At the start of Jessica Alba’s big-time career, I was there. She was working in a little film on the Isle of Man, called Paranoid. She had been a child actor in the TV series Flipper and looked, to me, like any other pretty 18-year-old Hollywood wannabe. She would go anywhere to get a movie, even to this windswept island, and would soon be forgotten. How wrong can you be?

The director James Cameron, fresh from his Oscar win for Titanic, had, apparently, been tracking her progress. He now wanted her to be the star in the title role of a TV series, Dark Angel, and offered her the first of several small fortunes to do so. Two fitness trainers were dispatched from LA to get her into shape. There were talks of specialists in hair, make-up, costume. Suddenly, it was as if stardust was being delivered by the lorryload to where she was staying, at the modest Mount Murray hotel.

Perhaps I should interview her after all? She had a day off from working with the film’s real stars, Jeanne Tripplehorn (of Basic Instinct) and Ewen Bremner (Spud in Trainspotting), and I was in for a shock. Not only was she just about the most determined, mature, self-assured teen actress I’d come across, but she had battled through a tidal wave of problems. Let’s start with her health: collapsed lungs, dialysis for kidney complaints, a burst appendix, a cyst on her tonsils, and a spell in hospital with pneumonia. Then there was bullying at school. She was attacked in the street by other girls and had to eat lunch each day in the nurses’ office to avoid being beaten. She had also been haunted by a poltergeist at her parents’ home. Taps turned on by themselves, doors slammed, the TV would flicker into life in the night. “I’d like to say it was something we all became used to, but it wasn’t. I was glad to leave that house,” she says.

Even a born-again religious group she joined at 12 turned sour. The pastor accused her of being too sexual, at a point when she did not know what sexuality was about. “I went through puberty really early, at 11. Everything suddenly grew, and that was uncomfortable,” she said.

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Alba’s early days were spent on the move. Her father, Mark, was Mexican, her mother, Cathy, a mixture of French and Danish, and this cultural difference set her apart from the rich folk in an upmarket area of LA. She was born in Pomona, California, but her father, a staff member for the American Air Force, moved Jessica and her brother, Joshua (now 25, also an actor), to Biloxi, Mississippi, then to Del Rio, Texas. They returned to California when Jessica was nine. “He didn’t make me aware of cultural differences,” she says, “and didn’t even speak Spanish, but the differences were there. When I started going to auditions in LA, I was offered roles like Maria, the Mexican [in West Side Story], who dates white boys.” When she landed the role in Flipper, at 13, her mother moved with her to Queensland, Australia, where much of the series was filmed. After the two-year series was over, she took a crash course in acting, at David Mamet’s Atlantic Theater Company in New York. Again, she was treated coldly by other students, just like at school. “It was hard to deal with. They were so patronising.”

Instead of bemoaning her ill-fortune, Alba discovered a natural talent in acting.

“I needed something I could do well, after all the pain and failure,” she said.

This sounded like the lament of someone much older. But she did not seem mixed up. When her career started, she was getting up at dawn, going running with her personal trainer, and doing weights at night, while everyone else was in the bar. Her attitude to such enjoyment seemed to carry a religious disapproval: “I never fitted in at parties with a keg of beer, making useless conversation. I prefer to work.”

And work she has. Nonstop, obsessional, dedicated. We have met up several times over the years to talk about her latest film or venture. It has to be said that Alba, at 26, proves that nice girls do sometimes win. She is nothing like some other famous women of her age group, such as Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, on a one-way track to self-destruction. Despite her enormous box-office success, she’s not like the sharp and steely Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon, either. But is she really playing the cleverest game in Hollywood?

Alba has behaved immaculately, turning up on film sets drug free and word-perfect, giving gifts to her co-stars, and never putting a foot out of place at a party or in front of the paparazzi. She became a star thanks to Dark Angel, in which she played a genetically enhanced part-feline, part-human, and made her fortune as the lead – the equally genetically freaky Sue Storm – in Fantastic 4. But incredibly, she has established herself as one of the world’s biggest sex symbols without ever having an on-screen sex scene.

