According to family legend, there was a snowstorm on the night in 1982 when Gabrielle Mary Antonia Hoffmann – Gaby – was taken home from the hospital to her mother's apartment at the Chelsea Hotel. Of course Hoffmann did not yet know she had been born into downtown New York artistic royalty. Her mother Viva (née Janet Sue Hoffmann) appeared in Andy Warhol's movies and lived at the Chelsea with Gaby's 11-year-old half-sister Alexandra, her daughter with ex-husband Michel Auder – the French video artist who later married the photographer Cindy Sherman. (Hoffmann's actual father was the actor Anthony Herrera.)  Her mother co-wrote a book, as yet unpublished, called Gaby at the Chelsea, a riff on Eloise at the Plaza. Instead of making rich-girl mischief like Eloise, the Gaby in the storybook would undertake uniquely downtown adventures, like finding a vial of crack in the stairwell. In Hoffmann's real life she grew up in a bohemian demi-monde filled with writers and photographers and experimental artists. Viva and her daughters led a scrappy existence in the Chelsea; Gaby remembers how, on her way to school every morning, the hotel manager would pull her into his office and give her the same speech: "I don't want to have to kick you out, but tell your mother she needs to come up with the rent."  Of her childhood Hoffmann says now: "We lived in a classless society. We'd spend a summer at Gore Vidal's house in Italy, but we were on and off welfare." That ended for good, though, when Hoffmann became an actor at the age of five and, a year later, a movie star. A family friend who worked in advertising had suggested that Gaby try to get work in commercials, and she was successful immediately. Later, with roles in films such as Field of Dreams, Uncle Buck and Sleepless in Seattle, she became one of the most recognisable child stars of the early 1990s. A precocious actor – and fabulous talk-show guest – Hoffmann possessed the kind of arresting vivaciousness and cheerful, unselfconscious vigour that acting coaches can't teach.  Then, when Hoffmann turned 17, she did what so few in-demand actors do: she disappeared. She took the portion of her earnings that had been kept aside for her as part of American child-labour laws and went to college to figure out what she really wanted to do with her life. Since then her acting career has been mostly dormant – until this year. She has starred in several movies that have been making their way through festivals, including Crystal Fairy, a Sundance favourite. She appeared memorably in the third season premiere of the American comedy-drama series Louie, and Lena Dunham wrote a part for her in Girls, in which she plays Caroline, a dark and electric new character – a woman who stands, knickerless, breaking a glass in her bare hands.  But she's also finding that the acting industry she left behind is very different now. A few months ago I sat with Hoffmann, now 32, on a lumpy queen-size mattress in the upstairs bedroom of a rented brownstone in Brooklyn. She was wearing an old greenish nylon nightgown, a striped wool cardigan and a pregnant belly prosthetic that itched badly. She was resting between takes of an episode of a web series she's been starring in, Lyle, which has been described as "a lesbian Rosemary's Baby". She plays the Rosemary.  As the crew began to fill the rented birthing tub for the climactic delivery scene, Hoffmann caught up on her email by tapping on an iPhone that had seen better days: the screen was cracked, and parts of it were held together by blue duct tape. I asked her what kind of iPhone it was. She answered: "A broken one", laughed and went back to typing. A minute later she looked up and, apropos of nothing, said: "I love Beyoncé." Hoffmann had everyone's attention. "I do. But I was walking down the street and saw this huge billboard for the documentary she made about herself called Life is But a Dream. Underneath the billboard is this homeless guy, then there's me with $2 in my bank account, and I am thinking: 'Life is but a dream?' I mean, I love you, B, but really?"  For this web series, Hoffmann agreed to a payment of $25 per day, though later, when the producers found they were under budget, they upped her to $100 per day. So you might say money isn't a priority. She sighs and throws her hair up into a bun. A word on her hair: it's big and brown, with a few grey strands now salted through, and there is just so much of it – a wall of hair. When she runs her hands through it, it stays where she leaves it. It is huge but obedient. Once you absorb the vastness of her hair, her eyebrows are not without context. They are hairy dashes that knit and weave and bob in the most exaggerated form of whatever expression she's making. They underline the rivets on her forehead that are, as she enters her 30s, a result of all this lifelong expressiveness.  