A sex kitten for the new millenium, Anna Friel spices up A Midsummer Night's Dream and talks a blue streak in Broadway's Closer.

"It was so funny today," she says, fluttering into her second-floor dressing room after the show and lighting up a long skinny cigarette. "Every time I said a swear word, the whole audience would go ‘Tsk-tsk’ really loud," she says, her sentences spilling out so quickly that a hummingbird would need a double latte to keep up. "I mean, doesn’t the poster say that it has sex and strong language? I was almost hesitant to say the words when I got to them. But I must say, I think it’s great—not everything can be The Lion King"

Certainly the Broadway version of the celebrated London production is no Disney-style family event: Closer centers on four adults who repeatedly lust after and ruthlessly betray one another. As an on-again, off-again stripper; Friel’s character, Alice, talks about sex and sexual politics in words that would get her arrested in most Southern states. She also performs a striptease that, depending on the location of your seat, exposes enough flesh to fill a dozen websites.

While Friel is relatively unknown in this country, the 22-year-old Brit actor has made tabloid headlines in her home country since 1993, the year she was hired to play a lesbian schoolgirl on the soap opera Brookside. She quickly became a sort of Susan B. Anthony by way of Shannen Doherty when she engaged in the U.K.’s first on-screen lesbian kiss. The then 17-year-old followed the legendary buss by posing scantily clad in various lad mags. Her transformation from teenager to twentysomething was followed more closely in the press than a Manchester United match, as was her two-year romance with English theater actor and TV host Darren Day. In fact, she found out that the relationship was over when she read in the paper that he was seeing another woman.

Friel never hid her immense heartbreak about what happened with Day, but then, she had no choice. Reporters and photographers followed her every move—although, admittedly, the places she frequented weren’t exactly out of the way. Friel was spotted at trendy London clubs, and she was often escorted to parties by the Cheshire-grinning pop star Robbie Williams, with whom she had a brief fling on the rebound.

Despite her now international sextress reputation, away from the stark stage lights (and fully clothed), Friel appears tiny and vulnerable. The walls of her small dressing room are adorned with wilting roses and a giant poster of a smiling cherub, a decor more suited to a plastic-horse-collecting Britney Spears fan than to a woman widely regarded as a major sex symbol for the new millennium.

When the discrepancy between her public persona and the girlish ornaments are pointed out, she laughs. "Patrick [Marber, Closer’s playwright and director] told me that I have a lack of sexual confidence," says Friel, who had never acted onstage before this Broadway run. "He said that I don’t think that lam sexy. But sexy to me has nothing to do with pouty lips and all that. It is more something that you see out of the corner of your eye, not something that is front and center."

That’s not to say Friel always strives for subtlety—she believes in pushing the displays of emotion in her film and theater work, even if it means her feelings get in the way of her performance. "Patrick knew a lot about my love life ‘cause it had been on the cover of every newspaper in England," says Friel. "He would say, 'I know you are dealing with things, but this is a play and not real life-you cannot bring that baggage in with you.’ Well, l am not a machine. If you are going to act in a play about these subjects, you have no choice but to bring those real emotions in with you. He would say, ‘No, you can’t—you have to use the stage as your escape."

Ironically, Friel feels her busy film schedule has freed her to do too much escaping over the past few years. First up is the anti-Closer——director Michael Hoffman’s Midsummer, a film full of lush romanticism and fairy dust. The cast features Michelle Pfeiffer, Calista Flockhart and Sophie Marceau, but it’s Friel’s star-crossed lover who shines the brightest.

Friel jumped from the Shakespearean tale right into the ‘70s-themed Sunset Strip, with Rory Cochrane and Jared Leto, and then played opposite Ewan McGregor in Rogue Trader, as the wife of the man who brought down Barings Bank. She followed that with Mad Cows, in which she shows off her knack for accents by playing a daft Australian sheepherder. Friel says that although the work has helped her finally get over Day, it has also distracted her from, well, everything else. "Since arriving here, I’ve managed to be introspective for the first time in my life," she explains. "Before this, I was going from film to film, having to adjust to different places and make different friends all the time. I never looked at myself, really. That sounds quite sad, and actually, it was."

She gets up to close the window as the evening gridlock begins and the rumble of tour buses and taxi cabs becomes deafening. "I got here," she continues, "and I said, ‘My God, you’re like a shell filled with many different characters.’ I was losing myself. This is the first time that I have thought, What is it that makes me happy, and what is it I want, and where is it that Jam going?"