Laura Linney doesn’t want you to like her. It’s that simple. Look at her in The Savages, the most recent in a long line of knockout screen roles that have transformed the portrayal of emotional brittleness and thinly veiled neuroses into a mesmerising art form. Here, in a bleakly witty turn, she plays Wendy, the embittered sister of a withdrawn academic, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and the daughter of a dying dementia patient, Larry (Philip Bosco). Wendy longs to be a playwright, to have a satisfying love life, and to reach a point of closure with her formerly abusive father. And yet, from within a barrage of stinging one-liners, she is revealed to be a fantasist, a liar, and, well, a self-obsessed control freak. Which can only confirm one thing – that Laura Linney doesn’t want you to like her.

The 43-year-old New York theatre queen and two-time Oscar nominee is sitting smiling in a Toronto hotel on the eve of her movie’s premiere. She is wearing a snug-fitting silver mini-dress and a pair of black leather knee-high boots with spiky three-inch heels.

But despite this striking outfit and her open manner, Linney insists: “It’s a big rule of mine that you do not flirt with the audience. It’s not my job to tell an audience how to feel or to manipulate them. Some actors are wonderful at it, but I work another way.”

And yet, here’s the rub: Linney is impossible not to like. On screen at least her career may be defined by a cavalcade of so-called difficult femmes – think of the disapproving sister in You Can Count on Me, or the self-absorbed mother in The Squid and the Whale – but she has none-theless retained an unerring ability to humanise these women and make them remarkably sympathetic and appealing to mainstream audiences.

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“I’m not sure about that,” she says bashfully. “I try to respect every character I play and remind myself that I’m not playing an idea, or a concept, but a human being.”

In fact, Linney does it so well that she has become much in demand for directors looking for externally abrasive yet internally conflicted women. She can be seen in everything from the high stakes melodrama Jindabyne to the CIA thriller Breach to the big-budget studio comedy The Nanny Diaries. “I know, I pop up a lot,” she jokes, covering her mouth in mock shame. “I’ve been lucky, and I’m sure if I was an actress who wasn’t getting work I’d feel very differently.”

She says that it helps too that she’s not hampered by age anxieties and instead embraces her surprisingly sassy maturity with gusto (although she flatly denies that she has any special diets or health regimes or does anything special to contribute to how stunning she looks.

“You have a lot of actresses who are terrified if they’re 30 and they haven’t won an Oscar yet, and they get more and more afraid until they doom themselves that way,” she says, refusing to name names. “Fortunately, I never bought into that. I’ve been conditioned by the theatre, where people don’t look at you and go, ‘Uh-oh, you’re getting older!’ Instead they’re thrilled that you are getting older because there are better parts for you.”

The theatre, it seems, is the key to Linney’s success. For it’s here that her career began, in her twenties, after she graduated from the prestigious Juilliard School of drama in New York, as a multiple award-winning Broadway actress, in plays such as Hedda Gabler, The Crucible and Six Degrees of Separation.

Even before that it was always in her blood. Her father is the playwright Romulus Linney, and so it was inevitable that theatre would become an intimate part of her childhood. “I always knew that I belonged there,” she says.

And though her parents divorced when she was still an infant and she lived with her mother, a New York cancer nurse, it was her father’s profession that held the allure. “I was like a homing pigeon. I just went there, like a deep instinct, and I’ve known it my entire life.”

She says that it’s strange for her now not to be considered primarily as a theatre actress (she could return to the stage any minute, she says, and always has that security in hand, but the demands of movies are too all-consuming). And stranger still that her movie career was something of a happy accident – bit parts in the likes of Lorenzo’s Oil and the comedy Dave led to an attention-grabbing role as the, yes, wait for it, brittle wife Meryl opposite Jim Carrey in the era-defining comedy The Truman Show.

Oh yeah? But what about her role in the apes-on-the-rampage action flick Congo? “Oh God,” she groans. “People give me such a hard time about Congo. But it was one of my first films, I was a theatre kid, and I knew nothing about film-making at the time. And all I had to do was run around screaming with a gun.”

Typically, some impeccable choices followed, and Linney cleverly navigated her way between mainstream studio efforts such as Mystic River and edgy independents such as The Laramie Project and into the space that she occupies now, as the smart and sassy fortysomething femme du jour. And yet, just when Linney – effortlessly successful, witty and attractive – is starting to resemble one of her all-too-perfect-on-the-outside screen creations, you have to ask, where’s the flaw in Linneyland? Where’s the hairline fracture? What’s the darkness that wakes her up at three in the morning and terrifies her to her very soul?

“Well, I went through a very difficult time a few years ago,” she answers. “I didn’t know where my life was going. I got overworked. I was single. I was confused and I was afraid. And thankfully, that time is over.”

She admits that the difficult period also ended, among other things, when she met her fiancé, Marc Schauer. He is, she says proudly, not connected to Hollywood – she met him at the Telluride Film Festival, where he was on the staff.

In the meantime, with the roles already piling up ahead of her, including stints as a writer’s widow in City of Your Final Destination, and as the wife of the US president in John Adams, she says that she plans to use as little of her pain as possible in all future performances, and instead get on with the important business of acting.

“I’m not into the idea of acting as therapy,” she says, firmly. “But I believe that if some deep psychological stuff comes through in all my performances, and it’s part of my own pain, well I can’t help that. Because I’m just one person. And I am what I am.”

The Savages is showing at OWE2, Oct 29, 8.30pm, and OWE1, Oct 30, 1pm

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