She's already made the leap from "Brookside" to Broadway. But with New York at her feet and Hollywood on the phone, does Anna Friel have what it takes to go all the way ?

-by Christa D'Souza. Photographed by Terry Richardson.

The house was packed, the applause rapturous as usual, goodness, how the Americans love British theatre! - but Anna Friel, the star of Closer on Broadway, isn't very happy.

It's about 10 minutes after the curtain has come down and we are in her dressing room, which is lit by hundreds of candles and filled with the smell of incense. The mirror is decorated with bunches of dried flowers hanging upside down, and tucked into its edges are various Polaroids of Anna with her father, and Anna with her friend Kate Moss.

On a low coffee table is a bottle of white wine that Anna has just uncorked, and the atmosphere is very post-dinner party, except our 23-year-old hostess is pacing up and down with a Marlboro Light in her mouth, muttering about something not being quite right tonight. Natasha Richardson, Anna's new great mate, has just been replaced by another actress, an American with whom she has never worked before, and Anna says she feels the tone of the production has suddenly become rather "fluffy", not serious enough for the theme of the play. "I mean, this is heavy stuff we're talking about", she says to her doe-like understudy and the resident American director, who are sitting cross-legged at the coffee table. Presently, the play's creator, Patrick Marber, knocks on the door. "Everything OK? ", he asks.

Well no, Anna starts to tell him, as a matter of fact it isn't.

"But you forgot about half a page of lines!" cries the stocky, oyster-eyed Marber, palms outstretched in bafflement. "Of course it's going to sound fluffy." Upon which all traces of the difficult diva vanish as Anna claps her hand over her mouth, widening those saucer eyes in panic. "Did I, did really?" she says. 

By the time we get out on to the crowded street, though, she has recovered, attracting plenty of stares in a home-made leather headband with a feather dangling from the end and platform Mary-Janes. She points out a theatre where the actor Scott Wolf, a current crush of hers, is performing. "They're weird, these Americans,"` she volunteers, completely ignoring a beggar who lurches right in front of us as we wait for the lights to change. "They take you out to dinner, they say -, `Let's do this, Let's do that', and you think luve-ly, but then they don't take it any further." 

I suggest it's because she must seem rather exotic to the average American male. "Well I'd like to think that?" she snorts doubtfully, "but I think it's more Northern Madwoman." She leads the way into the dark, smoky surroundings of the famous theatre haunt Joe Allen's, where she is enveloped like a long-Iost friend by the maitre d'. 

"He-e-ey. Hallo, baby!" she cries, as though she hasn't been in the joint for ages, when in fact she s here only last night with her mate, the actor Toby Stephens. Then she does a kind of table -hopping cha-cha down the narrow aisle, shaking hands with this fan and with that fan, stopping briefly at the bar to say hello to an actress friend blowing a kiss to Brian Dennehy, the Tony winning star of Death Of A Salesman. 

"Not too loud for you here is it" she shouts once we've finally made it to one of the tables at the back only to pop right back up again when yet another group of friends, including actor Matthew Broderick, walks in. "Hiya baby," she purrs. "I'm sorry I didn't get to see the show yet. I hear it's so good..." And then the discussion moves swiftly on to the probability of a late-night bowling session somewhere in the vicinity of the Port Authority bus terminal on 42nd Street. Anna promises everyone she'll be there. 

After they leave, she changes her mind. -`Oh no, I'm not going out tonight, she says, complaining of a lingering chest infection that won't respond to antibiotics and a bruised oesophagus from where her co-star, Rupert Graves, grabbed her too enthusiastically in the last scene. 

"That Matthew, he's a sweetie," she confides, while digging in her bag for a stray aspirin. "We're just a real group, us lot. Both Rupert and Ciarin (Hinds) live down the corridor from me. Judi Dench is here. She's been so incredible, l can't tell you - like a mentor. Her daughter, Finty, is a really good friend of mine too. It sounds like such a nightmare, all these actors hanging out together, but what's really amazing is that they all like me and want to give me their time. I mean, I'm not putting myself down or anything," she carries on, nodding across the room to Graves who has just walked in with his wife, "but I must be so boring to them." And then, spotting Patrick Marber in the distance, she cries, "Oh Iook, he's on his own... Hiya, baby! Come sit down. Have a glass of wine with us.

