Home-grown, everyday sadism

If Ellen Page ever worried that her roles in Juno and Smart People would too securely set her image as a feisty know-it-all, she chose well to appear in An American Crime, a film that manages to wrench all the placid innocence from her bones, writes Gina Bellafante. The movie, which appeared at the Sundance Film Festival last year and which made its debut on Showtime on Saturday, calls for none of her verbal wood chopping. Indeed, it demands a listless opposite, turning Ms. Page’s body into a cadaver long before her character becomes one, speaking to us softly, phlegmatically and from the grave. Ms. Page is all dreamy, spectral passivity; she mesmerizes. But so much is done to her that it is hard to know what she is actually doing.

Children are victimized so frequently on television these days — the babies left in Dumpsters on Law & Order: SVU, the boys or girls raped or chained up on Medium — that we may think we’ve become inured to depictions of such abuse. But An American Crime is such a shocking study of the will to defile, so forensic in its details, that it arrives as an act of vengeance against our habituation.

Based on the true story of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl in Indianapolis in 1965 who found herself subjected to cruelties any adjectives applied here would only cheapen, the film almost begs us to look anywhere else. Her parents, carnival workers, leave her and her younger sister in the temporary care of a local laundress named Gertrude Baniszewski. Sylvia is burned, bruised, beaten and sodomized, the horrors magnified by the viral quality of her steward’s sadism. Before long, it isn’t merely Baniszewski drawing the blood, but her lot of vacant-looking children and a whole neighbourhood of young novices bored into violence.

Tommy O’Haver, the film’s director and co-writer, tips us to its agenda in the economy of his title. Sylvia had the misfortune to be born to parents who were comfortable leaving her with a stranger, but she also had the bad luck to grow up in a time and a place where ignorance was understood as its own brand of wisdom. The 1960s haven’t yet sounded the nation’s social alarm clock. Images of Vietnam flicker on television sets (Mr. O’Haver gives us President Johnson making a speech about General Westmoreland) but no one in an Indianapolis of church picnics and girl-group pop is paying heed.

Sylvia’s community, we learn, did nothing to save her. An older neighbour of Baniszewski’s, in cheap make-up that she seems to think will dignify her, had a faint hint of what was going on, but testifies at Baniszewski’s murder trial that she simply couldn’t judge a hard-working woman who seemed to be struggling. Despite all the visual terror in An American Crime, the single most disturbing moment is aural: Sylvia explaining in post-mortem voice-over, quite matter-of-factly, that her parents kept working, leaving her younger sister behind again, after the trial, this time with a local district attorney.

Mr. O’Haver understands the inexplicable nature of horrors like this one and he never panders to our reductive wish for clear answers. Gertrude Baniszewski, portrayed brilliantly by Catherine Keener, was clearly a woman who struggled: she had respiratory problems, multiple children with different men and virtually no money. But Mr. O’Haver doesn’t redeem her with a more extensive biography, a litany of whatever deeper mistreatments she surely endured. Ms. Keener takes on the role as if she were built on a skeleton of rusty needles. Looking at her, we know plenty. Baniszewski hates the purity of Sylvia, a quality she can neither reclaim for herself nor bequeath to her daughters, whose young lives already seem destined for similar miseries.

An American Crime is the most brutal evocation of wrongdoing to appear in quite a while; it is hardly a pleasure to watch. But it is also one of the best television movies to appear in years.

Jennie Garth returning to West Beverly

Jennie Garth, who played Kelly Taylor on the original 90210, will join the cast of the new spin-off on the CW channel. Ms. Garth will not be a regular but will play a guidance counsellor to the (probably) much more at-risk new West Beverly High kids at her alma mater, according to the Associated Press.

On 90210, Ms. Garth became a diet pill abuser, was trapped in a fire, became involved in a cult, used cocaine, was raped, shot, got amnesia and had a miscarriage, according to her career review. She'll apparently have a lot of advice to give, but she might be a bit rusty since her roles on What I Like About You with Amanda Bynes and Dancing With the Stars have been so squeaky clean. Garth, 36, departed the CBS comedy pilot My Best Friend's Girl last month.

Born April 3, 1972 in Urbana, IL, Garth was discovered at age 15 by a talent scout who suggested she head to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. She did just that – dropping out of high school in her junior year to move west. Not long after arriving, she landed a role in the short-lived TV series Brand New Life (NBC, 1989-1990). Although "Life" did little to launch her career, its demise was quickly followed by landing her most iconic role – that of Kelly Taylor on Beverly Hills, 90210.

Playing the popular tramp-turned-good girl Kelly through the years afforded Garth the opportunity to not only grow up on camera in front of America, but to fully develop her character and improve her acting chops each season. From surviving getting burned in a fire, to battling a cocaine addiction, to dealing with all the love triangle drama of Kelly/Dylan/Brenda, Garth showed her versatility. Initially cast as the class tart with Shannon Doherty's Brenda the heroine of the show, Garth quickly emerged as the fan favorite – no doubt some of it a result of Doherty's real-life run-ins with the law and paparazzi. While a reported off-screen feud between seemingly the entire cast and wild child Doherty grabbing the headlines, Garth emerged from the scandals unscathed and above the fray.

Although Garth was raised on a horse ranch in the Midwest, she was entirely convincing as a spoiled Beverly Hills teen. It was this talent that opened up additional professional doors. The enterprising Garth taught good nutritional habits and fostered positive body image in teens with her 1992 video release, "Jennie Garth's Body in Progress." Acting-wise, she made her starring TV-movie debut in NBC's Danielle Steel's 'Star' (1993), playing Crystal Wyatt, a young woman who turns personal tragedy into professional success as a popular singer. Garth gave a solid performance, but the clichéd TV-movie failed to make a memorable mark. More impressive was the gripping ABC drama, Lies of the Heart: The Story of Laurie Kellogg (1994), starring Garth as a teen bride who puts up with ten years of abuse before convincing four young friends to murder her despicable husband (Gregory Harrison). Garth's turn as Kellogg was appropriately wrenching, eliciting well-deserved sympathy from the viewing audience. Later that year she played a rebellious young teen committed to a psychiatric facility by her out-of-touch parents in "Without Consent" (ABC), an entertaining telepic that marked Garth's first foray behind-the-scenes as executive producer. She next starred in the forgettable 1995 CBS thriller Falling For You.

While Garth had generally been cast as likable victims in her TV-movie work, her role in ABC's An Unfinished Affair (1996) broke that stereotype. In this soap drama, the actress played Sheila Hart, a scorned woman who takes up with her married former lover's naive son (Peter Facinelli) as part of an intricate revenge plot. Her performance as the colorfully contemptible character featured some delightfully wicked moments, and recalled her devilish early take on "90210"'s Kelly Taylor. Garth additionally had a role as the concerned girlfriend of a targeted shock jock's protégé in the HBO-aired feature "Power 98" (1996) and was featured in the Ireland-set political drama "My Brother's War" (released direct-to-video in 1998). She re-teamed with now real-life love Peter Facinelli, offering a cameo in the independent feature film, Telling You (1999).

Back in the "90210" zip code, the actress tried her hand at directing a 1999 episode during the program’s final season. With the bittersweet conclusion of the show's final episode in 2000, Garth was free after 10 years to pursue other adventures. After appearing in a few TV movies, she landed a role against type – that of older sister Valerie on the WB sitcom, What I Like About You (2002-06). A breath of fresh air after a decade's worth of primetime teen angst, Garth enjoyed a solid run doing situational comedy and watched as her younger co-star, Amanda Bynes, became a breakout star.

By the series' finale in early 2006, Garth could rest easy knowing that she was one of the few West Beverly High grads to escape the career-engulfing shadow of the iconic "902010." Not all her co-stars were as fortunate as she to find work and forge other successful identities. Though one – Ian Ziering – found a new kind of fame; that of hoofer-in-training on Dancing with the Stars (ABC, 2005- ). Caught in the audience cheering on her one-time onscreen flame, Garth must have caught a case of dance fever herself, as she was announced as one of several celebrity dance contestants on season five of the popular show. Garth put on a good show, making it to the semi-finals and impressing America with her growing confidence, as she learned complicated routines with her partner, Derek Hough – despite taking a tumble in the first few weeks. When Garth was eliminated on the ninth week of competition before the far inferior dancer, entertainer Marie Osmond, many people called foul – particularly the show's judges. Despite coming in fourth, Garth blossomed in front of America as she embraced her inner dancer.

...And funny with it

Tina Fey soared to prominence on Saturday Night Live. Now with an Emmy-winning sitcom and two hit movies, she is being hailed as the most powerful woman in US comedy, says Christopher Goodwin...

