1998 is the year when Anna Friel finally makes it big. With four Hollywood films on the go, she's looking great in all of them making the earth move in Landgirls and keeping Ewan McGregor off the straight and narrow in Rogue Trader, Best of all, she's ditched the showbiz boyfriends, got a new agent and a brand-new flat and she's ready. But just for now, she's all yours...

Story: Roger Morton. Photographs: Simon Emmett

It's late evening at Anna Friel's newly purchased flat in west London, and for the last ten minutes the soap imp4urned-movie beauty has been busy setting the stage. The wine's uncorked, lighted candles have been placed around the room and the mellow sound ofjames Taylor purrs from the midi system. The fire's licking, the conversation's taking off

And then horror comes trundling over the tiles.

In her post-Brookside years, Anna Friel has fought against homelessness, heartbreak, loneliness, tabloid mauling and professional prejudice. A just-past-teenage Lancashire hippy chick in dirty old, cynical showbusiness, she has stood her ground valiantly, held onto her independence and pulled through. But when I return from her bathroom with the news that there's a massive cockroach in there, she definitely needs help.

"You're kidding me! Oh my God! Please get rid of it, or I'll have to move out and stay in a hotel!"

It takes 20 minutes of chasing it with an empty cellular phone box before the interloper is trapped, berated and hurled through the kitchen window. As tranquillity returns, it occurs to me that crawling on mildly drunken all-fours round the flat of a film star pin-up is not the usual style of the celebrity encounter. But in the artfully unconcocted company of Anna Friel, it feels perfectly normal.

Two hours earlier at the nearby Cobden Club, she'd made an inconspicuous entrance: sneakers, brown leathers, T-shirt, glasses and headscarf Not that that's not fetching - Anna's gamine sex appeal is as effective off-screen in a dusting outfit as it is in its poll-topping, on-screen realisation. The casual gear is part of the likeable lass' charm armoury. It goes with her retained Rochdale accent and immediately inclusive sociability.

It's three years since Friel abdicated her position as the nation's sexiest lesbian in a domestic nightmare. Since Beth, a few one-off TV parts have surfaced - among them, the ITV monk drama, Cadfael, and A Midsummer Night's Dream for the BBC. But for someone who's been a mid-Nineties national obsession and potential fast-tracker, Friel's CV for the second half of the decade has been strangely minimalist.

The once mighty Anna, trashing lesser icons with soap verite and cutesie magnetism, was replaced by a tabloid love-life shadow, obscured by a wall of Danniella Westbrooks, Kate Winslets and Natalie Imbruglias. Now, assisted by the same agent who looks after Helena Bonham Carter and Sir Anthony Hopkins, she has navigated the rough post-Brookside phase, and 1998 will see her fully reincarnated as a movie star.

First up, she plays alongside Brit babes Catherine McCormack and Rachel Weisz in David Leland's Forties-set Landgirls. Later, she'll be lighting up Moscow as a TV reporter in Polish director Paul Pawlikowski's The Stringer, and lining up alongside Richard E Grant for an as yet untitled, Napoleonic war adventure. Those waiting for her naked mirror dance in Steven Poliakoff's tale of a Sixties free-love cult, The Tribe, will also be rewarded. First of all, though, there's the BBC adaptation of Dickens' novel of hidden identity and blackmail, Our MutualFriend. So, why the Dickens?

"Because I knew it'd be difficult and I like a challenge," she says. "I was up against all the classic British actresses like Kate Beckinsale, but the director and producer were young and they wanted my input - they wanted my influence.

"I had quite a lot of prejudice when I first came to London because I wasn't drama school trained; I was Northern, I didn't [adopts posh accent] talk like thet, I didn't go to university. I kept going to all these auditions with all these big British actresses and people who'd been to drama school, and it started to make me question my talent and think maybe I should just stop. Then I thought, 'Who am I trying to appeal to? This industry or the public?"'