I first met Anna Friel Iess than a year ago, soon after she had completed filming the ill-fated Rogue Trader with Ewan McGregor and A Midsummer Night's Dream with Calista Flockhart and Michelle Pfeiffer. Her role as Maddy in Mad Cows, the much-hyped screen adaptation of Kathy Lette's novel to be released later this month, was still up in the air. Sunset Strip, her first bona fide Hollywood film, which is to be released later this year, had not even been cast. Her posse was different then, too - a world that revolved primarily around that ultra-hip Primrose Hill mob: Meg Mathews, Sadie Frost, Jude Law and Jonny Lee Miller, with additions like Stella McCartney, Dan Macmillan and, of course, her greatest mate of all, Kate Moss.

Anna now says that coming to New York is the best thing that could have happened to her. Before leaving London, she was becoming rather exhausted by all the wild partying and late night trawls to Soho House. In New York, she continues, "there isn't a scene, there isn't the one bar that everyone goes to. In London, you're either in that top bracket or you're not; here it's much easier because you don't have to define yourself like that." She also likes it here because she has to make more of an effort. "I actually enjoy thinking this person or that person knows fuck-all about me and for all I know they could think I was someone who hadn't done anything. I love that!"` 

One does get the impression, though, that Anna is quite lonely here in her anonymous high-rise apartment with magnificent views across the river; that even though all her new actor friends couldn't be more supportive and friendly, she misses her mates back home dreadfully. Although she has spent time with Liam Neeson and Natasha upstate, and had a few stolen weekends in the Hamptons, it's not quite the same as, say, romping around Tuscany with Kate Moss last summer, popping in on all these "real live Iords" as she so nostalgically puts it. Kate and Anna: what a double act they must have made in Italy, and in London, fuelling all those spurious rumours about their supposed affair by one very public kiss at The Groucho Club. "The Groucho Club? Are you sure it was The Groucho Club?" giggles Anna wickedly. "Yeah, but Kate's just too beautiful. I remember in Italy I'd wake up in the morning and look at her and go, `You are so fucking beautiful ' 

"There are always rumours about me and Kate," she continues, easily, "but you either have that instinct or you don't, and I don't. I mean, I've had loads of women come on to me here, not dyke-y women, nice women, women who have never even heard of Beth Jordache [her cult lesbian character in the TV series Brookside]. And they always ask me if I'm gay. In a way it would be easier if I were. 

"It's very flattering when you get these beautiful, gorgeous women who can have anyone they want and they want you," she goes on, briskly sticking another cigarette in her mouth as she warms to her theme. Whether you mess around with your friends... it's either there or it's not, and I'm definitely a man's woman. Although I do actually look in the mirror and sometimes gel scared. I was having my wig put on the other day and I said to the hairdresser, `I look like a man, don't I?' I've got this jaw, or something, it's indefinable. It's definitely 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. . ."

Anna is a total babe, of course, especially now that she's spent $1,400 on getting her teeth done (the first visit she had paid to the dentist in two and a half years). But there is almost something too edgy, too feral about Friel for her to be described as a conventional beauty. She is wearing a chunky brown sweater and tight brown Joseph jeans that accentuate her long, vaguely undernourished looking legs to perfection. Her fingernails, meanwhile, are unmanicured and her pale skin reflects her penchant for drinking wine, smoking ciggies and staying out late. In other words, she has none of that American gloss most Britpack actresses acquire the moment they get off the plane at JFK. Yet, that is. 

For although Anna remains unchanged in some ways - still shockingly candid (I particularly like the story she tells Brian Dennehy about asking Kevin Spacey if he was gay), still friendly to the point of being seductive - there is something that has immutably altered since we last met. 

When Anna first arrived in New York, she used to throw up from nerves before going on stage and bite her nails to the quick, worrying what New York audiences would think of her. And as for the idea of designers giving her free clothes to wear, what a wheeze... but are they sure? 

Now, as New York's indisputable toast of .he town, with all sorts of designers clamouring to dress her and all sorts of people, like Al Pacino, calling her up, the picture's rather different. And so, quite naturally, is Anna. I watch her reaction, for example, when a stranger walks over to our table, having charmingly mistaken the back of my head for that of Calista Flockhart. Anna draws herself up in her chain greeting his minor faux pas with such obvious disdain that I want to crawl in a hole and hide. "Calista?" she inquires coldly. "Do you mean Calista who was in my last movie, A Midsummer Night's Dream?" 

