Sherlock star Lara Pulver leaves little to the imagination in daring sheer dress at the BAFTA Awards

She stripped off in Sherlock to the delight of a legion of male fans.And judging by her sartorial choice for the BAFTAs, Lara Pulver clearly relishes being in the nude.The 33-year-old actress, who is making something of a speciality playing femmes fatales, left little to the imagination as she arrived at London's Royal Opera House wearing a made to order flesh-coloured floor-length Yuvna Kim gown covered in glistening, feather-light leaves.

At one stage she attempted to adjust her see-through skirt, under which she wore a pair of platform nudes by Ursula Mascaro, although she appeared unusually shy under the glare of photographers' flash bulbs.The Fleming star, who shot to fame as dominatrix Irene Adler in Sherlock - is a woman capable of turning even the most cerebral sleuth to jelly - and in true form she ensured she was dressed to impress on Sunday night.She’s refreshingly candid on the pressures on actors to conform to body image stereotypes in order to make it big in Hollywood. 

In a recent interviewing promoting her role in Sky's new TV Drama Fleming, in which she plays Ian Fleming's lover Anne O'Neill, she said: ‘You know that in LA you’re being judged the minute you walk in the room. And you see people killing themselves to look this way and that, having surgery so they look a certain way.'
And the Kent-born star was certainly judged in her see-through dress, which revealed glimpses of her underwear when she glided along the red carpet.
Lara had no idea that the 111-second scene in Sherlock – which would be watched by nine million people on New Year's Day 2012, and a further 2.5 million online thereafter, making it BBC iPlayer's most watched of the year – was to change her life.
Speaking of her role in Sherlock, she admits the scene in some ways created a rod for her bare back as she proceeded to be sent a raft of scripts in which she was asked to play women wearing next to nothing.

Lara, now dating Raza Jaffrey, who played Zaf in series three to six of Spooks, has said: ‘What we say no to is sometimes more important than what we say yes to. I’m in this for the long game – I look at Helen Mirren and Judi Dench and that’s where I want to be.'

She adds: 'It wasn’t about the nudity – and the whole scene was so expertly contrived that you saw nary a nipple – it was about the performance. 

‘The majority of women who I’ve spoken to about the scene have talked more to me about how wonderful it was to see a powerful, sexy woman who, by the end of the episode, could crack and be vulnerable, warm and almost childlike. It was a gift of a role.’ 

Over the previous decade, the brunette beauty had starred in everything from Miss Saigon and Sondheim to True Blood and Spooks, but it took a flick of Irene's whip that sent her stellar.She says that her mother, a council worker, and her sister, a teacher, are both ‘very capable women’, and that she had always thought that to achieve and strive was the be-all and end-all for any modern woman.But despite her rising star she has come to realise, she says, that the rat race, the need to be a strong woman on every front, with an unstoppable career, endlessly self-reliant in the home, too, might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

‘I think women have slightly done themselves a disservice, in being able to do so much. It’s actually nice to say, "Yes, I could fix that washing machine, I have the ability to, and yet, actually, do you mind fixing it for me?”’