin addiction, she drifted into the seedy world of bounty-hunting for a bail bonds agency, tracking down criminals who abscond while free on bail awaiting trial.

Her adventures captured the imagination of Hollywood, and a film based on her life, directed by Tony Scott and starring Keira Knightley, opens later this year. A film based loosely on her life also stars Mickey Rourke, Mena Suvari, Lucy Liu, Christopher Walken, Jacqueline Bisset and Macy Gray, is scheduled for release in October 2005.

In and out of drug rehabilitation for years, on May 4, 2005, Domino was arrested for allegedly dealing methamphetamines. Domino would have likely been sent to jail for up to 10 years, and she was awaiting trial and under house arrest at the time of her death.

Domino Harvey, 35, was found dead in the bathtub of her West Hollywood, Calif., home on June 27, 2005. Cause of death is under investigation.

"Domino never failed to surprise or inspire me over the last 12 years," Tony Scott's press release read. "She was a free spirit like no other I have ever known."

Most of the Domino movie is made up and in no way portrays what her real life was like, producers insist. Domino had a delayed release due to her death so that they could change the ending. The movie is due to be released on November 4th, 2005. 

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