Women aren't funny. Christopher Hitchens made the claim last year, but fortunately Tina Fey didn't get the fax. Fey is the producer and star of America's latest hit movie comedy Baby Mama, which has gone straight to the top of the American box office. The success establishes her as the most powerful woman in American comedy and may finally convince Hollywood executives that women really can be brainy, hilarious, and commercially popular. The film, a female buddy comedy in which Fey's character finds a hilariously inappropriate surrogate mother for her baby, took $18.3 million in its first weekend. (Baby Mama is Fey's second number-one hit. The first was the deliciously bitchy 2004 high-school comedy Mean Girls, starring Lindsay Lohan, which Fey wrote, produced and also starred in.) What's even more significant is that Baby Mama easily beat comedies aimed at Hollywood's preferred and pampered audience - horny teenage boys. Women made up 68 per cent of the audience, and 55 per cent of them were older than 25.

Baby Mama features Fey as Kate Holbrook, a 37-year-old, unmarried, politically correct, over-achieving executive for an organic-foods company. She hires Angie, played by her Saturday Night Live co-star Amy Poehler, to have her baby. Much of the comedy comes when Kate and Angie, a gum-chewing, working-class party girl, become 'womb mates', moving in together. Imagine a 21st-century version of The Odd Couple. Their dysfunctional but often very funny relationship makes Baby Mama 'such a welcome alternative to the desperation and self-loathing of the Judd Apatow canon, or the compulsive verbosity of Juno', says Ann Hornaday, film critic of the Washington Post

Fey, who came to prominence on Saturday Night Live, the long-running TV sketch show, is already one of the most important figures in US television. She's the producer and star of the sitcom 30 Rock, which won an Emmy last year, beating The Office and Ugly Betty. Set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live-like TV show on which she plays the unattached head writer Liz Lemon, it's been hailed as the 'best sitcom since Seinfeld'. The combination of genius casting, including Alec Baldwin as a controlling TV executive, with dense scripts which combine high and lowbrow humour means it has the kind of devoted following long overdue for an American network comedy series (critics rave about it, saying they watch it twice in order to catch all the jokes). Although Fey is thrilled at the success of Baby Mama, what really makes her happy is that Lemon has been called 'the most realistic single woman on television'.

'We strive to make her realistic to the point of embarrassment,' says Fey, who acknowledges that Lemon is an unmarried version of herself. (Fey, 38, has been married for seven years to Jeff Richmond, a music supervisor who works with her. They have a two-year-old daughter.) 'We're just trying to show the underbelly of being a real woman. But it's TV, so I'm sure there are things that are heightened. I mean, she did steal a baby once.'

Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, believes that what's most remarkable about Tina Fey's success is that she 'has carved out a really new female comedy character, this pretty yet insecure intellectual. Fey is short, she's got glasses and she's insecure. It is really refreshing and not at all typical.'

Donna Langley, president of production at Universal Studios, which produced Baby Mama, believes that Fey has a unique generational appeal. 'Tina is so connected to the zeitgeist,' says Langley, referring not just to the success of Baby Mama and 30 Rock, but to a Fey sketch on Saturday Night Live in March which had a remarkable and pivotal impact on the Democratic presidential campaign. (Fey left Saturday Night Live in 2006, but returns to the show occasionally.) The sketch she wrote and delivered has been credited for single-handedly reviving the fortunes of Hillary Clinton, then all but counted out after a series of devastating primary defeats. It showed the press being ridiculously deferential to Barack Obama.

'If anybody saw Saturday Night Live,' Hillary said in a debate soon after, 'maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow.' It was the last line of the sketch, which the New York Times described as 'a brilliant girl-power endorsement from Tina Fey', which gave Hillary and her floundering campaign heart, by making a political virtue out of what has been seen as her greatest failing. 'Bitches get stuff done,' snapped Fey. 'Bitch is the new black.'

Shortly after that, Fey's status as the most important woman in comedy was confirmed by her appearance on the front cover of American Marie Claire magazine which normally features young Hollywood starlets, not 38-year-old spectacle-wearing, self-confessed geeks.

Fey seems to have fashioned her comic persona around her glasses. She first started using them when she joined Saturday Night Live in 1995, discovering before her first show that she needed them to read cue cards. She quickly realised that they give her the apparent moral authority to smile sweetly as she sticks a knife into the backs of the mighty, the pompous and the idiotic.

Recently, for instance, she called Paris Hilton 'a piece of shit' who has 'hands like a tranny', and is 'a terrible role model and a terrible young woman. You can buy videotapes in which you can see her bejanis.' (As a comedy sideline, Fey has devised many TV-acceptable euphemisms for female genitalia, her favourite, and ours', being 'cooter'. One of her sketches for Saturday Night Live was called 'Talkin 'Bout 'Ginas', a parody of The Vagina Monologues

But as the most famous - and most fetishised - spectacle-wearer in America, Fey plays down her status as the thinking man's sex symbol. 'Glasses make anyone look smarter,' says Fey, who can seem reserved in person. 'You put glasses on Woody Harrelson in Indecent Proposal and he's an architect. You put a pair of glasses on Denise Richards and she's a palaeontologist.'

The day Baby Mama opens, I ask Lorne Michaels, creator and producer of Saturday Night Live and co-producer of Baby Mama, what he feels is most distinctive about Fey and her humour. 'She has a very clear take on things,' he says. 'It always comes from a place of intelligence and there is just an edge to it. It's not fearful. It's strong and confident and you recognise the voice and most of the time you agree with it.'

That's interesting, I say, because people who know her well say she's quite shy. 'As a person, yes, I think that is so,' he says, 'but she projects a confidence. I have never seen her face a challenge that she didn't pull off. She won't give up until it's good. She has impossibly high standards.'

If Tina Fey's self-effacing appearance is unusual for a female comedian, her background and temperament seem particularly ill-suited to her chosen profession. Coming from a solidly upper-middle-class, stable Greek-American family in Pennsylvania, Fey was an unapologetic geek and straight-A student, editor of the school newspaper, in the drama club and member of the choir. She had trouble fitting in.

'I had a pretty rough puberty,' she says. 'Growing up as a girl is always traumatising, especially when you have the deadly combination of greasy skin and getting your boobs at 10. But somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh. I was trying to make them like me. But after a while it became part of my identity.'

She now acknowledges that much of the fabulous bitchiness of Mean Girls, which she wrote, came from her own high-school experience. Lindsay Lohan plays a naive teenager who has been home-schooled and is then plunged into the cliquey gender rituals of American high school.

'I ate weaker girls for breakfast,' Fey admits. 'I really was a snarky girl. My whole thing was, if I really liked a guy and he had the audacity to like someone else instead of me, I would hate that girl and devote hours and hours of time to picking her apart and talking about her behind her back and canvassing my friends to dislike her.'

At the University of Virginia, where she studied drama, Fey was again not part of the cool crowd. She disapproved of the heavy drinking, drug-taking and sexual promiscuity in which many of her fellow students indulged. Today she's proud that she's never taken drugs, except in childbirth. 'I want to be on record saying this, so my daughter can see it one day in the future. I have never done any drugs! I am extremely square and obedient in nature!'

After university, Fey went to Chicago, joining the Second City troupe, renowned for improvisational comedy. She went because she knew a number of alumni had graduated to Saturday Night Live, including John Belushi and Bill Murray. Fey honed her particular brand of humour there, specialising in especially lewd and caustic routines. In one sketch, she imagined Catherine the Great complaining about the unfairness of life: 'You can be a murderous tyrant and the world will remember you fondly. But fuck one horse and you're a horse-fucker for all eternity.'

Fey was so happy at Second City that she had doubts about moving to New York when Lorne Michaels invited her to join Saturday Night Live. The show, which started in 1975, has a reputation as a fearsome testing ground, especially for women, who had always been outnumbered by the men. The brutal and relentless weekly process by which sketches and jokes get winnowed down before the show can be devastating.

One thing Fey learnt from her fellow comics on the show was that, 'If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.'

The first sketch Fey wrote, about Bill Clinton, died in read-throughs. 'This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out,' she recalls. 'But I realised, "OK, that happened, and I didn't die". You've got to experience failure to understand you can survive it.'

Survive she did, and in 1999 Michaels made her head writer, the first woman to hold the post. The following year he made her co-host of the centrepiece 'Weekend Update' segment. Weekend Update features two faux newsreaders dissecting the previous week's news and disembowelling those unlucky enough to have been part of it.

'Prostitutes in Lyon, France, sent a fax to the government to complain that they are losing business to Eastern European women who are protected by the Albanian mafia,' said Fey in one typical segment. 'First of all, how rough-looking are these French prostitutes that all their customers are running to the Albanians? Secondly, why did they send a fax, and from whence? Do they have a fax machine in the whorehouse, or did they all trundle down to Kinko's - "You fax these, I'll let you shave me". Thirdly, how come French whores know how to work a fax machine, but every time I try to use it, I hit Powersave, or I forget to dial 9? This just proves what my boyfriend always says - that I'm dumber than a French whore.'

