THREE years ago, when Woody Allen cast Jennifer Tilly as the dizzy aspiring actress, Olive, in Bullets Over Broadway, she was thrilled but steeped in apprehension. "I was so nervous at first because I never got parts of that calibre and I even thought it was some kind of big mistake," she said when we met in London recently. "Woody had seen some tape of me and asked me to read for him. I did and a few weeks later they seat me the script and said he wanted me to play Olive. It was the easiest casting I ever had in my life. I was flabbergasted."
To prepare for working with Allen, she read several books on him. "I was really frightened," she says, "because the books I read said he has a propensity for firing people very abruptly and re casting and reshooting. Of course I thought that would happen to me because I've had so many bad breaks in my career.
Her pessimism was unjustified. "The minute I started working with him I felt so comfortable and so in synch with him," she says. "He gave me a tremendous amount of freedom and let me improvise a lot." And her performance earned Jennifer Tilly an Oscar nomination.
She might reasonably have expected offers of work to pour in after such an accolade. Instead, she didn't work for a whole year.
"I had just signed with this really big agency, CAA," she explains, "and they didn't work for me, and I'm the sort of person you have to sell - a hard sell because I'm not a woman who immediately springs to mind. My style of acting is more eccentric, more of a character actor.
"I came to the conclusion that I was just unhireable and my agency perpetuated that myth by saying they saw me as an Olive. So they think, `If we want a really obnoxious actress with an abrasive voice and very little talent, we'll call Jennifer!'"
She switched to United Talent Agency and received three movie offers in her first three days with them. "I'm on the second tier of actresses in Hollywood," she says. "We have to take what's left over after Sandra Bullock, Jodie Foster, Demi Moore and all the big actresses. And there's a lot of really good actresses on my level, like Nancy Travis, Joan Cusack and Annabella Sciorra, so every role is a bone thrown to this yard full of hungry dogs.
"So there's so much competition out there. Look at the average film and there's maybe 30 men and three women in it - usually the love interest, the secretary and the woman who gets killed off very early on. That's why I was so thrilled to do Bound because it revolves around women.
Jennifer Tilly gives her best performance to date in Bound, a modern day film noir set in Chicago and directed by the screenwriting brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski. An unpredictable thriller, it commands the attention as it unravels a murky tale of crime and duplicity in which the protagonists are vibrantly etched by Jennifer Tilly and Joe Pantoliano as the criminal couple, Violet and Caesar, and Gina Gershon as Corky, the tattooed lesbian ex con who comes between them.
"You've no idea who's going to survive until the very end," Tilly says enthusiastically. "Gina and Joey and me, we're all mid level stars, people you've seen dying abruptly in movies before, so you've no idea what will happen. If you have a big motion picture with Arnold Schwarzenegger, you're never afraid for his character because you know they won't kill off a star in the middle of a movie. And in our film you don't even know who the hero is, because everyone's behaving in a really bad way."
She was originally offered the role of Corky. "I was reading the script and the minute Violet stepped into the elevator, I was sure they'd made a mistake." But she adds, "I loved the role of Corky. She's essentially the man of the piece and how often do you get to play the man? I loved the idea of getting all buffed up and wearing no make up and pistul whipping Caesar. I thought it would be such a stretch for me.
"Apparently the film makers thought so, too! I'm so typecast and it's so easy for everyone to get typecast in Hollywood. I went in to meet the and I read Corky for them. They were so excited - but they were excited because it was the first time they'd heard their script read out loud!"
THEN the actress cast as Violet pulled out and the Wachowskis became obsessed with the idea that Jennifer Tilly should plan Violet, they pursued her for a month, but she was stubborn about switching roles.
"I was so into playing Corky that I didn't even see the merits in Violet," she says. "When I finally agreed to play Violet and started working on the part, I found her more interesting.
"She lives a very authentic existence. And she deliberately creates this sexpot facade to make people underestimate her. The ironic thing is how much she's in control of everything."
What made Violet even more attractive a role is that she is the most sexual character Tilly has played on screen. "Obviously, I'm an attractive woman, she says, "but I don't think anyone would have walked out of Bullets Over Broadway saying, `Wow, that Olive! I'd like a bit of that'.
She and Gina Gershon felt it was very important not to shy away from the lesbian scenes they have in Bound, she says. "My pet peeve about movies with gay characters is that it seems okay for them to be gay, but you have to shy away from them touching. Like Philadelphia. They're supposed to be lovers, but you hardly even see him take his lover by the hand. It's like there's an unspoken message that even though they're saying it's okay, it's not really okay.
"The cool thing about Bound is that we approached it like it was a heterosexual love scene. I've done a lot of movies where there were nude scenes in the script and I'd give them the red pencil and say that goes right out'. Most of the time it's exploitative and not necessary. But I felt it was really important not to do that in Bound. Gina and I could have insisted - to leave our slips on or to be under the sheets - but that would have been unnecessarily coy and we really felt we should just address it because their relationship is so important."
A younger sister of Meg Tilly, who has taken time off from movies to raise her three children, Jennifer came to Ireland 10 years ago to work on one of her first movies, Neil Jordan's High Spirits, "We had the most fun doing it, but the movie didn't turn out the way Neil wanted it. He conceived it as a kind of Midsummer Night's Dream, a story with the Irish and the Americans equally featured. I don't think the studio got all the bizarre religious symbolism. What they did was to treat it like a Steve Guttenberg Daryl Hannah comedy and that's what they edited together. The rest of us were just left in running around screaming and they cut out the Irish people almost completely - like Donal McCann and Tom Hickey, who had done fabulous improvisational things."
When we met in London, Jennifer Tilly apologised for her spiky hairstyle. "I'm having a bad hair day - in fact, I've had a bad hair three months," she says. She had to dye her hair blonde for the new Jim Carrey comedy, Liar, Liar, in which he plays a lawyer who finds himself unable to lie for a whole day and she is his client, a rich Beverly Hills divorcee seeking to waive a pre nuptial agreement.
"By the end of the day, my character is hake a gorgon," she says. "It's a vary funny movie. And it was fun to make for three weeks until my hair started falling out. Even after its fell out I had to keep doing the roots and I was thinking, `Please God, let me retain that hair to finish the movie'. I looked like Tank Girl."