Before she can dip a toe into what will later spill forth as a torrent of questioning self-analysis, Anna spies a mate. Vince Power, the bear-like boss of the Mean Fiddler organisation, strolls to the next table and Anna rushes over to hug him. It turns out there are as many music biz links in Anna's social group as there are thespian. Her father is a musician as well as a teacher and many a night chez Friel was spent with Anna singing along to her dad's guitar playing. Today, in addition to best friend and Small Faces star Laura Fraser, there are the Gallaghers. ("Meg's so nice, really sound, and Noel's always really attentive, always asks what I've been doing.") However, despite a couple of worrying appearances in videos for Oasis labelmate Ed Ball, all offers of recording contracts have been rejected.

"I didn't want it to be about being marketed, or 'She's this much of a babe'," says Anna. "And also, being completely realistic, if I were to release a record now when my acting hasn't been out and no one has seen me, they'll say 'Oh, she's gone the obvious route'. And I haven't

"I've not been seen by the public for two years, apart from hits. They've only seen Beth. And people have stayed with me, they're still interested. Maybe that's because my private life has been so interesting it's turned into a soap in itself"

It isn't that Friel's had a tremendously hard time in the spotlight. A few stolen sunbathing shots; some dopey stories about her relationships with West End boy Darren Day and bad boy "Yobbie" Williams. But for someone who repeatedly describes herself as "hyper-sensitive" and "over-analytical", it's had its effect. On the way inside, she points out that her doorman was offered bribes before she'd even moved into the block.

Her relationship with Darren Day ended last summer. She'd lived with the showbiz blond since moving to London in 1995 and the break-up was a messy affair - Day sliding off with Coronation Street actress Tracy Shaw and Anna packing her bags in public. It's characteristic of Friel, however, that she turned the emotional wreckage into career fuel.

"I can't sit up crying all night because the next morning I've got to be at work at five o'clock and I can't have puffy eyes. You push it down and deal with it bit by bit. And it's good. I'm lucky as an actress, certain emotions I can channel somewhere. It's not wasted. But I have been hurt. People say, 'Were you upset?' What a ridiculous question! I'm a human being. I'm really, really, really sensitive."

We quit the Cobden and as the car cuts west, the Friel facets are newly set off You want dippy? Anna's got plenty to offer. She wants to ride an elephant bareback. She wants to swim with dolphins. ("I'd rather swim with a killer whale, but my insurance company wouldn't let me.") But there's something about her being a small girl, caged in a car against the big, black, London night, that makes it particularly affecting when she tries to explain that, since fame, "I never feel safe any more".

It's a safe haven, Anna's flat. Or at least, once we've ousted the cockroach it is. The period furniture, the peacock tapestry, the painting of Ophelia above her olde French bed, were all chosen with the help of her godparents who live in Windsor, but no doubt her teacher parents up North - Des and Sheila - approve. It is not a funky babe pad. It's an old roof on young shoulders. And it's a ruminative, searching Friel who sits here tonight, sinking the red wine, fiddling with her cigarettes and drifting to and from the stereo with the next tender-hearted CD. Over the next two hours, Anna loops back to the love and values that came from her parents.

The contradictory impulses which alternate in her driven romance of a life can, she says, be accounted for in parental terms. Irish dad, Des, was the "dreamer", her mum the "realist". Anna is the confluence of the two. She describes her childhood as an "amazing, protected bubble" from which she's only recently emerged. But then later she says that she "surrendered" much of her Catholic-schooled, nine-GCSE-conquering childhood by joining Brookside at 16. What's clear about Anna's evolution in the last three years is that her Darren 'n' Robbie experiences were a crash-course in Cupid's potential for lousy behaviour.

Robbie Williams, her morale-booster fling after Day, is supposed to be coming round. They're firm platonic friends now and chat briefly on the phone, but Robbie true to his post drink-problem rehab regime, is to bed early, and Anna still wants to talk. She refers to her affair with him, as "the Rob situation" It was a brief liaison, but significant for Anna because the split with Day had left her feeling worthless and "completely and utterly unattractive". Williams made her laugh. turn, she didn't judge him over drugs and drink. She saw him as a (fellow) lost soul.

"I found myself getting incredibly an that this person had been allowed to get the state they were in. They should have had some help. No one can be expected go through what he went through.

"He was the first person who could relate to things that I was feeling - to a much lesser degree leaving Brookside than for him leaving Take That - but it was quite a similar situation.