Other examples of Fey's Weekend Update repertoire: 'A Harvard Medical School study has determined that rectal thermometers are the best way to tell a baby's temperature. Plus, it teaches the baby who's boss.'

'Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman say their split is amicable, and they want everyone to know that after their divorce their two adopted children will be returned to the prop department at Universal Studios.'

'In order to feel safer on his private jet, John Travolta has purchased a bomb-sniffing dog. Unfortunately, the dog came six movies too late.'

'U2 lead singer Bono met with President Bush on Wednesday and urged the president to help the world's poor, while the president urged Bono to get back with Cher.'

Under Fey's tutelage as head writer, the number of women on the show increased significantly. But Fey doesn't believe Saturday Night Live was ever overtly hostile to women, as long as they are funny. 'If it gets laughs it goes forward,' she says. 'There have been so many women who were stars on SNL. It's when they leave and try and be in the movies that things get hard.'

Which is why Fey is so thrilled that Baby Mama has been successful. 'Amy and I were excited to be doing a story about two women who are not somebody else's girlfriend,' says Fey. 'I liked the topicality of the fertility issues. There's so much weirdness and emotion about it. And Amy liked that it had nothing to do with a goddam wedding.'

Fey's hard-won success has also clearly squelched ludicrous charges, made recently by Hitchens and others, that women aren't funny. Responding to the late Michael O'Donoghue, the first head writer for Saturday Night Live, who once said that it helped to have 'a big hunk of meat between the legs' when writing humour, Fey says: 'I do have one, but it's been flayed open to a vagina.' So you don't agree? 'Well, the thing is, he said it and then he died. So, I don't know. '

But it's also clear that Fey's success is the exception in US comedy rather than the rule. Media historian Robert Thompson believes there are clear social reasons for that. 'Until relatively recently, the kind of things that would lead you to a life of comedy, just like the kind of things that would lead you to a life of crime, tended to be those things that were rewarded in boys, but not in girls. You could act up in school and you could be priming the act that you would eventually be doing professionally. It was kind of expected, boys will be boys. But for girls it was considered unfeminine, unseemly, even downright promiscuous.'

Intriguingly, unlike most other comedians, Fey's comic strength doesn't come from having been class clown. Instead it comes from skewering adult class clowns, our politicians and celebrities. 'She's pretty monastic at times,' says Poehler. 'She's not the first girl to belly-flop into the pool at the pool party. She watches everybody else's belly-flops and then writes about it.'

As Lorne Michaels, who has worked with comedians for more than three decades, looks at Fey's career in the light of the success of 30 Rock and Baby Mama, I ask him if it really is harder for women to establish an enduring comedy persona. 'They have less time,' he says. 'If they want it all, they've got to know who they are fast. There's no wandering around in a haze for 10 years.'

And you sensed that Tina knew who she was? 'From the very beginning,' he says. 'I think she wanted it all, and if she doesn't get it all she's going to get most of it.'

Don't call us: the cult of the actress rock stars

Scarlett Johansson's decision to record an album, when she's barely started as a movie star, seems at first glance capricious. Making it a record of Tom Waits songs, with help from David Bowie, adds a thin veneer of credibility, though the "vanity project" stink remains strong. But the news that Minnie Driver, too, is releasing a second album, this time with alt.country's tarnished king Ryan Adams, and his band the Cardinals, helping out, along with Juliette Lewis's continuing, and very successful career-switch from actress to provoking punk-rock star, suggests a more substantial trend, writes Nick Hasted.

Johansson's album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, has been bolstered by production from TV On the Radio's David Sitek, fresh from working with critically adored bands such as Foals and Liars. Her presence at last year's Coachella, singing "Just Like Honey" with the reformed Jesus and Mary Chain before greedily soaking up the atmosphere backstage, and her cameo in a Dylan video, adds to her hipness by association.

In part this reflects how glamorous rock and movie stars' worlds seem to each other. The chance of any of these ageing male rock icons refusing the attentions of a young, blond, Hollywood actress must also be counted as slim. Johansson, though, sees a deeper connection, suggesting the roles of singing and acting can be interchangeable. "Some of my favourite vocalists are acting in themselves," she notes. "Music is often about bringing characters to life."

"The only problem," Uncut magazine points out reviewing Anywhere I Lay My Head, "is that Johansson, no matter how much double-tracking Sitek uses, can't really sing." In this, though, she echoes perhaps the most famous singing blond actress of them all, Marilyn Monroe. Monroe is the most complete example of how minor details such as vocal limitation can be transcended.

Of course, she existed in a different time, when actresses were regularly called upon to star in musicals, as she did with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Her breathy sexiness nevertheless reached a sort of apogee when singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" or, infamously, "Happy Birthday, Mr President", to her reputed lover JFK at a celebration of his 45th birthday. Bonnie Greer used her this year, in the Theatre Royal Stratford East's production of her play Marilyn and Ella, to explore the enmeshed longings of singers and actresses. In it, Monroe aches to be taken seriously as a jazz singer, and Ella Fitzgerald wants to break out of her black jazz-club ghetto, into the mainstream of the movies. Each perceives opportunities for credibility and seriousness in the other's existence, forging a lasting friendship.



Johansson and Lewis, growing up at a time when rock'n'roll is an omnipresent attraction no matter how focused one may be on acting classes, are exploring an updated version of the same desires. Johansson's lurking backstage among bands, and even singing with them to rock crowds, gives her a whiff of something more dangerous-seeming, earthy and direct than her long, isolated months on-set, even as musicians see her as a cinema-screen-sized, superhuman beauty, walking among them.

Lewis has taken things still further. Though she broke through in a notoriously uncomfortable scene in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991), as Nick Nolte's schoolgirl daughter, subtly molested by Robert De Niro's killer on a dolls-house stage-set, and followed it with punishing roles in the likes of Natural Born Killers (1994), Hollywood has finally left her unsatisfied. Playing a futuristic, PJ Harvey-singing grunge star in Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995) showed her an exit. She has now all but abandoned acting to become lead singer in Juliette and the Licks.

Though this was initially assumed to be a sideshow, like the dreadful vanity bands of Keanu Reeves and others, early UK audiences soon found an actual catsuited movie star crowd-surfing over their outstretched hands at tiny club venues. Once they had gotten over the somewhat perverse thrill, it was obvious that Lewis was going all-out. Her second album, Four on the Floor (2006), saw Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl on drums, while Lewis's immersion in the proto-punk of the MC5 and the Stooges seemed viscerally real.

Driver sits somewhere between Johansson and Lewis. Part of the utterly obscure Milo Ross Band early in her career, as her life as a minor movie star has faltered, she has settled back into music. At 38, Hollywood's unforgiving sexism almost certainly dooms her to scrabbling for roles in future. But in winning over audiences at Texas's South by Southwest festival, or working seriously on tracks late at night in a New York City studio with Adams, such indignities can be ignored. She can think like an artist again, not a mannequin deemed past its prime.

It can work the other way, of course. Kylie Minogue's game, if not very good, turn as Charlene Mitchell in Neighbours was the highlight of an early acting career in Australia that included several feature films. But when she parlayed the soap's UK popularity into a career as a 60-million-selling pop star, her permanent, depthless grin as she modelled skimpy clothes through a succession of modestly risqué videos was entirely mannequin-like (albeit one who co-wrote a few songs). Returns to acting were either dismal (1994's Street Fighter saw her deemed "the worst actress in the English-speaking world" in the Washington Post) or dependent on her pop stardom, as with Moulin Rouge! (2001).

The traditional showbiz world of Marilyn and Ella, meanwhile, has re-emerged in the wake of American Idol and its ilk. The patina of rebellion and social challenge that attracted Lewis to rock'n'roll has been swamped by a revived idea of the pop star as all-round entertainer. This can be seen most clearly in R&B, where the likes of Rihanna stumble through off-Broadway musical set-pieces. Like their male hip-hop counterparts, these singers now also feel ready to meet Johansson and co halfway, by breaking into films.

Beyoncé Knowles is the best, and worst, example of why this can be an awful idea. Early roles, such as Mike Myers' blaxploitation-style sidekick in Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002), required little more than flashing a smile and some skin, which her videos made her well-versed in. The excruciating faux-Motown musical Dreamgirls (2007), however, in which she played a Diana Ross figure, starkly showed the limitations her singing always suggested.

The contrast between Madonna and Courtney Love, on this side of the actress-singer divide, is marked. Madonna bluffed her way through one film success (Desperately Seeking Susan [1985], in fact carried by Rosanna Arquette), and was a passable, Monroe-styled, femme fatale in her then-lover Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy (1990). Everything else has been a cumulative, career-long embarrassment of unerotic nudity and unexpressed humanity. Love, meanwhile, though a haphazard mess of an artist these days, gave everything she could find inside herself to her fine early albums with her band Hole, Pretty On the Inside (1991) and Live Through This (1994). This ability, the one Madonna and Knowles lack, let her roar through Milos Forman's Man on the Moon (1999).

