Rabbit-Proof Fence was the film that brought one of the most shameful episodes in Australia's history to the attention of the world. "Not since the last shots of Schindler's List have I been so overcome with the realisation that real people, in recent historical times, had to undergo such inhumanity," wrote the late, revered American film writer Roger Ebert of the acclaimed picture.

At its centre was a single performance by an 11-year-old Aboriginal girl, an untrained actor from the Kimberley. Everlyn Sampi played Molly Craig, who was mercilessly stolen from her mother in 1931 and removed to a mission. Craig escaped with her sister and cousin following the fence, which bisected Australia, for 2,400km, to return home.

Critics lauded her. "Sampi rarely faces the camera; her gaze eludes us, but her strength and wilfulness jump off the screen," wrote the Seattle Times. It was an "exceptionally strong performance" in the words of the Guardian film reviewer Peter Bradshaw. In 2002, she won the best actress award at the Inside Film awards, voted for by the Australian public.

Research published this weekend by Screen Australia, examining the strength of the Australian film industry, said the film was the "most widely (spontaneously) discussed film of the entire study, with participants of both genders and across all age groups sharing how revelatory, thought-provoking and even transformative they found it".

For the film's director, acclaimed Hollywood veteran Phillip Noyce, Sampi's performance was up there with the most memorable of his career. A presence he said he'd only witnessed twice before, "once in Angelina Jolie and again in Nicole Kidman. And now for the third time I have seen it in Everlyn."

But 11 years on from the film's release, it is near impossible to track Sampi down. She has all but disappeared from public life.

Everlyn Sampi with Laura Monaghan and Tianna Sansbury in Rabbit-Proof Fence. Photograph: South Australian Film Corporation

For the past few weeks our scheduled meetings have been cancelled, and I've all but given up hope of talking to her. But eventually we meet one early Saturday morning at Sydney airport before she flies back to her home in Broome, Western Australia, following the funeral of her stepfather. This is the first time she has talked to a journalist for an extended interview.

She explains it was the city itself that made meeting up difficult. "I don't know Sydney," she says. "It's too busy, too big. I don't really like it. The smell is toxic … All the cars and trucks. I can't breathe properly."

We sit in a corner of the vast departure lounge. Sampi is dressed as if for winter, her hands in woollen gloves, a scarf draped around her neck, wearing a thick jumper. She looks older than her 24 years of age. But still something sparkles. Noyce said she had the ability to "radiate light, to radiate energy". The production team auditioned about 2,000 Aboriginal girls, almost all of whom were untrained actors, predominantly from rural communities. Sampi's ability shone.

I ask her what she thinks when she watches herself back on film now. "I try not to watch it that much," she says, her voice muted by the swell of the room, "because I think of all my elderly that's been taken away … it changed our cycle of life and how we live." For Everlyn the stolen generations are a lived reality: her mother, Glenys, was taken as a four-year-old child, removed to a mission and eventually reunited with her mother, 10 years later.

"But then I get the happy part of it. Me so young and cute, how I help the girls to go back to their home and their land … I see myself as a role model for all the Indigenous, telling their story."

There was an understanding from the beginning that the key to Rabbit-Proof Fence's success lay with casting the right three child protagonists. Noyce traversed the length and breadth of the country, travelling to remote communities throughout Indigenous Australia. The challenge, as he described it, was finding three girls who could readily be identified as Aboriginal, and who would connect with a global audience at the same time.

Sampi was a revelation. A local lawyer and a friend of her mother overheard the crew discussing the project at a guesthouse in Broome. He knew she would be perfect and fetched the family and introduced Everlyn to the director the next day.

An early audition tape sees a shy Everlyn describing her love of fishing and camping. She looks away from camera the whole time, something Noyce later realised was a sign of respect in Aboriginal tradition. He knew almost instantly he'd found a star. Her relationship with the camera was striking: "It's something that happens between the lens and the performer, there's this transfer of incredible energy. But then when you look at the camera, back at the person you were photographing before, without the lens they just seem normal ... It's a star quality," he said.

Eventually Noyce began casting the other two characters around her. The performance is an astonishing achievement. But one, that as I am about to find out, is tied up with personal tragedy.

With such plaudits, the natural expectation was for a blossoming career to follow. The light of child stars often fades, but with a role so mature, so enmeshed in the politics of a nation, it's hard to understand why nothing took off.

"After the movie I just wanted to have a normal teenage life," she tells me. "They offered me movies after, but I told them, no way. I'm going back home."

Why?

"Because I was homesick, and I didn't like getting told [what to do] from white people. I've got a mind of my own. I just drift with the wind."

But the home she returned to had changed immeasurably following her new-found global fame. She was instantly surrounded by people in the community trying to exploit her, "weird people", she says. People she ended up "wasting my money on". Spates of alcoholism followed. She drifted from home to home, living with various family members in Broome. Schooling was difficult. She was in and out of counselling.

As Sampi recounts the detail there is a numbness. She's reeling off the story like it's nothing shocking. And perhaps in the context of the disenfranchised community from which she comes, there is truth in that.

