Domino Harvey, who died on Monday at 35, struggled – ultimately unsuccessfully – to relieve the emptiness and boredom of a life of wealth, glamour, and celebrity.

The daughter of the British actor Laurence Harvey and his third wife, the Vogue model Pauline Stone, she famously abandoned her life as a leading teenage model to become a gun-toting bounty hunter in downtown Los Angeles. 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.

But the real story of Domino Harvey’s mixed-up life and tragic death would have been too prosaic, and pathetic, to interest any Hollywood studio.

Domino Harvey was born in London in 1970, the product of a three-year affair between her father and Pauline Stone during his second marriage to the American multimillionairess Joan Cohn. Laurence Harvey 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 Cafe chain, and moved to Hollywood; her daughter attended public school in England, but found it difficult to conform to normal standards of behavior. “I was fighting boys by the age of 10,” she recalled. “I was a natural ringleader and troublemaker.”

Harvey 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 she 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.”

At age 19 she 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.

She acquired all the braggadoccio of the seasoned profaned a talent for laconic Clint Eastwood-style one-liners. “The real satisfaction is putting the sleazebags in jail,” she told an interviewer. “I just do what I have to do to make a living.” Among her exploits, she was said to have been involved in a shoot-out and helped to arrest the leader of one of Los Angeles’s most violent gangs. She once observed: “This is not a job that comes with a good health plan.”

In fact, though, her quarry consisted mainly of small-time drug dealers and hopeless drug addicts, a category into which she herself was steadily descending. When she checked into a Hawaiian rehabilitation clinic in 1997, after selling the rights to her life story, she weighed less than 98 pounds.

After two years’ treatment, it was said that Harvey had managed to kick her addiction. But last month she was arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs, possession, trafficking, and racketeering. Put under house arrest pending trial, she was ordered to wear an electronic tag and subjected to a regime of drug and alcohol testing. She had yet to enter a plea.

Domino Harvey was said to disapprove of the Hollywood version of her story because it depicted her as heterosexual, when she was in reality a proud lesbian.

She was taken to hospital on Monday after being found unconscious in her bath at her home in West Hollywood. Doctors were unable to revive her.