In Asia Argento's latest film, The Last Mistress, there's an exchange that could almost have been written by the Italian diva herself. Attending a costume party in 19th-century Paris, her character - the flamboyant Spanish temptress Vellini - is wearing a scarlet and orange dress, complete with horns on the shoulders. “You came as a she-devil?” she is asked. “No - the devil!” she replies. “I hate anything feminine.” Daughter of the legendary Italian horror moviemaker Dario Argento and former lover of the madman actor Vincent Gallo, it's tempting to think there's something slightly satanic about the 32- year-old Argento. “I've played all the prostitutes, all the call girls, all the killers, all the crazies, all the vampires,” she giggles.

If Argento has enjoyed her time as a wild-child, she now ploughs her more extreme urges into her work. Mainstream audiences will best recall her for playing Vin Diesel's main squeeze in the 2002 spy tale xXx, but last year in Cannes she became a cause célèbre with a trio of films that proved how far she's willing to go. In Abel Ferrara's strip-club tale Go-Go Tales she tongue-kissed a rottweiler, causing outrage in Italy. “I'm very free and I forget what is forbidden and what is not when I'm shooting a scene,” she sighs. “As I do this scene, I'm stripping, and the dog is sitting there and I'm on all fours ... I turn around and it licks my face and Abel left this in the movie. It was such a scandal, and it made me very fragile. I didn't mean it like that.”

Then there was Olivier Assayas's erotic thriller Boarding Gate, in which she plays a former prostitute who recruits Michael Madsen's one-time pimp for a series of S&M mind-games. Such was Madsen's reluctance to say the word “slave” in one scene (“he's a very macho man and it made him uncomfortable”), Argento reports that she masturbated to shock him into it. So how was that? “I can do that easily!” she cries. “In life, I do it every day!” Nudity, it seems, has never been a problem. “I couldn't take my clothes off right now, but if we were shooting a movie I wouldn't have a problem. I find it pretty empowering. I'm not ashamed.”

As for The Last Mistress, Argento is seen licking blood from the wound of her lover - this is far more than just a by-numbers bodice-ripper. It's a film of love, cruelty, passion and jealousy, based on the novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Argento is the eponymous mistress, who has shared a ten-year bond with the rakish Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou) until he becomes betrothed to the innocent young Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). It being a film by Catherine Breillat, famed for her extreme explorations of sexuality in films such as Romance and À ma soeur!, graphic love scenes are de rigueur. “Vellini has a few orgasms in this movie,” Argento winks, “which are fake!”

But it swiftly becomes clear she did not see eye-to-eye with Breillat. “As a woman, she's a tiger,” the actress says. “It was tough. She can be manipulative ... she provoked me a lot, my sadness, to get what she wanted out of me.” Breillat says the two did not stay friends. “I'm not really interested in someone who brags that she's a sex queen,” she says. “I'm more interested in someone who says ‘I'm the best actress in the world.' I think she's not very ambitious, artistically.”

This is a mite unfair - not least given that Argento has directed two films, Scarlet Diva (2000) and in 2004, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, based on the reputedly autobiographical novel of abuse by J.T. LeRoy which was later exposed as a literary hoax. Argento claims she had no idea until she read about it in the press in 2006. She admits, though: “I had feelings in my gut that something was not right.”

Part of the reason to make the film, she says, was to help her to get over “childhood pressures and horrible memories”. If it was stimulating - she published two novels and a book of poetry before she was 10 - it was also lonely. When she was 14, she ran away from home. Inevitably, she turned to acting, like her mother, Daria Nicolodi, who starred in many of her father's films. “Movies have saved my life and I'm so grateful. I'm so shy and weird that if I didn't find a place in the world through movies, I don't know what I would've become.”

Despite a difficult relationship with her father, Argento made three films with him. But after she refused to make another, he didn't speak to her for more than two years. Now, after a decade apart, they have reunited for The Mother of Tears, the long-awaited final chapter in the trilogy that began with his 1977 classic Suspiria.

“Unconsciously, I think I wanted to affirm myself. Especially when people say, ‘You only work because you're Dario's daughter.' I wanted to prove I could work outside of Italy.” This she did, with stints in Paris and LA, appearing in New Rose Hotel and Last Days. “I even had the Hollywood extravaganza with xXx. That moment, my career could have gone in a totally different direction. But I think I carry my father's mark, to be the freak. It's about being different and not being like everybody else.”

She now feels artistically satisfied, though her love life has suffered. She describes herself as “the wolf on the steps” - her peripatetic existence making it difficult to form lasting relationships. One man she keeps returning to is the father of her daughter, Anna Lou, 6. He's Marco Castoldi, a musician from the Italian band Bluvertigo. But whether they will unite for good, she can't say. For the mo- ment she has her priorities straight. “Movies and my daughter, they're the only things I care about.”

The Last Mistress is on selected release from April 11

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