The authenticity Love couldn't help expressing at her best is what actresses and singers seek in each other's worlds. It is what we can hear in Monroe's warm, breathy sex-singing. It is the reason Lewis tore down the cinema screen between herself and her audience and leapt into their arms, and Johansson stepped onto the stage at Coachella, and sang with two old Scottish punks. Other actors might do a stage-play. But the fumble towards talent they don't quite have, and another's art that seems more real, keeps the two-way traffic alive.

So the next question is: How does a girl born into a real-life of rock'n'roll soap opera (Sex! Drugs! Paternity tests!) make the reverse journey her into film and television? By becoming this year's hottest model and the star of her own reality TV show, that's how...

Daisy Lowe belongs to a very modern breed of London It-girl. It's a role you have to be born into suggests Alison Jane Reid. While their predecessors were the daughters of aristocrats – the Tara Palmer-Tompkinsons and Lady Victoria Herveys, whose pedigree was determined by how many acres their family owned in Gloucestershire and how closely related they were to the Queen – these days, it's more a question of rock'n'roll royalty than blue-blooded veins.

A quick inspection of the surnames of the current crop of girls-about-town is telling. From Peaches Geldof to Lizzie Jagger, Leah Wood to Kelly Osbourne, the latest generation to grace the gossip pages are more likely to have spent their early years on a tour bus with their rock-star parents than competing at pony-club gymkhanas.

Although Lowe's name may lack the instant wow factor of her starry peers, the 19-year-old model's genetic make-up has secured her place in the rock firmament. The eldest daughter of Pearl Lowe, the fashion designer and former singer with Britpop band Powder, and step-daughter of Supergrass drummer Danny Goffey, her indie Primrose Hill upbringing alone would have been enough to ensure vicarious celebrity status later in life.

In 2004, however, a DNA test which revealed that her biological father was not her mother's first husband, as she had previously believed, but Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, placed Daisy at the centre of a real-life rock'n'roll soap opera. Old friends, Lowe and Rossdale had enjoyed a fling so brief in the late-1980s that neither suspected Daisy might be his child. A doting godfather to Daisy for 15 years, his reaction to the news, according to Pearl, was to sever all contact with the Lowes, seemingly ploughing his energies into saving his marriage to the American singer Gwen Stefani.

Although the subject remains strictly off-limits, it is hard not to interpret Lowe's fierce loyalty to step-dad Goffey as an indirect condemnation of Rossdale. "Danny is a brilliant dad," she says. "He is father to my brothers and sisters, who I never for a second think of as anything less than whole; I just think of them as my brothers and sisters. He will be there for me when no one else will. Plus, of course, he's a creative genius. I'm proud to call him my father."

It would be easy for Daisy, a supporting player in the media drama, to have remained exactly that, forever known as little more than Gavin Rossdale's love child. But like many It-girls before her, Lowe has greater aspirations than just being a socialite. "If I'm going to be famous, I want to be famous for doing something good – having talent," she declares. What sets her apart is that she actually looks likely to make good on that desire.

At the beginning of this year Lowe, a model in Britain from the age of 15, was signed by the powerful New York agency IMG, which looks after supermodels Giselle and Naomi Campbell – a reliable indication that international stardom is on the cards, since it is in the US that the major campaigns that will put her on billboards around the world are booked.

The producers of the upcoming BBC2 fly-on-the-wall documentary Class of 2008, which charts the early push for fame and fortune of a group of trendy young things, are similarly confident she has what it takes to become a huge star, which is why they have made Lowe the focus for the series.

While her fellow subjects look set to achieve considerable success, including Lowe's on-off boyfriend Will Cameron, lead singer of The Blondelles, it is clear who is the star of the show. (Her relationship with Cameron, incidentally, is very much on right now – despite recent tabloid stories suggesting Mark Ronson is more than just the good friend she claims.)

Lowe has already graced the catwalk for Chanel – hand-picked by Karl Lagerfeld, no less – and stepped into Kate Moss's stockings in a campaign for luxury lingerie brand Agent Provocateur. With her doll-like face, mussed-up hair and slender but curvy body, she strikes a unique balance ' between an edgy, catwalk-friendly look and a more commercial appeal that could see her do very well indeed.

Were it anyone but Lowe, the prospect of such fame and fortune at such a young age might be worrying, but it's hard to imagine anyone better equipped to deal with the inevitable circus that will surround her. Her own childhood provided ample preparation for dealing with the excesses of celebrity; after all, not many people can say they grew up in a house where Pete Doherty was once a lodger.

Regulars on the 1990s Britpop party scene, Pearl and Danny were part of the Primrose Hill set that included Kate Moss, Sadie Frost and Jude Law. At one stage they were dubbed "the Posh and Becks of the indie world", although it would be fair to say that they lived a little more dangerously than Mr and Mrs Beckham. In her recent autobiography, All That Glitters, Pearl describes her descent into cocaine and heroin addiction with incredible candour, recounting the day-to-day struggle of trying to hold things together and care for her three children.

During a particularly difficult period of depression following the birth of her third child, Frankie, Pearl describes Daisy as her "saviour" and recalls how, at 10 years old, Daisy would change the nappies of her younger siblings and warm bottles while her mother lay paralysed in bed.

While some children might have cracked under the strain and developed their own wild-child ways, Lowe's instinct took her in exactly the opposite direction as she assumed responsibility for keeping the family functioning as Pearl slowly fell apart. "The only way to rebel against my mother was to be totally normal," she explains. "There's a huge element of Saffy from Ab Fab in me – just because I always tried to be my mother's mother. Obviously, she takes huge care of me, but I always felt it was my duty to help her too, being the oldest, especially as she was doing drugs. She was always really depressed and I'd want to be there and help her."

Going against the grain of the chaotic, bohemian household, Lowe became ultra-practical and mature beyond her years. At seven she insisted on looking after the family passports on holiday, and at 13 she was more interested in being a forensic scientist than following either of her parents into show business. Even now she confesses that caring for others has become something of a reflex for her: "I've spent my whole life looking after my little brothers, I've got a really strong maternal instinct."

If it was a tough childhood, Lowe does not portray it that way. "I never took it as a burden," she says cheerily. Meanwhile, her devotion to her mother – who has now been clean for several years – is absolute: "She is an amazing ' mother. We steal each other's clothes and talk on the phone every day – she is my best friend. It's all about Danny and my mum; we are a very close family."

The close physical resemblance between mother and daughter is striking too, although Lowe is candid about why her mother never pursued a similar career in modelling: "She got too pudgy because she was always stoned!" she giggles.

When Pearl decamped to Hampshire to escape the temptations of the London party circuit, Daisy initially stayed with her grandparents to continue her studies at her old school. Bright and articulate, she excelled in chemistry and art and was predicted to get good A-levels, but the separation from Pearl proved too difficult, and she abandoned her education in favour of modelling. "I couldn't handle being away from her," she says. "I just felt lost, so lost. So, it was my ticket out of school. Of course I could go back any time. Modelling's not forever, is it?"

While it may not be forever, for the moment at least it seems that Lowe is enjoying the new world it is opening up for her. She describes the decision to leave boyfriend Will in London while she spends much of her time working in New York as "really hard". Nevertheless, there is a sense that Lowe is relishing the new-found freedom that has come with her own pad in the Big Apple's East Village, and that she is at last getting the chance to shed the adult concerns she has dealt with for so long and indulge herself like any other 19-year-old. "I love being able to eat what I want, go where I want and walk around naked and sing to myself without anyone telling me to shut up," she confesses.

There have already been some notable career highlights, too. A shoot with in-demand American photographer Steven Klein was particularly memorable. "He's so quiet – a tortured genius," she says admiringly. He returned the compliment by dying her blue for a shoot – giving her a life-threatening allergic reaction in the process – hanging her off a giant crane and making her jump into a tub of green slime, naked, in the dead of winter. Lowe doesn't seem to have minded: "I am up for anything with Steven – he makes me feel like a beautiful piece of art when I work with him; he sees things no one else sees."

But it was modelling for the grande dame of British fashion, Vivienne Westwood, that she enjoyed most of all. "She is a huge muse of mine," admits Lowe. "I've never seen a designer get so involved in a show before. She was running around with a make-up palette saying, 'You all look too similar' and putting random eyeshadow here and there. Then she ran around with the eyeliner going, 'Who wants a moustache?' She was just so full-on and creative."

