Natascha McElhone, who stars with George Clooney in the Solaris remake,'hijacked the première', she tells Donald Clarke.
'I'm not a celebrity," Natascha McElhone says, firmly. Well, maybe. But people must occasionally point at her in Sainsbury's, mustn't they? With her huge, almond-shaped eyes and her torrent of auburn hair (more hair than anybody could reasonably know what to do with), she is hard to mistake.
"I tend to tune that out. Though my friends do occasionally say, 'Ooh, did you hear what that person just said about you?' I just put my hands over my ears and go: La, la, la!"
She does have a point, however. She is not a celebrity on the scale of, say, George Clooney, with whom she stars in Steven Soderbergh's fine remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 science fiction fable, Solaris. Then again, she did appear alongside Jim Carrey in 1998's The Truman Show and Brad Pitt in 1997's The Devil's Own. But the unnecessarily beautiful Englishwoman has never quite followed through on her potential. "Somebody with less integrity could have had a very different career to the one she's had," Soderbergh told me when I interviewed him recently. "She has all the tools to be one of those actresses that is in a lot of big movies, but I don't think she has the desire to see her personal life altered in any significant way."
McElhone laughs when I read this quote to her: "I remember him saying something less formal to me: 'Why don't you just f**king get out there?' Something like that. 'Why are you hiding?' But consciously none of that is going on. If I really want a role I will go after it. I really wanted Solaris for example and I pursued it."
Nonetheless, she has managed to forge a family life for herself in London and appears to enjoy a hinterland much richer than she would have experienced if she had taken the soup and moved to Los Angeles. At her suggestion, the London première of Solaris was replaced with a screening in aid of Facing the World, a charity formed by her plastic surgeon husband, Dr Martin Hirigoyen Kelly.
"I hijacked the première," she laughs. "He brings children from third-world countries with facial deformities - some caused by landmine explosions, some congenital - to England for treatment. Initially, he went out to Afghanistan and attempted to operate on them there. But it was impossible. He has to take the whole face off and rebuild the skull sometimes, and you just can't do that with flies buzzing round you. So he realised that the only solution was to do the operations in England."
Dr Kelly became aware of the need for his services following e-mails from sufferers' relatives who had found his name on the Internet.
"It really got to him. So, when The Gap asked me to do an advert for them, I asked them if I could give the money straight to his charity and avoid the tax. That paid well enough to bring the first child over and the charity première seemed like another great opportunity. It probably paid to bring another two or three kids over. People were incredibly generous."
Aside from her good works, McElhone has also been distracted from the limelight by the birth of her son (now aged three) and, when we meet in Dublin, she is heavily pregnant with a second addition to the clan. Conveniently, her mother has moved back to her native Donegal, and is on hand to babysit while Natascha deals with the Irish press. Was she aware of an Irish influence in her upbringing?
"Because my Mum brought us up in Brighton, wherever she could she would plug us into the Irish community," she says. "So I'd have to go off to Irish dancing classes in some obscure hall. But that did make me feel like a bit of an outsider actually, living in the south of England where all my friends were doing ballet."
Despite her reservations, the jigs and reels encouraged a taste for performance, and she went on to win a place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Graduating in 1993, she did bits and bobs on television before being spotted by James Ivory (he of Merchant Ivory) in an open-air performance of Richard III. He cast her opposite Anthony Hopkins in 1996's peculiar Surviving Picasso, and, though the film was not a hit, it enabled her to work with an impressive parade of the world's finest directors: Alan J. Pakula, Peter Weir, John Frankenheimer and, of course, Steven Soderbergh.
Sadly, the excellent Solaris may prove a little bit too oblique to appeal to a mass audience, but it does bring her into contact (occasionally literally) with George Clooney's nude bottom, a piece of anatomy that has obsessed the US press.
"I started to make up the most terrible lies," she says. "Some journalist had been banging on about his bum, and then, moving on, said there's not much computer-generated work in the film. So, in a really conspiratorial way, I said, 'Well apart from George's bum. But don't tell anybody.' And this guy was writing it down really seriously. For the rest of the day, we told them that George's bottom was the only bit of C.G.I. in the film.
"And then I said that, well, actually it was my bum, but they put hairs on it to make it look like George's. So the whole day became like this Monty Python sketch. But George is incredibly good fun about that sort of thing, not remotely uppity."
Looking beyond Solaris, McElhone dismisses any idea of a life plan. "The notion of a career for an actor is something that only parents and journalists talk about." Implicitly confirming Soderbergh's diagnosis, she refuses to impose any order upon her future.
"Who knows what will happen? It depends what comes along. I know I am not in control of my destiny. It is so much about timing, about chance. You can't force anyone to work with you, no matter how much you might want to work with them."
Solaris goes on general release on February 28th. Details of Facing the World can be found at www.facingtheworld.co.uk