Oh dear. In the heart of Manhattan’s up-and-coming meatpacking district, on a bone-shatteringly cold Saturday afternoon, the bijou French restaurant that Piper Perabo has selected for our rendezvous stands resolutely fermé. Having traversed an ocean to meet the actress, and been assured no backup plan was necessary, this situation poses a bit of a problem. Time passes, digits freeze, the wind off the Hudson river shreds a layer of facial epidermis.

The mobile rings. It is Perabo. She had arrived early and has scouted out an alternative watering hole. She guides me in over a couple of blocks with one of those control-tower-to-novice-pilot directives — “You’re almost there. Keep going. No, no, straight on. I’m right outside. Can you see me?... How about now?... How about now?” Up ahead, a shivering waif in an orange ski jacket and New York Fire Dept cap waves meekly. It wasn’t just a bad line, she really does sound ill. “I lost my voice,” she croaks, eyeing the tape recorder. “I hope I’m loud enough.”

Piling into the warm, Perabo orders hot water, honey and lemon and rifles for some tissues. She’s midway through shooting a film with Diane Keaton (Because I Said So). A tight schedule means they must crack on regardless — she will redub her dialogue later. But it’s no bother, she insists: “I’ve been really busy in the past two years, and I feel lucky to be back at pace again.”

Those unfamiliar with the petite actress — the winsome, toothsome smiler with the alliterative name — will hardly be enlightened by the fact that her roll of honour includes Cheaper By the Dozen (1 and 2), Slap Her... She’s French and last year’s horror show (in every sense) The Cave.

“I’ve done films where I’ve realised, as I’m working on ’em, like, hmmmmmm,” she concedes, screwing up her face. “Sometimes it’s at the first rehearsal.”

No film, it seems, has fully capitalised on her star-making turn of six years ago, in the guiltily pleasurable smash Coyote Ugly. Back then, as the lead in Jerry Bruckheimer’s rags-to-riches fable, an update on his own Flashdance (singer/ songwriter by day, sassy, strappy-topped, postfeminist waitress by night), her beaming face had been plastered everywhere, and she was being hailed as Hollywood’s Next Big Thing.

Her fortunes could be about to go on the upswing again. This month finds Perabo in unlikely mode, headlining the British romantic comedy Imagine Me & You. The directorial debut of telly writer Ol Parker (Mr Thandie Newton), the film won favourable notices on the festival circuit and hopes are high. Shot lovingly in the magic-hour light of London’s Primrose Hill and set amid the lives of chipper young professionals, it does, seemingly, owe a Third World-sized debt of interest to the oeuvre of Richard Curtis. For all the familiarity of the milieu, though, it will quietly carve a small place in cinema history as the UK’s first family-friendly lesbian romcom.

In it, Perabo plays Rachel, a demure English newlywed whose nuptial rapture is rocked by the advent of Luce (Lena Headey), the come-hither florist whose buds, apparently, are in need of some tending. “I love it that Rachel’s character doesn’t hem and haw about, ‘Am I gay? Am I a lesbian?’” she enthuses, larynx loosening up a bit. “She’s much more obsessed with, ‘Is it crazy to rush into something like this?’ The fact that it’s a woman is so much farther down the agenda.”

She’s right here. Due to the mainstreaming of gay drama over the years, ground broken largely by television, a same-sex scenario is hardly a sensation (even if, in this vision, it’s a case of queer guy through a straight eye). Indeed, of greater concern might be the film’s view of marriage as a rather disposable commodity — Rachel dumps husband Heck (Matthew Goode) for some lipstick love barely a Bollinger after the blessing. But one should never ever confuse movies with real life. “Heck is genuinely a lovely guy,” Perabo asserts, “but I think there’s a type of person who gets married too early because they feel it’s the next step.”

Perabo’s still not sure how she got the part. She was playing “a bipolar heroin addict” when Parker flew to New York to meet her. She had once shot a film in Wales called The I Inside (“just a little outside Cardiff”), with the Glamorgan coast substituting, unfathomably but far more cheaply, for the coast of Maine. But it clearly helped that she had done an English accent before, as a fairy-tale princess in the fantasy film George and the Dragon, which she shot a couple of years ago in Luxembourg.

She’s quite the Anglophile, as it turns out. “I already had a liking for English beer,” she adds. “The only pub where anybody spoke English in Luxembourg city was on Wednesday nights when they showed the Manchester United games, so you’re drinking English beer with a lot of English guys.”

Perhaps of equal significance in her casting was the fact that Perabo also has a bit of previous, having appeared, to critical raves, in the acclaimed indie film Lost and Delirious, a sort of Juliet & Juliet drama set in a Canadian girls’ boarding school.

While that was “a little more full-on”, as she puts it, Imagine Me & You’s decidedly tamer grappling was eased by the fact that Perabo and Headey had acted together before and were already firm friends. “Any time I’m playing opposite somebody in a love relationship, if I know them it’s easier, because I know how much I can trust them,” she says. And, well, you hear the lads’ mags salivating already.