Despite the glamour of it all, Lowe still seems to have her heart set on a quiet life. It is safe to say that she has no interest in living the itinerant rock-chick lifestyle that her mother once enjoyed; her one experience of touring with her boyfriend's band failed to ignite any passion for life on the road: "I've never been so ill in my entire life," she groans. "We were travelling around Germany and all there was to eat was schnitzels; I need vegetables and sleep."

Perhaps it's the effect of seeing her mother so happily settled in the countryside with her vegetable patch and ethical clothing range, or perhaps it's just that maternal instinct kicking in once again, but Lowe's ultimate ambitions are a world away from her current career path. At the top of the agenda seems to be marrying her boyfriend and having children. Lowe says that she fell for Cameron when he confessed that "he just wanted to be a really good dad".

So what, then, is this would-be homemaker doing stalking the catwalks of Paris and New York? "I want to have money so I can spend it having children," she says simply. "I want to have three or four and be a really good mother and make sure they have a really brilliant life with parents who are not struggling." It may not be very rock'n'roll, but it sounds like a nice plan.

Class of 2008, an eight-part series, begins on 17 May at 12.45pm on the BBC Switch zone on BBC2

Jones to appear in BBC Dickens drama

Ruth Jones, star and co-creator of hit BBC3 comedy Gavin & Stacey, is to turn her hand to drama by appearing in the BBC's adaptation of Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit. The period drama, which tells the story of the Dorrit family and the rich array of characters they meet on their way from rags to riches and back again, is being written by veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies, whose most recent project was Sense and Sensibility.

Jones, who made her name in the BBC3 comedies Little Britain and Nighty Night, will play "colourful character" Flora Casby, the childhood sweetheart of Arthur Clennam, played by Matthew Macfadyen. Little Dorrit, which is being billed as one of BBC1's highlights for the autumn, will air in the same soap opera format as Bleak House, the BBC's last major Dickens adaptation in 2005. An hour-long launch episode will be followed by 14 half-hour instalments.

Jones, who wrote Gavin and Stacey alongside James Corden, is also appearing in BBC1's forthcoming adaptation of Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. She is also writing a Gavin and Stacey Christmas special.

Mackenzie Crook, who shot the fame in The Office and stars in current movie release Three and Out, has also signed up to Little Dorrit. He plays office raconteur Harris, while Being Human's Claire Foy will take the lead as Amy Dorrit.

Tom Courtenay will play her father, while James Fleet, whose credits include The Vicar of Dibley and Four Weddings and a Funeral, will star as Amy's uncle, Frederick Dorrit. Amanda Redman has also been signed up, playing Mrs Merdle, while Lord of the Rings' Andy Serkis will appear as French villain Rigaud. Doctor Who's Freema Agyeman will also appear as Tattycoram.

Filming on the drama begins this week and will continue throughout the summer in locations in and around London, Buckinghamshire, Kent and Herefordshire. Made in-house by the BBC, Little Dorrit will be executive produced by Sense and Sensibility's Anne Pivcevic with Lisa Osborne producing.

Kate Harwood, head of BBC series and serials, said: "We are very proud to be presenting this wonderful line up of cast who will be bringing to life one of Dickens' broadest range of characters in a gripping, witty and touching script by the inimitable Andrew Davies. Part murder mystery, part love story, and wholly entertaining, Little Dorrit promises to be an autumn treat."

Olivia Wilde is 'House'-mate that's here to stay

Auditions are seldom a favorite part of any actor's job, but Olivia Wilde says she enjoyed the whole process of becoming a new regular on House, the hit Fox medical drama returning with new episodes, starting tonight in the US.

It could have been a real ordeal. As "Thirteen," the nickname by which her character is known on the show, Wilde and several other actors played young doctors battling for a limited number of spots on the medical team of Dr. Greg House ( Hugh Laurie). And, in a case of life imitating art, Wilde and the other newbies weren't sure which of them would be selected to become new regulars.

"We all had different deals, so we knew we had a certain number of episodes, but we didn't know beyond that point who would stay and who would go," says Wilde, 24. "Once it got to that point where we were having to wait until the next script to see who would disappear, it became an interesting environment. What was so great about our group is that no one approached it in a negative way. The only way to deal with that kind of tension in the air was to joke about it constantly.

"It was great, because none of us was taking any moment for granted. That happens a lot in television, where you forget that you are incredibly lucky to have a role and you should continually be working to develop it. We felt that we were constantly having to prove ourselves, which means that we were all probably working harder than we would have been otherwise."

Mastering her character's technical jargon and adjusting to a fast-paced series where the focus is on the puzzling case of the week were challenges, Wilde says, but she looks to series star Laurie as an example of how to keep her priorities straight.

"It's extraordinary to watch an actor who takes so many risks," she says. "Hugh never settles, and he's continually harder on himself than anyone else. When you're on a show that shoots nine months out of the year, it makes some people lazy. Watching him every day is sort of like a master class in acting, especially since he carries it off with such humour and grace."

If her "House" work is rewarding, her first network series role, in the short-lived 2003-04 Fox drama "Skin," was valuable mainly as a learning experience. As the ingénue lead in this "Romeo and Juliet" story set against the backdrop of the porn industry, Wilde was touted by Fox flacks as the Next Big Thing, but all the attention went away once the show tanked.

"One day all these people were bowing down to me and throwing free clothes at me and telling me I was the best thing since sliced bread, and the next day the show was cancelled and all of that disappeared," Wilde recalls. "That was great for an 18-year-old to learn and I will never again take the bull seriously."

The daughter of writers and documentary filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Wilde was born in New York but grew up mainly in the Washington, D.C., area, graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. She says she has known since she was 5 years old that she wanted to be an actress.

"It was either that or the nuthouse," Wilde says, laughing. "I remember seeing my first episode of 'Saturday Night Live' and asking my mother what those people were doing, and she said, 'They're actors.' I said, 'They get paid to do that? Sign me up!' I started seeing a lot of theatre and becoming engrossed in it, and I was just so excited that there was a profession that involved all of those things."

After high school, which included a period of study at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, Ireland, Wilde took off a year before planning to start college and travelled to Los Angeles, where she quickly began to find work. After Skin, she had a better experience on The O.C., where she played Alex Kelly, a bisexual beauty who dated both Seth Cohen ( Adam Brody) and Marissa Cooper ( Mischa Barton). She had a great time on the show, she says, although she hadn't realized she was joining a pop-culture phenomenon.

Miley Cyrus: an achy or breaky career move?

America is highly sensitive about its female child stars - with good reason. Think Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and, in another era, Judy Garland. It was in that context that the country heaved a collective sigh of "Oh no! Not another!" when its latest hot young thing, the 15-year-old TV and pop wonder Miley Cyrus, became embroiled in a spat over sexually suggestive photographs.

What has made the row so striking is that until now Cyrus, who plays an ordinary kid with a secret life as a pop star in the Disney TV show Hannah Montana, has mostly avoided any whiff of wild-child rebellion. Her off-screen image has been as wholesome as her smile - or her bank balance, with some commentators predicting she will be a billionaire by the age of 18.

But in the next edition of Vanity Fair she is portrayed by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz in a different light. Leibovitz has her draped in a satin sheet, most of her back exposed, in a pose that gives the impression she is topless. The actor looks straight at the camera over her bare right shoulder, her hair across her face.

In the Vanity Fair article that accompanies the photographs, the interviewer Bruce Handy asks Cyrus about the photographs. Wasn't she, or Disney, at all anxious about the shot? "No, I mean I had a big blanket on. And I thought, this looks pretty and really natural. I think it's really artsy," she is quoted as replying. But when news of the shoot broke over the weekend, it caused an instant hostile reaction from bloggers such as Lin Burress, a morality crusader who called on parents to take revenge by burning Hannah Montana accessories. "Bonfire anyone? That would make a nice video on YouTube."

Vanity Fair pointed out that Cyrus's parents and minders were on the set of the Leibovitz shoot, and saw the digital photograph. "Everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait of Miley," the magazine's spokeswoman, Beth Kseniak, said. To underline the point, a video of the shoot was put up on the Vanity Fair website yesterday, with a caustic note saying the photoshoot that led to threats of Hannah Montana bonfire parties was in fact "a relaxed family event". Cyrus quickly changed her tune. “I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” she has said in a statement. “I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologise to my fans, who I care so deeply about.”

Disney Channel, whose programme Hannah Montana has made her a star, has also weighed in, accusing Vanity Fair of manipulating her in order to sell magazines. Their reaction is understandable, given Cyrus's escalating worth. A lot of money, and Disney merchandise, is resting on Miley's alabaster shoulders. In just two years the teenager has already developed into a hugely bankable name. Hannah Montana was an instant hit when first screened in 2006. In it, Miley plays a character called ... Miley, an ostensibly normal schoolgirl who, unbeknown to her classmates, leads a double life travelling the world as Hannah Montana, a singing superstar. Her TV father is played by her real father, the country music star Billy Ray Cyrus.

