LOS ANGELES

IF you are born into the British high life, specifically to the actor Laurence Harvey and Pauline Stone, a Vogue model, and wend your way through life so that you end up chasing drug dealers, murderers and thieves through the streets of South Central Los Angeles as a bounty hunter, chances are good that someone will eventually hear your story and think it's a movie.

In 1993 that is what happened when Tony Scott, the director of "Top Gun" and "Crimson Tide," read a profile of Domino Harvey, who was 23 at the time, in The Daily Mail of London. "I tracked Domino down in Hollywood, where she was modeling and bounty hunting," Mr. Scott said over the phone from his Los Angeles office late last month. "Domino lived in an apartment above the garage because she wasn't allowed in her mother's house with all her guns. We'd sit up in her apartment with the Soldier of Fortune magazines and AK-47's scattered around the room, and then I'd go and have tea with Mum and the Jack Russells and the Francis Bacons on the wall."

On Friday, when "Domino," starring Keira Knightley, arrives in theaters, audiences will get a glimpse of the complex, contradictory life of Ms. Harvey. But the movie's subject, who was eagerly awaiting the release, will not. She was found dead in her bathtub on June 27. She died after suffering a heart attack and had toxic levels of fentanyl, a painkiller, in her blood, said Stephen Bernard, her lawyer, citing a coroner's report. "Domino," which focuses almost exclusively on Ms. Harvey's exploits as a bounty hunter, does not dwell on the darkest part of her life: a 15-year struggle with drug addiction. What it does capture, her friends and family say, is the essence of someone who was so fascinated with danger that she organized her life around it, becoming one of the few female bounty hunters in the country and helping to capture 50 fugitives, often in life-threatening circumstances.

"She was about extremes," said Annabelle Nielson, one of Ms. Harvey's oldest friends from England. "Her extremes were guns, knives, arresting people. She lived an incredible life."

Ms. Harvey grew up in London with her parents and her half-sister, Sophie (from her mother's previous marriage), who was five years older. Her parents were celebrities at the time - her father starred in the original version of "The Manchurian Candidate," "Butterfield 8" and "Darling" - and the home was filled with fashion models and movie stars.

When she was 4, Ms. Harvey's life was turned upside down when her father died of cancer. "Domino was very angry after her father died," said her mother, Ms. Stone, who spoke about her daughter over the phone from London, where she has lived since 1999 after 21 years in Los Angeles. "She refused to watch any of his movies. And she never asked me anything about him."

Ms. Stone moved her small family to Belgravia, an aristocratic London neighborhood, where Ms. Harvey chafed at the restrictions of school, something she would experience until dropping out as a teenager to become a model.

"She was a beautiful girl with the height and everything else, but she had a particular look that was actually very sexually ambiguous with the tomboy thing and the shaved head," said Ms. Nielson, who met Ms. Harvey when the girls were 11 and in an English boarding school. "Modeling is all about having the right look at the right time, and it wasn't the right time for her."

After working as a D.J. in London clubs, Ms. Harvey decided to move to Los Angeles to be closer to her mother, who had married the restaurateur Peter Morton, a founder of the Hard Rock Cafe chain and of Morton's in West Hollywood, Calif., a favorite movie industry hangout.

Ms. Harvey had a close but at times difficult relationship with her mother. "Her personality was completely different than her mother's," said Heidi Gibbs, Mr. Morton's sister. "What was important to her mother was being a lady, and that just wasn't important to Domino."

In California, Ms. Harvey pursued various unladylike careers like working on a ranch and as a firefighter before finding her calling at Celes King Bail Bonds in South Central Los Angeles.

"She loved finding people no one else could find," Ms. Gibbs said. "She didn't have any fears or any boundaries or any fear of authority. She was missing that thing that stops most people in the world from doing things. And she loved her guns."

According to Mr. Scott, who spent weeks at a time watching her track down fugitives, Ms. Harvey thrived on the adrenaline rush and danger of bounty hunting. After tracking down a bail jumper, she and her fellow bounty hunters would collect 10 percent of the bail amount from the bail bondsman. She earned roughly $30,000 to $40,000 a year, Mr. Scott said, but money was secondary.