"Both coming from the North and going into London, me 19, him 21. Go 'What the flick do I do? What's happen Where am I? I don't know a single person. Nobody wants to see me depressed. No one wants me to be ill', which I was at time. You're so used to putting on a front and smiling and going 'Hey!' And then you go home, close the door and go, 'I' desperately unhappy. Why am I unhappy?'

"I was made to feel completely undervalued and when you feel that you question everything. My self-esteem was nil, my security was nil. I was totally alone and feeling, 'Oh God, what do I do?' And it was through pure strength and going, 'Right. You've got to try and try and try. And once you've tried as hard as you can, if you fail that's fine because you can justify it to yourself. If you give up now then you'll always think you were a coward.' I didn't want to feel like that. I'd hate myself if I were a coward."

Anna sips from her wine glass and scrubs at an imaginary mark on the carpet. It's late. Well into the self-dramatising portion of the night. But even allowing for the time and the grape, it's obvious that she's tiptoed closer to the cliff of bleakness than her zingy babe reputation has let on.

"I have old-fashioned values. I'm a big romantic, I like - erm - a man to take care of me. I like doors opened, I like gentlemen. I think in the modern age we've become far too complex for our own good and we're forgetting what we're actually about. We're here to be loved and love as many people as we can and find true traits like honesty and trust and truth and real people, and don't let all the stupid things interfere, materialistic values and position and your job and how much money you earn... I'm old-fashioned in that sense. And I wear old-fashioned nighties in bed!"

It's a tribute to the megaton of willpower packed into Friel's size eight that she's shed much of the naivety and retained the Northern lass appetite. With a switch of CD from gloomy soundtrack to some quietly exulting Verve, she's darting on, full-speed ahead..

"I crave information, I want to learn from people, I want to grow, I want knowledge, I want experiences and I just need to be with the right person who can teach me that. I believe in people, I believe in communication. In the Sixties and Seventies, people used drugs and saw how it opened their minds. I want to take whatever makes these people you watch on TV hold hands and wear flowers."

What else do you want to experience, outside of acting?

"I want to be able to rollerblade. I want to be more courageous. I really want to jump out of planes, to parachute, and I really want to have the confidence and the permission to be able to do it. I want to read loads and loads of books. I want to see lots and lots of films. I want to direct. I want to have kids, too. I love children, I think I'd be a good mum.

"I'd like to have answers to my spirituality. I'd like to die full of wisdom, and to have wisdom you have to experience everything. I don't know what's going to happen. I'm just a very open-minded, liberal person, but I'm also dedicated and disciplined. The two contradict each other. I've got to learn how to combine them without it being dangerous, without it damaging my career.

Judging by the course she's steered of late, Anna's about as likely to trash her career as she is to turn into a cockroach. In three difficult years she's hooked herself into TV corset drama, turned down her own LA-based drama series, seen off two star boyfriends, launched a clothing line, done some Pinter at north London's Almeida Theatre and made a quartet of credible movies. (At the time of going to press, she's shooting the Nick Leeson story in Singapore opposite Ewan McGregor.)

"I won't be satisfied just appealing to England," she says. "I wouldn't have gone to the top if I just stayed here. I like to do ground-breaking things. I'd like to represent Britain so they say, 'We've got an English actress who is a star'. They only say the Sylvester Stallones and Arnold Schwarzeneggers of this world are stars. We've got Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, but not that many people."

Maybe you should kidnap Winona Ryder, I suggest.

"Do you think she'll be my competition? She's older than me, though. I can still play quite young. I wonder if she can do my accent as well as I can do hers?"

The two-dimensional, pixie-babe Friel is no more. Anna mark II is a potential Winona slayer. She has snapshot-blitzed her way through smart sets and dowdy hotels, batted for Rochdale in the depths of RADA, honed her craft and won the struggle alone. She is a teller of great bad jokes ("Bill and Ben are in bed. Bill says to Ben, 'Flubbalubbalubbalub.' And Ben says, 'Oh Bill, if you loved me you'd swallow it."'); a disregarder of cautious PR advice; a candlelit soul and an ace hostess. She is a volk-starlet heroine of modern times.

"The average girl? I wouldn't be the average girl. I'd hope not because that'd mean I'd have nothing to offer. I probably want perfection in everything the average British girl wants, and a little bit more. Maybe that'll be my downfall. But I don't want to die not knowing."