But then let's face it, this is a young woman who at the age of 23, with no drama-school training whatsoever, has already been in Time Magazine, has been hotly tipped to play Eliza in Cameron Mackintosh's upcoming musical production of My Fair Lady; hell who has Madonna scurrying round town for tickets before Closer closes. Although that's no big surprise considering Madonna's already written the "Anna Friel song"

What? Madonna's actually written a song for Anna?" You know, that song," says Friel, "the one on Ray Of Light that starts 'And I feel...' Everyone says it sounds like she's saying Anna Friel'. It's like this big joke.

In other words, Anna Friel is not just another Britpack actress on the cusp of something big in the States. She's here. She's arrived. She's a bona fide star. Although if weight loss is a function of that kind of success, I'm not sure if she hasn't overdone it. "Hey. I'm still the same as I weighed last time," she protests after ordering for both of us - soup, salad and a bottle of white wine. "Just under seven and a half stone. But I will tell you, the more successful you get the more eyes are on you. I never gave a shit. I never thought about what I ate until I slowly started acknowledging the pressure that is always around you. When I was in LA I had producers pulling me over, saying 'Anna, we have a prah-blem'- perfect American accent here. 'Don't worry, it's fine, but your stomach isn't looking so flattering on camera, like you're going to have to stop with the donuts, Anna, hon-e-e-e'

Friel is talking about her three-month stint in LA filming Sunset Strip, a pastiche of the Seventies rock`n`roll business in Hollywood, in which she plays a redheaded costume designer called Tammy. One would have thought a gregarious person like Anna would have loved the whole LA experience, would have had to be dragged on her bony little posterior to get on the plane to come East. But evidently not. Despite being great friends, with Joaquin Phoenix, Liv Tyler's ex who was living next door to her in the Bel-Age Hotel, she was rather relieved to leave. 

Making Mad Cows was obviously a more enjoyable experience for her, not least because it had the approval of The Gang. "Meg and all that lot had seen Sara Sugarman's first  film, Valley Girls [a short about Welsh cleaning ladies] and said it was fucking great,' she recalls. "So I was really keen, especially since I hadn't worked with a female director since Brookside. Besides, I liked the idea of looking at the world as an Australian single mother with a three-month old baby".

Anna certainly looked the part, with a wig that turns her into the spitting image of Kathy Lette and clad in a maternity bra filled with detachable silicone breasts.

"Oh my God, they're so weird"' says Anna. "They make you three cup sizes bigger and they've got nipples on the end of them which go hard when it's cold. We had to buy three pairs, because if you're breast-feeding they change size a lot... Talking of babies, I had the weirdest dream last night. Very beautiful, very physical. You know, one of those dreams where you don't want to wake up. I was in this Arabian castle and I had a baby which was breast-feeding, and I just felt so content and wanted. Then I woke up and I was so disappointed it wasn't true! And then guess what? I started my period!"` 

Born in Rochdale, the daughter of Des a schoolteacher from Northern Ireland, and his wife Julie, Anna Louise and her younger brother Michael (the little boy pushing his bicycle up the hill in the Hovis ad) both started performing on the stage as children. They had every encouragement from their parents, particularly Des, a folk guitarist and computer buff who started up Anna's much-visited website and now devotes most of his working hours to looking after his daughter's career interests. Nicknamed Granny Friel as a teenager, and once rushed to hospital with suspected ulcers on the eve of sitting her GCSEs, Friel was always pretty driven. But, as her father points out when we meet back in London, it was always of her own volition. "What do people mean when how did you get your daughter into it," he reprimands me rather sharply. " Like, how did I get her into sweeping chimneys? There were no expectations, except for Anna to be happy" 

It was through the local youth theatre group that Anna started getting noticed by people in the business; and at the age of 15 she came to the attention of Brookside's producer Phil Redmond. Hence, the cult of Beth Jordache - who helped bury her sexually abusive dad under the patio, had a lesbian affair with the neighbour's nanny and eventually died in a prison of a heart attack - was born. Indeed, I still have my Free Beth Jordache T-shirt from the Silver Moon women's bookshop in Charing Cross Road to prove it.)

It would be wrong to describe Friel's career after she left Brookside as meteoric: but she certainly made that leap from soap, to BBC costume drama (remember her in Our Mutual Friend ?); and she had absolutely no qualms about appearing totally starkers in Stephen Poliakoff's otherwise abysmal TV drama The Tribe. In other words, there was something distinctly risky, something that went beyond titillating, about this "popsy from Brookside" as she was once witheringly referred to in one of the broadsheets, which had all sorts of people sitting up and taking notice.

