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When, in 1997, she finally did get a classical role it was, wouldn’t you know it, as that most famous children’s home survivor, Jane Eyre. The same year, she was cast in a small but acute film by Carine Adler called Under the Skin. She played Iris, whose grief at her mother’s sudden death led her into desperate sexual liaisons. But wasn’t she also, in a sense, still playing Sam Morton, on the run from her past, grieving for her lost family or families?

“The roles I’m choosing aren’t as draining on my psyche now,” she admits when we talk about this, “but when I was younger, people often assumed they were cathartic. ‘Oh, she’s had a terrible childhood. It must be to do with that.’ So I took a year off after Under the Skin and I went into therapy to try and figure it out and then went on to Bali travelling. In the end I thought, ‘No, I’m just bloody good at acting. I just really enjoy it. Why am I analysing it?’ ”

She returned to work and lived for two years in the East Village, New York, where Woody Allen cast her as the mute Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown. She surely wasn’t drawing on anything personal in this film, yet there was more artistry to be witnessed in Hattie’s silently changing the wheel of a car in than in some actors’ entire show reels. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

The following year she gave birth to Esme, only months after splitting up from her partner, the actor Charlie Creed-Miles. She claims to have worried for only a moment about Esme not having her father living with her. “I was socially afraid of becoming a statistic. ‘Child in care becomes single mum’ — that whole thing. But it was a momentary fear.” Creed-Miles now lives two streets away.

Professionally, although more confident by now and less likely to cause ructions on sets, Morton continued to be drawn to tragedy. As Billy Crudup’s girlfriend Michelle in the weird Jesus’ Son, she died of a heroin overdose. In Minority Report she was the “precog” Agatha (named after Agatha Christie), an aquatic telepath whose semi-submerged body shuddered and leapt and screamed in sympathy with victims of yet-to-be-committed crimes. In Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, she was the orphan Morvern, wildly reinventing her life after her boyfriend commits suicide.

“For a while I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do it because I’d been in care’, but Morvern is very different from me because she went into care as a child and stayed with one family. It’s a bit like your mum and dad dying when you’re little and going to live with your aunt, and that sort of thing’s fine. So I thought, ‘No, why stop myself being involved in an amazing project just because of a coincidence?’”

And now, with In America, comes more agony, as she portrays a mother who has lost her eldest child and has to keep the surviving family intact in their new country. At an early, lachrymose West End screening a few weeks ago she said she hoped it would be as cathartic for everyone to watch as it had been for her to make.

“Just before filming,” she explains, “I was told my dad had died. Not my dad, my stepfather. But he hadn’t.”

What? “It was my real mother’s husband. They were separated a long time ago. But she’d been given misinformation. I don’t know and it’s still not sorted out. A family member had been misinformed that Frank had passed away. We can’t find him. So I was not openly grieving but it was like playing grief again.”

Did she go home crying? “No, I am not like that any more. I’ve learnt through experience not to do that. When I was younger I was notorious. I didn’t know how to calm down after a scene. If I’d just murdered somebody or been raped I’d come off the set and go into make-up and my head would be somewhere else.”

If we accept that she does not draw on her own life for her work, I wonder if she’ll at least concede that her drive came from a need to escape a miserable background. The cuttings say that at 13 she ran away with a dance music collective and by 14 was “bingeing” on LSD and speed. At 16, “the lowest point of my life”, she had an abortion. She says she never said that.

Is she saying that these were not desperate times? “I’m saying the subject is not up for discussion.” (Morton is not in the least difficult with me but her steel sometimes snags through her charm.)

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