And she's not, you might say, as image-conscious as most actors her age. At one point she told me a story about something that happened to her at Sundance. In Crystal Fairy she plays a wandering hippy, and she spends a good portion of the movie naked. At a party following the film's debut at Sundance, two women approached her to compliment her performance and then ask how she'd got the merkin – a pubic wig – to adhere. "No," she explained to the two women. "That's just me. I'm a human. I have hair."  Hoffmann doesn't think it's fair to compare her with the typical modern child star, or the modern survivor of child stardom either. "I was never as famous as all these kids," she says. "There was no social media. We weren't celebrity-obsessed as a culture. These kids are under a crazy microscope: they're basically brands. And they eventually implode and act out. They need a break, and they're not getting one." For all that her family depended on her talent and skill, Hoffmann never felt she couldn't walk away from acting; she never felt she was less important than what she could help provide.  Claire Danes, with whom Hoffmann became good friends as a teenager, suggests, counterintuitively, that it was actually the permissiveness of the environment that saved both of them. "Growing up in downtown New York City in the 1980s, we were ensconced in art and progressive thinking," says Danes. "Our parents all experimented with raising us in a fairly loose, unorthodox way. A huge emphasis was placed on creativity, and our artistic efforts were never dismissed as childish. There was a sense that we – kids and grown-ups – all had the potential to make something of value. We never felt patronised." People often associate child stars with overbearing stage mothers, but Hoffmann says that wasn't the case with her. "It was because of who my mother is that I ended up living a life surrounded by extraordinary people, all of whom have played a major part in who I am today and why I turned out the way I did."  The money from her child-acting days is gone and she'd like a home, some stability, all while pursuing projects that interest her. She hates that all her stuff is in storage.  Hoffmann followed her sister to Bard College, then spent her 20s trying to work out what she wanted to do with her life. She interned with a chef in Italy; she trained to be a doula after helping deliver her sister's kids. She and her former boyfriend were living in a vintage trailer in the Catskills when Hoffmann realised it was time to find a creative direction in her life. Acting kept pulling at her. "I was obsessed with figuring out if it was something I would have come to as an adult on my own," she says. "And it was almost like I couldn't do it until I answered that question. It was just always like a total existential crisis when I would get an audition, and it was torturing me. I couldn't commit to any other line of work because I wasn't willing to take myself completely away from the acting." She decided to dedicate a year to saying yes to every audition but to picking only projects she liked and found artistically fulfilling, at least while her money held out.  Hoffmann's world has shifted seismically since she was the alt-Eloise at the Chelsea Hotel. Anthony Herrera died in 2011 from cancer. Michael Auder and Cindy Sherman are divorced. Viva lives in Palm Springs now. Times Square is so bright and shiny that you can practically see it from space. Nobody has pubic hair any more. The Chelsea Hotel, a one-time stalwart symbol of all that was great and dirty in the city, has been sold, and Gaby Hoffmann can do no more than squint through the scaffolding to see what used to be her home.  Sebastián Silva, who directed Crystal Fairy, fell in love with Hoffmann when she auditioned for a recurring role on his HBO digital series The Boring Life of Jacqueline. Silva was looking for actors who could speak Quebecois French, but was willing to settle for traditional French. Hoffmann showed up but admitted she didn't know French at all. "She was so loud and kind of aggressive, even, it threw me off," he says. "I thought she was too much for me. I didn't know what to do with her."  So he hired her. And when Silva set out to film Crystal Fairy, a biographical account of a road trip he took 12 years before in Chile to drink the hallucinogenic product of the San Pedro cactus, he had only one actor in mind for the free spirit of the title role. He contends that Hoffmann could tweeze her eyebrows, shave her armpits and act like everyone else, but she would never be able to quash her essential Gaby Hoffmann-ness, the thing that made Lena Dunham write the role in Girls just for her or that makes people like the writer-director Jill Soloway seek her out without a project in mind, just in the hope that they'll find something to do together.  "She inspires that in people," Soloway says. "She's got this fast-talking-but-intellectual, unfolding, unravelling adorableness." Silva puts it more bluntly. "She's an anarchist," he says. "She could be wearing a Cinderella dress and she'd still be a mess."
Brought up in the wild excesses of New York's Chelsea Hotel, Gaby Hoffmann has never conformed. Now, after a decade-long disappearance, she's back as an indie film goddess – and star of Girls. Taffy Brodesser-Akner reports