Daryl Hannah thinks Hollywood is still ''male-dominated''.

The 54-year-old film star believes female stars are cast to be figures of male fantasy in films, but hasn't lost all hope as she believes the industry has the ''potential'' to express what it is to be male or female in a ''transformative way''.

She said: ''It's a male-dominated industry. It's just a bunch of guys saying: 'Let's make the girl young, and sexy, and hot'. So yeah, of course it's exploitative. And that's unfortunate because it has the potential to be really transformative in expressing the human condition.''

Although the 'Splash' actress - who famously dated Neil Young and John F Kennedy Jr. - was seen as pin-up girl in her prime, she has now revealed she felt like she was being mocked by people who thought she was attractive, because years of bullying had made her believe she had a ''weird'' appearance.

Speaking about her status as a sex symbol, she told the Guardian newspaper: ''I didn't realise that, because I was a self-conscious, picked-on kid, when people were looking at me, I'd feel they were making fun of me.

''Because that was the only attention I was used to. So the attention triggered the same old response. I knew that people were looking at me because I looked weird.''