The show is watched by more than three million people, most aged six to 14. The ratings for Disney's target audience are second only to the scarily successful American Idol. There are two multi-platinum-selling Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana CDs, magazines and a recent live tour is reported to have made her $1m a week with the further spin-off success of the 3D film due out this year. The show is so big that it has featured on Bart Simpson's blackboard, on which he wrote: “The capital of Montana is not Hannah.” The line where Miley ends and Hannah begins has thus far been blurred, but the Vanity Fair shoot was perhaps a first tentative effort to propel Miley into a more grown-up and endlessly lucrative world (see the Olsen twins).

But there have been a few small cracks in the facade. What Miley Cyrus seems to fear is the outrage of Middle America, which likes its TV stars to be on the goody-goody side of clean-cut. And to make matters worse, the shoot comes hot on the heels of internet photos showing her bare midriff and - gasp - bra, which prompted another apology and an admission that she was not perfect.

Born in Tennessee, Miley has acted since she was 9, when she got a part in her father's TV series, Doc. A committed Christian, she credits her faith with helping to keep her grounded and, like Britney Spears once did, has vowed to remain a virgin until she marries. But with car-crash personalities such as Spears and Lindsay Lohan currently out of action, the pages of America's supermarket tabloids need filling. Miley Cyrus's bare back may be just the thing.
Vanity Fair pointed out that Cyrus's parents and minders were on the set of the Leibovitz shoot, and saw the digital photograph.

Greta Scacchi regrets

What does an A-list beauty do when the vamp years are over? Greta Scacchi talks career choices with Kevin Maher...

Edinburgh, 1987. A festival screening of the colonial thriller White Mischief is followed by an audience Q&A with the director Michael Radford and stars Greta Scacchi and Joss Ackland. A local compère directs the questions, and the discussion is lively.

Eventually, he points to a woman in the audience who, dourly and directly, addresses Scacchi – then a 27-year-old starlet du jour, boasting an impressive CV and a seemingly exotic mix of Italian heat, Australian candour and English froideur. “When are you going to stop playing the dollybird characters and do something decent instead?” barks the woman, stopping Scacchi in her tracks. The compere says politely “I think we’ll pass on that one.” But the damage is done, and Scacchi is gutted.

“It still stays in my mind, even now,” says Scacchi today, thoughtfully masticating some salade niçoise in a swanky London eatery, while her big soulful eyes glaze in momentary remembrance. She is here to talk about a new TV role, as Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra in the BBC drama Miss Austen Regrets, but right now she’s swirling in the recriminations of a career repeatedly hamstrung by her own ineffable beauty. “Because I knew then that no matter how puritanical my views were about doing quality material, there were always going to be people who’d only see me that way – as a dollybird.”

Of course, the phwooor factor of a dollybird is a precious thing in its heyday, and certainly the Scacchi of Heat and Dust, White Mischief and Presumed Innocent had an erotic screen voltage that overwhelmed all public perceptions. A memorable Spitting Image sketch featured Scacchi auditioning for Richard Attenborough. “Shall I take my clothes off now? Don’t you want to see me naked?


There are going to be nude scenes in this film, aren’t there?” she asks, in typically gross caricature. But clichés can be cruel, and Scacchi never made that transition from an A-list vamp to an older A-list vamp like, say, Sharon Stone (in fact, Scacchi turned down Stone’s career-making part in Basic Instinct – she thought, rightly, that the material was tawdry).

Thus, in Miss Austen Regrets, there seems to be a battle raging between Scacchi and her own image. As the elder, wiser sister to the fiery Jane (Olivia Williams), her Cassandra is a bedraggled bread baker, chicken plucker and general rural dogsbody without a dusting of make-up or a single bonnet change in ten years of screen life.

Scacchi is charitable about the role, and says that she did it to work with Olivia Williams, and because it cast an interesting light on Austen’s real life. She is charitable, too, about her forthcoming role in the new Brideshead Revisited adaptation (she plays Michael Gambon’s mistress), as she is about her role as the London wife of a Muslim police officer caught up in a Menezes-style killing, in Shoot on Sight.

And yet, you sense the frustration she feels with her screen career. On stage she has recently proved her mettle in Terence Hall’s touring adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s anti-love story The Deep Blue Sea.

Again, like Cassandra Austen, she is playing against type as a plain, older woman, but one who is emotionally abused by her younger RAF lover. The role, she says, has been rewarding, and proof that she is a performer of some range.

Scacchi studied at the Bristol Old Vic with classmates including Miranda Richardson and Daniel Day-Lewis (whom she briefly dated). Raised in Italy, England and Australia, she made an impression on film, she says, despite her theatrical training, alternating milestone movies such as White Mischief with arthouse outings. Her dalliances with Hollywood, meanwhile, have often been painful, culminating recently in deleted scenes as George Clooney’s wife in Syriana and a fleeting role as Jodie Foster’s shrink in Flightplan.

“And what did you think?” she asks, of her brief Flightplan appearance. “Did you think, ‘She must be desperate, why would she play such a tiny stupid little part?’ ” I tell her that she was credible, but I sense the question was rhetorical. “And now I’ve no choice,” she says, reaching under the table.

She pulls out a script, title hidden, and rolls her eyes. It’s decent money, and will pay the bills for the next six months, but it’s awful – they want her to play an MI5 villain. She groans. “What do I do? Do I just think, ‘OK, I’m crap. I’m washed up. They only ever rated me for my looks. So now, whenever I can cash in, maybe I should?’ ” Again, I’m guessing this is rhetorical. “But somehow I have a little suspicion that I might be better than that.”

She says that the only thing left for a woman in her forties battling the prejudice of a va-va-voom past is to trade on that past slightly. Like, say, Helen Mirren. “It’s the hint, the suggestion that there’s a boiler deep inside,” she says. “Helen Mirren still uses it, and the association is helpful.”

She adds that her own Hollywood adventure was cut short by a turbulent marriage to the Law & Order star Vincent D’Onofrio. They met on the set of the 1991 romantic melodrama Fires Within, got married, had a daughter, Leila, and divorced two years later.

She now lives in a cottage in Sussex with her husband Carlo Mantegazza, who is the father of her youngest son Matteo, and also her first cousin. “Do you think I want to talk about it?” she asks, stiffening at the mere mention of their relationship. It’s a tough call, but I’m going for rhetorical here, too. “Well, no, I don’t want to talk about it,” she continues, before remembering how the paparazzi blitzed her daughter’s school when the story first broke ten years ago.

The mere process of recollection, however, seems to have blackened her mood. “I thought we were here to talk about Austen!” she snaps, before sinking into a complete, lengthy, and slightly strange silence.

“Do you normally do this when you don’t want to answer a question?”, I ask, eventually, non-rhetorically.

“I think it’s the best way, isn’t it?” she replies.

“Well, I’m finding it difficult.”

“Oooh, sorry,” she says, inexplicably melting. “So, what do you want to write about? What would you like to say about me?”

I say that I quite like the whole . . . “The dollybird thing?” she interrupts, excitedly. “No.” “The cousin thing?!” she asks, tentatively. “No”, I say, “I like the idea of your inner boiler.”

“Oh God,” she groans again, “Why did I say that? Although I think I could turn it on if I needed to – what do you think?”

I say nothing. I know the drill. But for the first time that day I think, phwoooor!

Miss Austen Regrets, Sun, BBC One, 8pm

Martha's next move

As Freema Agyeman returns to Doctor Who, she tells Andrew Pettie about her character Martha’s evolution, saucy fan mail and her designs on Hollywood...

One of the fringe benefits of owning a Tardis should be that it allows you to duck out of sticky social situations. On Saturday, however, Doctor Who (David Tennant) uses his Tardis to materialise right in the middle of one of the stickiest imaginable, as he and his new companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) come face to face with his former assistant Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman).

The Doctor hasn’t seen Martha since the end of the last series. But series creator Russell T Davies has kept her busy by transplanting her character to Doctor Who’s BBC2 sister show, Torchwood. Thanks to the experience, Martha, says Agyeman, is a changed woman. “Martha left the Doctor to be with her family and complete her medical training,” she explains. “But because of all the experience she had battling aliens as his companion she also works for [paranormal investigation agency] UNIT. That’s made her tougher and more independent from the Doctor. In the last series they had a kind of student-teacher relationship, whereas now she knows how to tackle dangerous aliens on her own. In a way, she’s outgrown him.”

Martha has also moved on romantically, allowing her unrequited feelings for the Doctor to fade into friendship. In fact, Agyeman reveals, “Martha’s got someone new in her life. She’s engaged – to another doctor as it happens.”