In 2009, the conservative Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt resumed a stinging rebuke of the film, which he had started when it was first released. Furious that the film is shown to thousands of schoolchildren as a teaching aide, Bolt derided it as factually inaccurate, claiming that the portrayal of A O Neville, the Chief Protector of Aboriginals in 1930s Western Australia, as a racist motivated by a belief in white supremacy, was a gross misrepresentation (his argument is broadly discredited by historians who accuse him of historical denialism). But his fiercest criticism was levelled at Noyce's relationship with his child protagonist. He brashly accused the director of taking part in a modern day "stolen generation" – by "pluck[ing] her from a bush town and offer[ing] her a bright future".

Such claims are contradicted by the fact that there is a genuine level of support around Sampi that has not waned since she was first cast. She was not simply left to fend for herself after filming was over, and is in close contact with a network of concerned people, many previously involved in the film. But sometimes things go wrong.

In October, Sampi made headlines after she nearly died in a reportedly horrific accident. The story ran that she dropped a glass bowl and fell on the shards, which slit her throat, slicing her jugular vein.

But this was not an accident. Everlyn says she was assaulted by someone she knew.

"[We] were fighting," she says. "Physically fighting?" I ask. She laughs, as if it couldn't have been anything else. "Yeah. Aggressive fighting. We smashed it out. Me and him got into a lot of fights … I'm pretty tough." She looks fragile for the first time. "But not that tough."

The two grappled, and Sampi fell to the floor as the bowl smashed. "Part of my body just fell onto it. I stabbed my neck, I didn't feel anything. I pushed myself up. I saw blood …"

She was driven to the local hospital in Broome, and recalls trying to calm herself to slow her heart rate as the blood pulsed out of her. The injury was so severe she was flown to Perth for emergency surgery. Her heart stopped twice before she reached the operating table. It was nearly fatal.

All that remains now is a small scar on her neck – she pulls back her scarf and points to it. "We're kind of mad, us Aboriginals. We fight," she says.

Four and a half thousand kilometres separate Broome from Sydney (where her agent is based), a five-hour plane journey. It is this lack of proximity that partly explains why Sampi's career has yet to fly. With the Australian film industry decamped on the other side of the country, auditioning is tough. Despite all this she made two guest appearances on SBS drama The Circuit, a number of years ago.

The truth, however, is that she was battling demons before she was first "discovered".

In Following the Rabbit-Proof Fence, a behind-the-scenes documentary released after the film, there are short moments where her angst as an 11-year-old is glimpsed. When her braided hair is cut before the shoot she is obviously distressed. Noyce later commented that she tried to flee from the set before filming began – she was once found in a telephone booth trying to book a flight back to Broome (filming took place in Adelaide).

I ask about her difficulty with literacy: Everlyn learned to read and write only recently. She had struggled with school before the film. She started "drinking and stealing and robbing" from the age of nine, but says her childhood before that was idyllic.

Then, one day, she says everything changed. At the age of eight, Everlyn says she was sexually assaulted. It took her a further 10 years to tell anyone about it.

"I respected them and I knew them … He took advantage of me. Took me out somewhere dark in the scary places and from there I just changed. I hated myself, I didn't like who I was. It kind of killed me."

Just as in her early auditions, Sampi doesn't engage me in eye contact. Her gaze is locked off to my right. "When I was doing the movie, I thought I wasn't the right person to get the part because of what happened to me …"

Years later she reported the matter to the police.

Since then, Sampi says, she has considered suicide a number of times.

There is no doubting, however, that the film was one of the most positive experiences in her life. She says: "The movie made me love myself again. It brought me back. I had all these experiences, all this lovely thank you from everybody … even the Indigenous mob, they cry when they see me [on screen] and it makes me proud. It makes me feel that I actually did something."

Sampi spoke at the film's release about her desire to one day have children, to lead a steady life. "I want to have a car and a house first and want to make sure everything is ready," she said.

Is she ready now? "I don't know … I can't even fall pregnant. It might be when I find the right one, but [now] I'm not because it's a distraction in my life. I try to be there for them, I try to love them, and it's not enough."

But she feels like she's reached a turning point. She's got a place of her own in Broome and is comfortable, for the first time, talking about her childhood experience. She says she wants to perform again, to sing, to act, to model. It doesn't matter. She recalls fondly the times before the assault happened when her brothers and sisters would create plays and make up stories. Performance, she says, is natural for her.

There is an assured degree of resolve as she talks about the future. "I was drinking at a young age, I was smoking at a young age, because I wanted to kill myself. I thought drinking and smoking would do it. But it didn't … for a reason."

Larissa Behrendt, the academic and author of the Australia Screen Classics reader on Rabbit-Proof Fence, hears Sampi's story. "It's striking that we think of her as representing so well the story of the stolen generation experience, when in fact she was actually living this life that represents issues facing just too many young Indigenous people," she says.

"She became such a hero as an actress, but the story she's telling now, about her life is even greater act of bravery."

It was probably the obvious question 11 years ago when the film came out, but I ask it again. Does Everlyn still see part of herself in Molly?

"Yeah, because she's a strong woman. Having that strength and that thought to go back home, I would do that. If I really wanted to, I would go back home."