And then there was her rather alluring 'private' life, so lovingly chronicled by the tabloids. First of all came Darren Day, who left her for a Coronation Street actress: followed by Robbie Williams whom she met after he came out of rehab. Perhaps it was the fact that she played a lesbian on TV but we were all completely bewitched, fascinated by who she was attracted to and vice versa. Did she fancy Ewan McGregor, and did he fancy her, I remember asking her last year when we first met, unaware that, number one, he was married with a child and, number two, a whole slew of pictures had been splashed across the tabloids of the pair of them snogging on the set of Rogue Trader. I got my knuckles rapped, of course, for asking the question. "People's lives can be wrecked by stuff like that," I remember her telling me snappily.

But one can see why Anna will always be perceived as a kind of temptress. As my friend, a super-hot Hollywood agent tells me later, "Anna Friel is very like Julia Roberts in that she keeps reeling you in. She's got that talent for making you feel you are the most important person in the world".

I feel to a certain extent she's doing it to me now, sharing all her innermost thoughts, telling me her dreams, making me feel like a very special confidante here in this dark, smoky restaurant over a bottle of nearly finished white wine. But then maybe that's just the way she is.

"I know people have said to me the more I get successful that I should protect myself," she shrugs. "that I shouldn't let people in the way I do. But I'm like, no! I don't want to pretend one thing and be another. Natasha said something that scared me. She said, 'Anna, you mustn't be so charming. You've got to know that whoever you are is enough.' And I found that a real criticism until I looked the word 'charm' up in the dictionary and saw she was actually paying me a compliment. 

"It's hard because I'm expected to act and, behave like an adult. They never say, `Well, she's 23, don't worry', and sometimes you think, 'OK, then tell me. How am I meant to behave? What the fuck am I meant to do because you're confusing me!"

The one thing I have to keep for myself is me, and I'll be willing to take the risks for that. It gives you a kind of dignity. Look, I'll tell you a secret and nobody knows this," she continues, as if proving the point. "I've got a birthmark," and she triumphantly proceeds to rub the top left-hand comer of her lip with a napkin. Sure enough, there is a very, very faint mark which, under a Klieg light could, I suppose, be misconstrued as a tiny cold sore, but nothing anyone would ever notice. 

"Oh, but I was bullied so much when I was younger because of it!" squeals Anna. "Darren didn't know I had it for a year because l used to get up early every morning, go to the toilet and put make-up on it. 

"Now, I never told anybody that before," she says, reeling me in again with those big saucer eyes "So why am I telling you this?"

Two days later, we meet again at her flat after a matinee performance, and Anna seems distinctly on edge. The play, apparently, feels unfamiliar with the change in the cast, and she's worried about the performance this evening. And then tomorrow, on her night off she's got to zip to London for 24 hours for the premiere of Rogue Trader, which would be perfectly fine, except that Anna, who's looking more waif-like and sunken-cheeked than ever today in a backless orange top, dirty jeans and a full face of stage make-up, doesn't exactly have the constitution of an ox.

" I'm going to be zombified," she says, pacing worriedly up and down the bare living room with her arms folded tightly across her chest, while her PA, Amy, a pleasant American girl, quietly potters around the galley kitchen looking for a coffee pot. " I didn't sleep at all last night and I just heard that Ewan might not make it, so that means everything's going to be on my head. Hey Amy, did those clothes come in from Gucci yet? Oh well, at least I'm going first class and they've got those beds." 

When I arrive the following Monday afternoon at Anna's west London flat, her father is in the rather grandly appointed hallway with a warning finger to his lips. I must be very, very quiet, says Des - an articulate, energetic little man with a moustache and a silver Nokia permanently attached to one ear because Anna and Amy are sleeping, still in recovery from the red-eye flight they took last night to make the premiere of Rogue Trader. Sadly, I do not see her again, for by the following day she has flown back to New York her first-ever trip on Concorde - in order to make that evening's performance. And from here, it all seems to go rather pear-shaped. Having apparently been hit by that virulent chest infection once again and the tragic news that her friend Finty's father (Judi Dench's husband) has been diagnosed with cancer, Anna goes into a tailspin. She misses five shows - one of them because she got stuck out in the Hamptons with a broken-down car - and feels so ill she has her assistant call Vogue to cancel the photo shoot. While she languishes in bed, a flurry of maybe 30 tri-coastal calls are made trying to figure out what on earth has happened. Is she suffering from the same 'nervous exhaustion' that put her friend Kate in The Priory, I can't help wondering?