Martha Jones’s career is going from strength to strength. But what of Freema Agyeman’s? It has been rumoured that she was replaced as the Doctor’s companion because of a backstage rift with David Tennant. “Oh my God, I’d never heard that!” she exclaims, taken aback. “David and I are very different people – we listen to different music, we like different things – but I think that can be a good thing, and was part of the reason I got the job. David was always someone I could learn from, somebody I could ask questions. He made me feel completely welcome from day one. I’m really upset that people think we didn’t get on.”

Agyeman believes Martha’s transfer to Torchwood has also helped her to develop as an actor. “Although there’s obviously an overlap between the two, Torchwood is a very different show from Doctor Who – it can be much darker. As a genre, sci-fi gives the writers freedom. Playing Martha in Torchwood has given me a great opportunity to stretch my acting muscles.”

Martha has been an instant hit with Doctor Who’s notoriously obsessive – and picky – fans. “I get lots of letters from six, seven and eight-year-olds telling me how they want to be Martha Jones,” she says. “Even grown-ups shout out ‘Hey Martha!’ to me in the street. And at the DVD signings, by the time some fans get up to the desk to meet the Doctor and Martha they can hardly breathe they’re so excited. They just stand there shaking. It’s one of the amazing things about Doctor Who that it touches people on such a grand scale.”

Despite all the attention, though, Agyeman has taken overnight celebrity in her stride. Even slightly alarming romantic overtures from fans haven’t fazed her. “I’ve yet to receive a marriage proposal,” she says with a chuckle, “but I did get a rather, erm, suggestive letter. The writer was saying how he’d love to be my assistant and obey my every command, which I guess was flattering. It certainly made me laugh.” (Note to potential suitors: Agyeman has a boyfriend, Jamie. They met shortly before Agyeman won the role of Martha when her “bread and butter job” was working as a theatre usher.)

Whenever her time on Doctor Who and Torchwood comes to an end, Agyeman has designs on Hollywood. She’s a devoted fan of comic-book adaptations such as Spider-Man and the X-Men franchise. “I really enjoy the crazy action sequences and pace of those films,” she says. “I suppose in that way comic-book adaptations are quite like Doctor Who. Those are the films I enjoy watching, so I imagine I’d also enjoy acting in them.”

For now, though, Agyeman is very happy with life as Dr Jones, and delighted by her return to the Doctor Who fold. Initially, she was worried that her first day of filming would be “like your first day back at school, when you worry that everything will be different”. But thanks to all the familiar faces among the cast and crew it was “like [she’d] never been away”.

“Being part of Doctor Who is like being a member of a club,” she says. “Whether it’s sending someone a text, or meeting up to go out for dinner, everyone stays in touch. When you’re in the Doctor Who family, you stay in the Doctor Who family. It’s like a nice version of the Mafia.”

Doctor Who is on Saturday, 26 April on BBC1 at 6.20pm

A Heroes star leading a far from ordinary teenage life

Hayden Panettiere is the poster girl of hit television show Heroes. The plot of the series about ordinary people who suddenly discover they've got superpowers could almost work as a metaphor for the life of the 18-year-old. Overnight she was thrown into the global limelight by the phenomenal success of the show. Every word and action of this girl from upstate New York became newsworthy, including her wardrobe, the men on her arm and, perhaps more surprisingly, her politics.

In Heroes, which returns to BBC2 tonight, Panettiere plays Claire Bennet, a 15-year-old cheerleader, who, in the first episode, discovered that she could heal instantly from any injury. The indestructible high-school student is forced to hide her ability from her peers and maintain a relationship with her father, a man who is keenly interested in people with special powers.

The first series won plaudits and awards but the start of the second series was met with a backlash when it aired in the US. Fans complained that the show had become lacklustre, the new characters were uninteresting, the trademark episode cliffhangers were noticeable by their absence and the story was unfolding too slowly. Show creator Tim Kring even went on record to apologise for the mis-steps and just as the season got back on track, the writers' strike ensured that the second series only had 11 episodes rather than the expected 24. Arguably it was a blessing in disguise.

However, just as interest in the show was beginning to wane, media interest in Panettiere went into overdrive as it emerged that she was dating her co-star Milo Ventimiglia. The news was met with consternation among her fans, with a consensus that the 12-year age gap between the pair was too large.

The blonde teenager has complained about the judgmental attitude of the criticism, but believes that she is now mature enough to handle it. One of the reasons for this is a holiday to Europe that she took with Ventimiglia and fellow cast members Jack Coleman and Adrian Pasdar: "About five days after I turned 18 [in August 2007] I took off to Europe with them. It was the first time that my mother hasn't travelled with me and we went to Munich, Paris and London. It was such a different experience being on your own and it just changed me dramatically. My mom says that one person walked on that plane and another person walked off."

She talks of having a family at home and a family on set. She describes the cast of Heroes as being her surrogate fathers, brothers and sisters; revealingly, there is no room for a surrogate mother. Her mother is Lesley R Vogel, a former soap actress who put her daughter into her first commercial when she was just 11 months old. At the age of four, Panettiere had landed her first part in a soap, and by the time she was nine she had appeared on Jay Leno's talk show. Aged 10, she was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for A Bug's Life Read-Along. She has sung songs for soundtracks including Bridge to Terabithia, and later this year her debut album is due to be available for download.

It seems that it's impossible not to talk about her wardrobe. When we meet she is wearing a blue Cynthia Rowley dress that, given its length, could easily be mistaken for a T-shirt. Her face is splashed with ready-for-television make-up and her hair is immaculately curled. She looks like the archetypal all-American prom queen. She is being spoken of in the same breath as Lindsay Lohan and Mischa Barton. However, unlike both those stars, who have both been arrested for drink-driving, Panettiere's arrest record is one that she is proud of.

On 31 October 2007, she was part of a group of protesters involved in a confrontation with Japanese fishermen. The group tried to disrupt the annual dolphin hunt in Taiji, Wakayama, by swimming towards dolphins that were being herded to a cove where they could be killed. In the confrontation, Panettiere paddled out on a surfboard before being forced back to shore as the fishermen used their boats' propellers and harpoons to block the protesters. On the beach, television cameras caught the actress in tears before the group of surfers headed straight to Osaka Airport and left the country to avoid arrest by the Japanese police.

The protest established her as the poster girl of the Save the Whales Again! campaign. She recalls: "I was absolutely beside myself the whole time. They wanted to arrest me, but it created such a wonderful stir in America and around the world that it was the biggest step forward we've ever had with the problem. At the end of January, I spent four days in Washington DC visiting the embassies of Japan, Norway and Iceland, the whaling nations. I spoke to the foreign minister of Japan and I think that they've lifted the arrest warrant, because I was at the embassy and that would have been interesting locked in a jail cell below the embassy in DC, but he welcomed me back so unless it's a trap I think I can go back to Japan now."

She recounts the tale with a glint in her eye: "He was so polite, respectful and kind and told me: 'You are the most welcome guest that I've ever had.' I was like, 'Shit, really! Thanks. I don't know how much I believe you, but thanks.' We spoke about how Japan looks at Sea Shepherd as if they are a terrorist organisation, and about how whaling can be stopped."

Whether she will turn out to be the Hanoi Jane of her generation or not, American politicians are as eager as the whaling nations to get her on side. I'm struck by how nonchalant the actress seems as she talks about being tapped by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: "I've had conversations with both of them. Actually, it was with Obama and Chelsea Clinton rather than her mother. The reason I was having meetings with them was to ask about their opinions and views on whaling, which dramatically impacts my opinion on who I vote for." Only just old enough to vote, the actress would not divulge which of the two camps won her over.

The Heroes star is even turning the media infatuation with what she wears into a way of helping save the whales. She has set up a website (www.panettierecloset.com) that sells clothes and accessories from her wardrobe, with the proceeds donated to animal-rights campaigns. When purchasing from the site it will pay to remember that the actress is only 5ft 1in.

Her film career is about to take off, too. She will soon be seen in Fireflies in the Garden, in which she stars alongside Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds and Emily Watson. In the family drama, Panettiere appears in the flashback scenes playing the young incarnation of the no-nonsense character that Watson plays in the present. Fireflies' director, Dennis Lee, has no doubt about her star quality, "Hayden is spectacularly talented. People know her through Heroes but she is the real deal. I'd love for people to understand that and not lump her in with her generation of actors who tend, for a lack of a better phrase, to get themselves in trouble. She has her head on straight."

Whether or not she is the most talented actor of her generation is a moot point; what is in no doubt is that she is the most dynamic teenager to have come on to our screens in a long time.

Heroes starts tonight at 9pm on BBC2; Fireflies in the Garden will open later this year

Jessica Arsenal is getting serious

Jessica Alba mesmerises men. It's what she does. Or to be precise, it's what Hollywood has let her do. Her signature roles so far have seen her in various states of undress, from a bikini-clad diver in Into the Blue to a lasso-wielding stripper in Sin City.

