Smash hit

Whatever bitterness she once felt towards her mother has long since evaporated. "I adore my mum. She's an amazing grandmother. Recently she came to do some episodes of Nip/Tuck, playing my mum [chuckles] and we all went to this little restaurant on the beach to celebrate, my daughter and me and my mum. I looked at this other family with this stereotypical grandma and I turned to look at my mum and she was in jeans, barefoot, her hair blowing in the wind with this mad sweatshirt on. Why she's a good grandmother is she can come down to their level." She doesn't hector Daisy about Third World debt, then? "No, she's not like that." Has she changed? She sounds like a different woman to the one presented to us in the media. "Wouldn't that be the same with so many people?" Fair point.

I mentioned a quote I'd read from Vanessa Redgrave saying ruefully that as she had aged she had come to realise that time spent with her own children was as important as that spent with children in refugee camps. As important! Most parents wouldn't put it quite like that... Joely Richardson didn't really respond to this. She said both her parents had done a fantastic job of rearing strong-minded, hard-working children. "There wasn't a silver spoon, the work ethic did rub off. It was, 'Do that well and you'll be rewarded in the proper way.'" She has come to view the fact that she wasn't central to either of her parents' lives as a positive thing.

"Whenever people say it must be impossible [being an actress] coming from the family I do, because the bar is set so high, I say no, in a weird way it was actually not being present and involved in my parents' lives that enabled me to say, 'I'm gonna do this.' It [acting] didn't even come into my orbit." Similarly with the politics, although she "sat at the back of an awful lot of meetings", she "can't say being an insider turned me off, because I never got involved enough.

I wasn't particularly political. I felt a bit embarrassed about that." Shortly after her father died "I did see a lot of his films from the Sixties and I remember thinking, 'God, I wish I'd talked to him about it.' I was somehow disengaged from what they were into."

Conscious that we had used up the bulk of our time talking about her parents rather than her, and she had a plane to catch, I switched to her career. How had she suddenly become a tabloid

regular "at the grand old age of 35", as she put it? Was it all down to the tiny gold backless Julien Macdonald dress she wore for one

premiere in 2000 and her relationship with TV presenter Jamie Theakston? Did she decide to try to become a Hollywood star? "No, absolutely not," she said firmly. "Not on any level.

"I came out of drama school," she continued, "got a few good jobs in the theatre, made a few films, got married [at 25, to Tim Bevan, who produced Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones's Diary] and had a child [at 27]. I'm not into astrology but I'm an old goat, a Capricorn. We're old, old souls. In my twenties I was very set. I had a house to run, I'd work if I could fit it in. Then my marriage split up and," she leant towards the tape-recorder for emphasis at this point, "my husband did not leave me and run off with a younger woman, as is reported. He did meet someone shortly afterwards but hardly a younger woman, pretty much a peer. The marriage split up because we just hadn't paid enough attention to it."

Her relationship with Bevan is now amicable. "I love him dearly and he's a fantastic father but at the time it was horrendous, a tough time. I took some time off and was really miserable for a year. Divorce is... really shite. But, around 34 I guess, I came out the other side and got a slew of jobs back to back, Maybe Baby, The Patriot. When I picked that dress, I just thought it would be fun. Everything had changed, from where I lived, to the people I saw, to the clothes I wore, to the fact I'd started working out. It was a new life."

Having got to county standard as a teenager, she has now resumed her tennis, and revived an interest in sport generally, and has overcome any residual puritanical notions that her interest in fashion was frivolous. Or rather, she decided that even if fashion were frivolous she didn't care. "I didn't wake up one morning and think, 'I've got a new life to lead,' but if you don't have a husband to consider, or in-laws, you think, 'What do I want to do? I'll wear that dress.'" I asked her to talk about Jamie Theakston and she said "No!", pretend-appalled at the intrusion. Now, she said, "I've actually been seeing someone for about a year and it's lovely."

Around about that point she said she had to think about getting off. She lit a last cigarette. I asked her one more for the road. What did she reckon to this idea that she'd somehow been unlucky in love? "Is that the idea?" she asked back. Yes, it is, I said, in the press at least. (Not so much unlucky actually, as a bit dangerous: before she married Bevan, she'd had an affair with Scottish landowner Archie Stirling, an affair that ended his marriage to Diana Rigg.) "Oh, I dunno," she said. "I had a couple of relationships, then I got married, we split up, I dated someone on and off for three years and now I've dated someone for a year. I'm happy. Is that lucky or unlucky? I dunno. Sometimes I've been lucky, sometimes unlucky. Sometimes I've dumped, sometimes I've been dumped. I've made mistakes, but what can I say?"

She stubbed out her cigarette, got her stuff together, started laughing. What's funny? I asked. "Oh, I don't know, why am I laughing? It's this, this interview thing. It still catches me unawares. It's hello, we meet, we talk about our childhoods like we've known each other for years, then it's thanks for the bacon and eggs, goodbye, see you when I see you. It's like filming at 4pm in the street, telling someone you love them, then going home. It's funny. It's absurd."

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