She has posed in bra and pants for the lads’ mags, and threatened to sue Playboy when they put her on the cover without her permission. She dyed her dark hair blonde and played a stripper in Sin City, with an unforgettable whipping scene, but did not strip. She has teased and titillated, whether in a bikini in her hit film Into the Blue, or being photographed in black thigh-high Gucci boots and little else in the magazine Arena. But she has always stopped short. “Men are visually stimulated,” she tells me, with a shrug and a smile. “They are easy to manipulate. All you have to do is dress up in a sexy outfit.”

This is the revenge of the nerd. She has learnt the tricks, used all her experience of being rejected, and reinvented herself over the past eight years. But she doesn’t trust easily. “If anyone gets too friendly too quickly, it feels wrong,” she says. “I have to ask myself if I want to let them in to my life. Or, why should I?”

With each year that passes, she finds it easier to look back, and more facts about her emerge. She has offered herself for interview every couple of years, playing the game, giving the latest on her love life, and rarely criticising anyone. The result is there for all to see: a beautiful Hollywood actress who is increasing her standing and bank balance with each event and every movie.

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So many actresses are disappointing away from the screen. They are usually pencil-thin, stressed out and neurotic. With Alba, the opposite seems true. Her skin is luminous, her brown eyes remain calm, and she recognises only too well these days that men find her sexy.

After the release of Dark Angel, she announced that she was in love with her co-star, Michael Weatherly, who is 12 years her senior. Before this, she had never had a proper boyfriend. “I was a real dork,” she told me at the time. “If you don’t have sex in the first two dates, you’re nothing in LA, but I knew I wanted to be in love with the first person I slept with.” When she starred in a dodgy romance, Honey, in 2003, she said her own parents, Mark and Cathy, were only 20 when they had her. “I can see nothing wrong with young romance, because I know it leads to something permanent and worthwhile.”

Did she become a bit too frank in an interview with American Cosmopolitan a couple of years ago? In it, she announced: “I don’t think a girl is a slut if she enjoys sex. I could have a one-night stand and I’m the kind of girl who looks over in the morning and it’s like, ‘Do you really have to be here?’ I feel like a lot of women try to make it more than it is, so they don’t feel bad about wanting to just have sex.” After saying this, she pulled back slightly. “I was talking in general terms,” she told me. “It was made out as if I was talking about myself. I don’t do one-night stands, but I’m not judgmental about women who do. Why should I be? Men do it all the time.”

She’s expecting a child in May with her film-producer fiancé, Cash Warren, 28, who she met while making Fantastic 4. She’s wearing an engagement ring that seems the size of a small golf ball. “It was love at first sight,” she told me at the 2005 Cannes film festival, soon after they got together. The pregnancy was unplanned, which must be one of the few things that Alba has not controlled over the past eight years.

The reason that Alba is talking today is a crop of new movies. She is the star of them all. In The Eye she plays a famous concert violinist who was blinded in a childhood tragedy. She undergoes a double corneal transplant that restores her sight after over 20 years of being blind. But her happiness is short-lived, as she starts to be haunted by frightening images. “Are you saying you can see dead people?” asks her doctor in an ironic reference to the film The Sixth Sense. Of course she can – and this is what has made the film, an entertaining slice of hokum, such a box-office hit in America.

Alba spent six months learning to play the violin for The Eye. “I hung out with a young female musician who’s been blind since childhood,” she says. “I picked up on how she interacts with people, how she gets around in the world, walks down a street, and moves around with such ease. I never wanted to play my character as weak or helpless.”

She also plays the lead in a psychological thriller, Awake, in which she’s the wife of a patient who is undergoing heart surgery. He suffers from “anaesthetic awareness”: although paralysed by drugs, he can see, hear and feel everything that is happening during the operation. “It was a film to take a chance on,” she says. “The bigger the film, the more people are in charge of what the story should be. In this, things were clear from the start, and the script didn’t change.”

The biggest film of her year, and one of the likely hits of the summer, is The Love Guru, the latest from Mike (Austin Powers) Myers. He plays an American called Pitka, who is raised abroad by gurus. When he returns to his homeland, he goes into the business of giving advice to people with troubled love lives, like Alba.

What is the result of all this filming for Alba, other than adding a few million to her bank account? “I’m knackered,” she says, with typical frankness. “It’s not just the play-acting and drama of it all, but the people themselves.”