In America, she's almost a figure of national obsession. The Hollywood satire TV series Entourage devoted an entire plot to the conquest of a guest-starring Alba, while Us Weekly magazine claimed she was Tom Cruise's first choice before he clapped eyes on Katie Holmes. Meanwhile, Eminem, in the D12 song "My Band", rapped: "Yesterday Kuniva tried to pull a knife on me/ Cause I told him Jessica Alba's my wife to be."

All of which runs contrary to the 5 ft 6in figure sitting in front of me, reports James Mottram Dressed in black trousers, a cream blouse, and patent red flats, with her hair tied back with an Alice band, she couldn't look more like a choirgirl if she tried. Her frame is petite and slim, and just starting to show signs that she is expecting her first child with fiancé Cash Warren in the summer. She's also unfailingly polite, apologising after she hiccups. "I have the worst heartburn since I got pregnant," she says, fluttering her big brown eyes. Still, I can't help but be reminded of a recent comment by a BBC Radio 5 listener, comparing her to this season's trophy-less Arsenal side: "Easy on the eye, but never going to win an Oscar."

Alba would argue differently. After all, she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Dark Angel, her breakthrough TV show. But, at nearly 27, she strikes me as an actress who has to work fast or her time may pass. Hamstrung by her beauty, she is typical of what Hollywood wants from its young starlets these days: a girl-next-door with just the right amount of sex appeal for the 18-25, male, movie-going demographic. God knows how many trees have been felled to print the posters of her adorning teenagers' walls the world over. But it's precisely this accessibility that made her perfect casting as the Marvel Comics superhero Sue Storm in Fantastic Four and its 2007 sequel, which grossed a staggering $618m across the globe.

If that blockbuster franchise is enough to buy her some time, it hasn't won her much respect. She complains that she gets sent far too many scripts with gratuitous nudity – "I don't think this is happening to Natalie Portman" – but her choices have been naive. Take last year's woeful comedy Good Luck Chuck, in which she played the love interest. "It's porn," she recently moaned to Elle magazine. "It wasn't supposed to be like that." Hollywood has evidently been a steep learning curve for her. She noted of her Into the Blue co-star Paul Walker: "Paul was the lead. Paul helped develop it. You wouldn't believe how much that kid got paid! And I don't think he did one ounce of publicity."

Her new horror movie, The Eye, is her chance to top the bill, in a role far removed from your typical scream-queen. A remake of the Pang Brothers' Hong Kong thriller Jian Gui, it has a pedigree attached to it, in that it's directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, the Frenchmen who were responsible for the genuinely creepy Them. Alba plays Sydney Wells, a blind concert violinist who undergoes a double corneal transplant. As her sight gradually returns, she begins to be haunted by some horrific shapes in her peripheral vision. "She's definitely being frightened and freaked out, and losing it," says Alba. "But it's all going on in her head."

Arguably, The Eye offers Alba the chance to test her technical acting mettle. She went to two blind-orientation centres, learning basic Braille and how to walk with a cane. And she spent six months learning how to play the violin – even though, in the end, this is seen in just two sequences. "It was so irritating," she says. "I play someone who has been playing her entire life – she's an expert, so it's second nature. So for me, who has never played it before, I needed all that just to get comfortable with the instrument... but the violin is really complex. Just holding the bow properly took me a while."

Although the film never quite delivers on its early promise, Alba argues that it's much harder to tell a ghost story in the US. "In Eastern culture, people see ghosts, people talk about ghosts... it's just accepted. And in Western culture it's just not. Educated people for the most part aren't going to say, 'Oh, yeah, I saw a ghost', whereas in the East, someone who's a doctor or a lawyer would say, 'Oh yeah, of course people see ghosts!'" Has she ever seen one? "I've never seen a ghost. But at my parents' house, we've had televisions turning on in the middle of the night, faucets turning on, doors opening... things like that."

Born in Pomona, where her father was serving in the US Air Force, Alba spent much of her childhood being shuttled across the States between army bases before the family finally settled in California when she was nine. This rather nomadic upbringing was certainly "perfect training" for life as an actress, which she began in earnest after she took her first class when she was 12. Within nine months she had an agent, and shortly afterwards made her debut in the 1994 comedy Camp Nowhere. But while working steadily throughout her teenage years – odd episodes of Chicago Hope and Beverly Hills 90210 and the like – she never quite got the breakthrough she wanted.

"If I didn't get a job, between 16 and 18, that wasn't significant, I was just going to go to college," she recalls. "I didn't want to be a struggling actor at 36 with five kids, doing something I hated. You see the story so much. It's such a vicious business to be in when you're not meant to be in it." Her saviour came in the shape of James Cameron, who cast her as the superhuman lead, Max Guevera, in Dark Angel, his short-lived sci-fi TV series. "It's probably the most influential thing that I've ever had," she reflects. "Thank god for Dark Angel. Getting a blessing by James Cameron to star in his first television show. Really the first thing he did after Titanic was hire me."

During filming, she began a four-year relationship with her Dark Angel co-star Michael Weatherly – some 13 years older than her, he proposed on her 20th birthday, the subject of some controversy. After the show was cancelled, however, Alba began to forge a film career. With her unusual ethnic origins – a mix of Mexican, Danish, French and Spanish – she was initially pigeonholed into ethnic roles, notably the risible Honey, in which she played a Latina hip-hop dancer. "Until the last couple of years, I was often categorised – I had to be exotic, or mysterious, or the bad girl. I found the lighter my hair got, the wider people's minds got. They stopped thinking of me as someone who is Latin, which is very Hollywood."

Recent reports have claimed that Alba is ashamed of her Latin heritage. "It's crap!", she fires back when I put this to her. "I don't speak Spanish. I was born and raised in the States. My father was born and raised in the States. And my grandparents were born and raised in the States. So I'm American... I have Latin roots in America and I would love to play a Latin character. I've only been offered a few, and they weren't the right movies. They weren't characters that I felt represented Latin women to me. Latin women are intelligent..." She sighs for second. "I wish I could speak Spanish, because it would be a lot easier to play more interesting roles."

For the moment, she's planning to take some time off from film-making after she gives birth. "I'm just sitting back and figuring out what this whole experience of being a mother is all about – and taking that in," she says. She has been engaged to Warren since December. They met on the set of Fantastic Four, when he was an assistant to the film's director, Tim Story. Refashioning himself as a producer, Warren has recently worked with director Stacy Peralta, who made the excellent skateboard documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. Their new project is Made in America, a study of gang violence in Los Angeles and its effects on young black men. "Stacy is really about opening the can about what is happening to the black man in the United States and what we're doing to them," Alba gushes, suddenly animated.

Proving she has something of a political conscience, Alba recently appeared in a pro-Barack Obama video directed by Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am, alongside Ryan Phillippe and Kerry Washington. "I've always tried to be aware and do my part – and try to get kids to vote during election times," she says. Why does she support the Democratic candidate? "The fact he's raised so much private money, and that he really feels like he's for the people, and not really driven so much by big business. And it's just so rare to find a politician that has that much integrity. Everyone views him as the next JFK. That's where people are putting him, because he's for the people and not necessarily about making more money for corporations that are running our country."

Compassionate and socially engaged, this is not the Alba that Hollywood has so far let us see. I wonder if she has plans to produce a film, perhaps with Warren. "I don't know," she muses. "We haven't really talked about it, so I'm not really sure. I wouldn't mind doing something with him. He's incredibly smart and very business-savvy. I think him being part of anything means it's going to be progressive and successful." Does she find it difficult conducting a relationship in the public eye? She nods. "Everyone has an opinion of who you are and what your relationship is about, things that you've done or didn't do in your relationship – and it's just all crap, really. Things that are written about it are all crap."

As she accusingly fixes her eyes on me, I change the subject: what does success mean to her? "Success helps me smile a lot more," she replies. "It means that I know I'll be OK. I'll never have to be on welfare, or have food stamps or deal with poverty in any way, shape or form. So that's real nice, because a lot of people I know have to deal with that. I wasn't born into money, so it's nice not stressing about that." It's unlikely to be something she's ever going to have to worry about again. This summer, she takes the female lead in Mike Myers' new comedy The Love Guru, in which she plays – unsurprisingly – his squeeze. "It's about the need for self-love," she explains. "It's a very sweet message."

Given her ability to stir male loins, Alba would've been the ideal match for Myers' earlier creation, Austin Powers. As it is, she gets to play second fiddle to a man trying to break in to the self-help business. But in her quest for longevity, aligning herself with a man of Myers's talent is a wise move, and she was impressed by his dedication. "I appreciated the perfectionist in him, wanting to get it right. I'm that way too. I mean, why are we all here? We're all here to make it the best it can be and not make it half-assed." Maybe there's a chance of that Oscar yet.