Smash hit

Morton may be a one-off director, but she is a remarkable actor — natural, brave, self-transforming — and in an age of hard-sell celebrity her fame and bankability have grown in inverse proportion to the amount she has chased them. She laughs at the idea she might be part of the “Primrose Hill set”; although Kate Moss is a mate, Morton is too busy making films, organising her kids’ social lives on her iPhone and expressing her politics. Actually, she is more of a working-class Vanessa Redgrave than a gadabout Sadie Frost — addressing a Unison rally over job cuts or deciding never to work for the BBC again after its refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal. A mother of two — Esme, 9, and 16-month-old Edie, whose father is Morton’s fiancé, the film-maker Harry Holm, son of Sir Ian — she is immersed in children’s rights, a veteran campaigner at 31 and a one-woman child-abuse unit, with a newsflash on her computer to highlight all abuse or neglect stories, and an ambassador for Save the Children. “For sex offenders,” she says, “I genuinely believe that life should mean life. To me the crime is equivalent to murder because you take away someone’s life.”

The serious-minded actress has done commercial movies — most notably Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report — but she prides herself on her loyalty to small-budget, independent cinema. She says she was barely paid for her role as Debbie, wife of the suicidal Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, in Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film Control, a character she loved. “She was innocent and loving. And very normal. I like playing people that are normal. So often in film, people want to have spectacular heroes, but I’m interested in the character that people look past. You might call them nobodies — I call them everybody.”

What effect has her background had on her work as an actor? She shakes her head impatiently, stating that she wants to talk today about being a director. And then — on her own terms — she tells me. “My formative years gave me massive strengths that I use in my work. In the TV series Band of Gold, I based Tracy [a teenage hooker] on someone I lived with in a home.” Moreover, since she had very little secondary education, she has chosen roles in order to educate herself. “On my early TV jobs, I’d ask cinematographers for their top five films, classics like Cinema Paradiso or The Bi­cycle Thieves, and I’d make sure I saw them.” Her heroes are two art-house directors she has never worked with: the Finn Aki Kaurismaki and the American Jim Jarmusch. But the ones she has learnt from are those who “have shown me kindness” — Lynne Ramsay, Spielberg, Sheridan — to whose vision she submits without a whimper, though it’s hard to imagine. “I am the paint for a director’s palette,” she says. “They can do anything with me. As an actor, I’m Plasticine.”

In an industry that devours gorgeous actresses before they get a chance to show their talent, Morton’s porcelain skin, high smooth forehead, wide-set eyes and pillowy figure — she is still breast-feeding — allow her to appear an angel or a frump; pleasingly, not having drop-dead beauty has been a help. In Charlie Kaufman’s baffling debut as a director, the metaphysical opus Synecdoche, New York — in which her character, Hazel, ages over 30 years — she acts alongside Michelle Williams, whose standard-issue gorgeous looks would be a distraction in the Everywoman roles to which Morton is drawn.

Eight years ago it was reported that the Weinsteins had rejected her for The Brothers Grimm for having beefy upper arms. She laughs at the memory because she can afford to. “My work speaks for itself. My appearance is my business. If I’m asked to lose 3st to play a heroin addict, I’ll consider it. If I’m going to play Zola Budd, I’ll learn how to be a runner to look right for the film.” To us, that particular casting might seem pretty unlikely, but not to her, a woman whose self-belief is almost scarily powerful. “How I look as Samantha Morton — whether I go running or eat fish and chips every day — is my prerogative. Women who start their careers being cast because of their looks reach their mid-thirties and find it hard to get a really good part. I have good parts offered to me all the time.”

She thinks very carefully about what work to accept (about every­thing, actually), twice turning down the role of Myra Hindley in Tom Hooper’s 2006 TV drama Longford. “But then I questioned why I was an actor in the first place. What is my talent for if I can’t portray both sides of the coin and question the evil in society? I felt sick thinking about how I was going to play her. I just had to imagine it was a fictional character. It was better that someone like me did the role and gave it a huge amount of thought and integrity, rather than me sitting at home screaming at the TV because somebody else has played it and f***ed it up.”

Soon she will be moving her family to America for eight months to work on what she will only describe mysteriously as “another biggie”. For all her championing of the edgy, intellectual film-makers, she is excited rather than snooty about blockbusters. Indeed, Morton’s most likeable quality is appearing eternally chuffed at her own good luck, which, given her past, must seem miraculous to the once devout Catholic. “A film like that means you can have a lovely home. Every single day on Minority Report I would pinch myself, and say, ‘Look, you’re here.’ I mean, you thank your lucky stars, don’t you?”

The Unloved, part of Channel 4’s Britain’s Forgotten Children season, goes out at 9pm next Sunday; Synecdoche, New York opens on Friday

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010