Time magazine called Anna Friel the UK's "greatest export". They also dubbed her Britain's Bella Donna - curious in that the meaning is both fair lady and deadly nightshade. Chrissy Iley assesses the potency of the ex-Brookside actress who has undergone serious reconstruction in Manhattan.

How many times have we been told you can take the star out of the soap but never the soap out of the star - no matter how many times you wash her she'll never come clean. Doomed to the small screen and supermarket openings, doomed to never amounting to more than a tabloid reputation, never being taken more seriously than a heap of redtop headlines.

It could have gone that way for Anna Friel. As the sexually abused lesbian in Brookside whose private life was about looking for love in all the wrong places, it seemed like it was going to begin and end with a much flaunted broken romance with fellow soapy Darren Day and bad boy Robbie Williams who kissed her better, only to be caught kissing someone else in a limo.

As Brookside's notorious Beth Jordache, Friel brought us the first British girl-on-girl kiss in prime time which ensured she got a place in all women's intrigue and all men's imaginations. When she went to prison for burying her drunken, violent, on-screen father under the patio, fans wore T-shirts emblazoned with "Free Beth Jordache". They were heartbroken when she left and Friel herself was exhausted.

She knew she couldn't be feeble for too long. She knew she had to have a world plan. Soap is just a double-edged sword. It makes you famous, then it eats you up. Friel had to do some serious reconstruction. She became best friends with the actress Sadie Frost and started hanging out with the Brit Pack of Primrose Hill - Jude Law, Johnny Lee Miller and possibly her greatest Mate, ate Moss.

When Sadie Frost was having her own dark moment about being dismissed as "mumsie" after having a baby, Friel gave her life-changing counsel and encouragement, telling her that her fight to stop being buried by Beth Jordache had been so difficult that if she could do it anybody could.

The first thing she did was to stop stripping off to get attention quite so regularly. Her Brookie days had been complemented by bikini pictures or lingerie pouting for Loaded and the like. She says, "Oh my God, I don’t know how they ever convinced me to do those. But I stopped doing all those bikini things at the same time I cut my hair off".

Any severe shearing or transforming of hair is never an accident, it's always a metaphor. She might say she did it for the part - the first time it was shorn was for Rogue Trader (where she played opposite Ewan McGregor as the wife of Nick Leeson who caused the collapse of Barings Bank). Cutting her hair was the most instant and obvious statement that meant I'm not Beth the long-haired lesbian. No longer a mixture of vulnerable and edgy, she became just plain edgy.

The real turning point in Friel's career was not this film,. Nor was it The Land Girls, a David Leland film set in the wartime forties, in which she co-starred with Catherine McCormack and Rachel Weisz. The transformation really began when she took an American agent who advised her to under expose, to leave Britain where she would be photographed getting in and out of taxis. Start again in Broadway. Just as Nicole Kidman did The Blue Room she was described as "theatrical viagra", when Anna Friel did Closer on Broadway, she was an equally sexually charged experience, an equally potent drug.

Playing a troubled runaway in Patrick Marber's play about obsession and lust, Anna looked like a pixie that had such a raw-nerved manic charisma she became one of the most talked about actresses in Manhattan. Time magazine called her "Britain's Bella Donna" (whether they meant fair lady or deadly nightshade, we will probably never know) and hailed her as this country's greatest acting export, marvelling at how she could go from suburban soap star to a serious sophisticated actress. Okay, so Spielberg visited her backstage, Tom Cruise took her flowers, and when I was in New York she didn't show up to a portrait sitting with the artist David Remfry, an old friend. He said she hasn’t changed since she's become famous; she's got so busy she's stopped turning up for things. This time it was because she was locked in a reading with Al Pacino.

Jack Nicholson famously said of her when he saw Closer, "Until I sleep with her I just can't concentrate". Friel s happy to know that he's still all over the place.

The big rumour fuelled partly because of the fact she played a lesbian in Brookside and partly because they were caught kissing in the Groucho Club was that she was having an affair with Kate Moss. She says they are just good friends and that she's not at all gay. "There are always these rumours about me and Kate, but you either have that instinct or you don't, and I don't. I've had loads of women come on to me, it's very flattering when you get these beautiful, gorgeous women who can have anyone they want and they want you, but it's either there or it's not and I'm definitely a man's woman. Sometimes I worry that I look like a man. It's nothing to do with the haircut, but then I don't want to be too pretty, do I ? I don't want to be a babe".

Of course Anna wants to be a babe. Anna is a babe. She doesn’t have to try to be sexy, she just is. Clive Anderson, normally the master of the smarmy one-liner put down, was mesmerised. She's got a kind of confidence that comes from having to work so hard that small rejections don't matter any more so you might as well just go for it.

In 1998 she went to Italy to film William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Calista Flockhart and Michelle Pfeiffer. After that she starred as a hormonally challenged Australian new mother in the screen adaptation of the Kathy Lette novel Mad Cows.

Friel, 23, was born in Rochdale into a middle class home. Her father is a schoolteacher and her younger brother Michael was the little boy pushing his bike up the hill in the Hovis ad. Both children started performing young, although Anna was nicknamed Granny Friel as a teenager because she studied so hard - she was always pretty driven.

So once she had decided she was no longer going to be a lesbian popsy from Brookside she set every corner of her being into the reconstruction process. When you meet her she is so friendly she's kind of seductive. She's brilliant at doing accents and will perform on command. She likes to make you laugh and although she says her "main aim in life is to have fun", I suspect that's a hard aim to have when it's coupled with all that grafting and all that ambition.

After the airing of her love life in public, she's rather shied off from close relationships. The scarred but brittle character she played in Closer is probably close to her own soul. She seems so ubercool now it's hard to imagine her with the shiny faced Darren Day. They had a two-and-a-half year relationship which ended in 1997. It was succeeded far too closely for comfort by his parading his new love Tracy Shaw, the Coronation Street actress, across the pages of a tabloid. By way of explanation, Day said that their break-up was caused because he was 28 and Friel was 21. He left her because he said she wasn't ready for commitment - Day later dumped Shaw. When Friel fell straight into the arms of Robbie Williams, it can't have been commitment she was looking for. He, by all accounts, loves women, but loves too many of them. It was at a time when he was recovering from being a former Take That star with the very relaxing and restorative substances called drugs and alcohol. It was a fun but short-lived relationship which ended when she saw him out on the town with a blonde with a seahorse tattoo in the tabloids the next day.

She refused to be a victim, however "I found myself incredibly angry that Robbie had been allowed to get in the state he was in," she said. "No one can be expected to go through what he went through with Take That easily and Robbie helped me so much with the pain of being dumped by Darren, I'd been through hell".

She insists that she's still a romantic and would like to get married in a forest because it would remind her of a "fairy tale". Sounds like she's been taking A Midsummer Night's Dream too seriously. She says, "If there's one thing I really do want in my life it's true love. To feel love you have to be accessible and open. You can't be that guarded, and in this business you need to be guarded and I'm not. Which means I'm open to a lot of hurt. The big question in my life at the moment is what is more important, love or career. I'd like both but I'd rather die in love than be an Oscar-winning actress. God I want a boyfriend."

Dealing with hurt and not going under is something she chooses to survive. She employs a team of agents and publicists to help her plan the reconstruction of Anna. Last year she appeared at the top table at the Oscars. She borrowed a £5,000 dress from Donatella Versace and was decked in "for one night only" diamonds. Donatella loved the publicity and said Anna could come into her closet any time.