"I told her that it's dangerous what you do, you're going to kick down one too many doors and there is going to be a bigger gun on the other side," said Mr. Scott, who bought the rights to her story in 2004. "And she replied, 'Heads you live, tails you die.' That was her motto."

She worked primarily with two men, Ed Martinez, and someone known only as Choco - Celes King III, the company's founder, died in 2003 - and the three had their routine down to a science. "They'd get a motel room and draw a map of someone's house," Mr. Scott said. " 'You go here, I'd go here.' Kick in the door. Pseudo military thing."

Mr. Scott depicted one of Ms. Harvey's most dangerous exploits in the film. She, Mr. Martinez and Choco entered a room expecting to find only one person and were met by at least a dozen gang members with guns drawn. In the film Ms. Knightley gets out of the jam by offering lap dances, something Ms. Harvey did not do.

Although tabloids frequently described her as a lesbian, Ms. Harvey dated a series of men. "They were all losers," Ms. Stone said. "She was captivated by anybody with a dark side."

Throughout it all Ms. Harvey was haunted by drug addiction. She had started using various drugs as a teenager. As a bounty hunter, rubbing shoulders with criminals, she had colleagues who did not disparage her drug use, and if drugs were found at the scene of an arrest, Mr. Scott said, they would often be kept, considered part of the reward.

Ms. Stone said she paid for Ms. Harvey's four attempts at rehabilitation, the last one in Hawaii. "I thought at least she couldn't get out and walk home," Ms. Stone said. "She kept begging me to send her a ticket home and she'd almost persuaded me until my husband ripped the phone out of my hand."

Ms. Harvey ended up staying for two and a half years, finally leaving in 1999. "I thought it had worked in Hawaii," Ms. Stone said. "But after she came out, she probably didn't stay off drugs for a full 24 hours."

At the time of her death Ms. Harvey was awaiting trial on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, drug possession, interstate drug trafficking and racketeering. She insisted to friends and family that she was innocent of the trafficking charges and pleaded not guilty in court.

"The government charged her as if she were a major player in the major distribution ring," Mr. Bernard said. "Based on our investigation, the primary charge was unfounded. Domino was a drug addict, but she wasn't a distributor."

DESPITE Ms. Harvey's defiance, those who were close to her in her final months said that she was shaken by the severity of the charges and by the more than three weeks she spent in the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Los Angeles, while her $1 million bail was being arranged. After the bail was finally posted, she was placed on house arrest in her home in West Hollywood and subject to monitoring and to random testing for drug and alcohol tests.

Ms. Stone said she believed her daughter's experience in jail and fear of the charges against her finally might have scared her straight. "By the end she wasn't on drugs," Ms. Stone said. "She was getting random testing and realized that she had to toe the line."

For his part Mr. Scott didn't consider adding scenes to the movie to depict Ms. Harvey's death, although Ms. Harvey does appear briefly after the movie ends, but before the credits roll. "I am Domino Harvey," Keira Knightley says in a voiceover, while the camera focuses on Ms. Harvey calmly smoking a cigarette in front the Las Vegas Stratosphere Hotel. The screen then fades to black and the words "In Loving Memory of Domino Harvey" appear.

"I'm not macabre," Mr. Scott said. "I wanted to applaud her in life and in death. There was a move afoot to release the movie close to her death, but I didn't want to capitalize on her death."

Although there was speculation in the news media that Ms. Harvey had committed suicide by overdosing on painkillers, no one close to her believes that.

"I don't know what occurred at the end," Ms. Gibbs said. "She was excited about the future. She kept talking about how there was going to be a movie about her. She had a purpose."

Ms. Stone guesses that because Ms. Harvey was anxious and desperate for sleep, she took too many painkillers. No one knows how she obtained the pills. Ms. Stone described an upbeat voice mail message Ms. Harvey left on the day she died. "She wanted to tell me about the four people she'd employed to look after her," Ms. Stone said. "She said: 'Mumsy, everything is going fine. They're really, really nice people, and I chose them myself. Boys at night to keep the riffraff away. Don't worry about me. I love you lots.' "