Toronto, Sept. 15 (Reuters): When director Curtis Hanson was looking for an actor to play a slutty, thieving, despicable younger sister for his latest project, In Her Shoes, his thoughts settled on Cameron Diaz.

And that delighted Diaz, the bubbly star of films like Charlie’s Angels and There’s Something About Mary.

In Her Shoes, which also features Toni Collette as Diaz’s older sister and Shirley MacLaine as their grandmother opened yesterday at the Toronto Film Festival.

“There’s this flawed character who is allowed to cruise through life based on her looks ' I thought: ‘Jeez, Cameron can do that’,” he said. “What I wanted to know is, can she go where she needs to go, to be thoroughly despicable'”

It seemed no problem for Diaz, a younger sister in real life. “Their relationship, that Maggie would create chaos constantly and Rose would clean it up constantly, I just thought that was a wonderful story and something everybody can relate to,” she said.