She does not want to name names, but manages to dismiss actors with faint praise. “There are some great artists out there,” she says. “I am just not attracted to them in any other way than as working colleagues.

“I am way too high-maintenance myself to be in a relationship with an actor. I do not need someone who has to have as much hair and make-up time as myself. They are also bigger divas than the women. When I used to do the action scenes on Dark Angel, the guys would be roughed up a bit. There might be an accident, and they get popped on the jaw. The guys put ice on it, take a 20-minute break and get x-rays.

I would say, ‘Come on, man. You are 200lb. Stand up and get out there.’ ”

She has similar bullish views on the paparazzi. “You’ve got to get over it,” she says. “Kid Rock, of all people, gave me some advice. He said, ‘If you have a problem with the paparazzi, then move to Michigan. Nobody will bother you there.’ ”

It is probably the equivalent of those who trawl the clubs of London and then object to being photographed at two in the morning.

“Exactly,” she says. “So stop screaming about being photographed. You’re famous – get used to it. When you are no longer famous, they will move on to somebody else.”

It’s the same with the Hollywood merry-go-round. She’s constantly amused by seeing producers cosy up to well-known stars, trying to persuade them to appear in movies.

“They kiss ass,” she says, bluntly. “Then, if you are hired and don’t do well in a couple of films, they’ll move on to somebody else. It’s just the way things are. I’ve accepted there’s little loyalty.”

She also deals with producers in her own way. “They used to ask if I wanted to join them for dinner, to talk about a potential movie,” she recalls. “It would be a chat-up line. I would always politely refuse and say, ‘When you have the movie, we’ll talk about it.’ ”

Alba seems far too street-smart to be sucked into the maelstrom. But what about those who have been, like Britney or Lindsay?

“I don’t know what it would be like to live in their shoes,” she says. “You don’t have to bring such attention to yourself. And once you do, there’s no turning it off. It’s something you don’t have any control over, and they are now scrutinised, at some point, during virtually every day of their lives.”

It turns out that Alba was warned by her parents that if she misbehaved during her teens, they would immediately pull her out of the acting business. “My mom was attached to my shoulder,” she says. “There was no escape. But I respected it, because I was in this strange position of being isolated by my own personality.”

She’s clearly not envious of other actors who dedicate themselves totally to their career, who suffer marriage break-ups as a result of pressure.

“Film-acting means having to reinvent yourself every few months, and going to live in a new place on a film set and deal with different situations and people,” she says. “It takes a toll on your personal life. You can be constantly living your life on movie sets, which is not healthy.”

She’s witnessed the shenanigans that go on during virtually every film: the on-set affair between co-stars or leading crew members, which ends the moment the film is over.

“There is a lot of infidelity,” she shrugs. “Do I like to see it? No. Would I ever be involved? Never. I would also not put up with it myself, because I don’t have to. I am 100% faithful and I expect it to be returned.”

But given her personality and approach on tough love, could she not easily slip into being a workaholic whose life revolves around acting?

“I never do anything by half measures,” she agrees. “Even when I became involved in religion as a girl, I’d get up at five o’clock in the morning each day and pray. I’d attend church three times a week. I listened to only church music, and didn’t tune into the pop channels. I am always aware of the dangers of being sucked in, with a disregard for everything else in life.”

She has turned her religious beliefs into what she describes as a “private, low-key thing”. And that pastor who banned her from wearing tank tops and tight jeans for bible study – “I even had to cover up my butt with a sweater” – was probably disturbed by what seems a natural, high-powered sexuality. The tank tops are now Chanel and the jeans are from Gap, which she advertises along with L’Oréal cosmetics.

“If you are going to sin, then sin big,” she jokes.

With Alba there is always more than a hint of sin. She has four small tattoos on her body, she professes a liking for thigh-high boots, and rides a Harley-Davidson “because I like the looks and the power”. To her credit, she delivers her views like someone from the old-fashioned glamour days of Hollywood. She looks great, accepts all the hoopla for what it is, and knows exactly what she’s doing.

“I could have used the ill health and bullying I suffered as an excuse not to do anything with my life,” says Alba. “But I’ve used it as inspiration. When you grow up lonely, you look at everything through different eyes.”

Aware is released on April 4, The Eye on April 25, and The Love Guru on July 18

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