Whether she's playing a hard-boiled or soft-boiled character, one never knows with Miranda Richardson which way the shell is going to crack open.
If you're an actress, the quest for a decent part on the screen is still a difficult one. "Long-suffering" is an attitude you may have to strike in a majority of roles, while staying decorative enough to offer the leading man the promise of something more than conversation.
The "supporting" or "character" parts she is commonly allotted, despite being the most combustible actress talent of her generation, have made Richardson uniquely adept at turning herself from an object into a subject. She may choose to take on the long-suffering parts, but then she takes them on with a vengeance.
"Surprise" is the word that crops up most often if you talk to directors and producers who have worked with her. "She always had a more interesting, surprising choice at any given moment than I had," gallantly allows Simon Curtis, who directed her in the Royal Court production of A Lie of the Mind, by Sam Shepard, and in a TV production of Harold Pinter's Old Times
Rob Walker directed her in the BBC serial Die Kinder. "Sometimes I would give her a suggestion for a scene and she would just look off into the middle distance. There was never any way of knowing whether she would incorporate it or not. But then she just hits the moments you need. She has a complete machine inside her." Television producer Keith Trodd says: "She brings a peculiarly English stamp and eccentricity to the screen, but also a chameleon quality. You can always recognise a performance by Miranda, but you're often surprised by it."
Her snappishness has unnerved some of Fleet Street's most hardened celebrity-squeezers, but she can be happy to chat at length about the art of acting.
The 5ft 5in cat-lover looks frail and nondescript in public, in an oversized black T-shirt, tie-dyed in brown from the midriff down. Her hair is currently spiky and russet-coloured in a short, Laurie Anderson cut. Her pale complexion is not so much peaches and cream as, in the absence of make-up, lychees and cream. There are long pauses before many answers are forthcoming. It's hard to tell whether they signal deep thought, calculations of evasive action, or simply the paralysis of someone pausing over a dessert menu.
What are the best moments of acting? "There are good mornings on a film set when the concentration level is at such a pitch that you feel everyone is going for the same thing. In theatre, it's not dissimilar. If there's just one scene that has a flow on it, it's enough to keep you on your mettle, to keep you interested."
And the least best moments? "People making assumptions about you. Or typecasting. What else can I tell you? If you're wrongly informed at a casting session... being a woman, and the differences in pay. And the fact that most people on film sets are still male, though that's not something that I go home and have angst about and I've not had bad experiences with crews."
Repeated attempts to probe the origins of this mercurial style, both oblique and intensely concentrated, are met by a series of cloudy responses: "I turn up for work. I kind of clear my mind... You've got a very broad groundsheet, then you bounce off from there. The writing is the springboard for your intuitive stuff and then you see, maybe a colour of what you want to achieve. Then you bring in the technique you've learnt. But when you're on film, you're not always in control of that. That's what makes me believe in a kind of collective unconscious, a sort of experience you draw on."
Mike Newell, who directed her in the films Dance With a Stranger and Enchanted April, says: "In performance, she's someone who lives on her nerves a lot of the time. It's extremely exposed and very subtle, and comes from very detailed observation. But in the end, you look at her and think, 'I have no idea how you do this.'
"With her, there must be an absolutely open channel between thought and instinct, which a lot of actors make a holy grail but few achieve to the same level. The performance has to be planned and considered and carefully built: it's not just a fine fury flung down. Anthony Hopkins is one of those actors who will say, 'No idea where it comes from.' But of course they plan it, they just don't want your fingers in it."
Richardson indicates that her speedballing screen debut, as the murderer Ruth Ellis in Dance With a Stranger (1985), was fuelled on a purer form of instinct-without-planning than was good for her health. She suffered a physical collapse soon afterwards, caused as well by the loneliness of the shoot. Newell had snatched her, at 26, from provincial rep, which had followed drama school in Bristol. (She had a comfortable upbringing in Southport, Lancashire, the daughter of an Oxford-educated businessman.)
To try to stay sane as the feral Ellis, Newell says, Richardson would sometimes play-act on the set in the guise of a psychopathic, Benenden-style schoolgirl, throwing facetious, screechy-growly tantrums to entertain her co-workers. This character was later developed into the role of Queenie, the Elizabeth I plaguing Rowan Atkinson in the BBC's Blackadder. (Such cabaret antics are an important sideline for Richardson: she was a guest host on the American TV revue Saturday Night Live, by all accounts, an excellent turn.)
Ellis and Queenie initially led people to typecast her as an interpreter of the wantonly unhinged, an archetypal hysterical woman. It was a perception she grew to detest with a venom that, directed at journalists, led some to think this oddball actress might not have all the lights on in the attic. ("Don't hark on madness because I'm not mad and I don't really play mad characters," she rounded on one interviewer. She turned down the Glenn Close role in Fatal Attraction, calling it "crap".)
Although she has done a reasonable quota of hellcat characters, most have been in extravagant black-comic contexts that can hardly be counted as personal statements: in the TV drama After Pilkington, by Simon Gray, she stuck scissors into the dons of her father's alma mater; in Ball Trap on the Côte Sauvage, a TV farce by Andrew Davies in which she played a slatternly, bonkers Pole who gazed at Jack Shepherd's lower anatomy and declared, "That's a nice one!"; and in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, in which she was an IRA hitwoman with the hump over her beau's bisexuality.
Does it ever make sense to talk about the "persona" of an actor? "I have no idea what my persona would be. As far as I'm concerned, I'm changing all the time. If you only took on roles that had the same qualities, then I suppose it might make a critic feel better, if he can see some kind of bedrock. Perhaps that's the old definition of a star, someone who's always going to come up with the same goods. But it intimates limitation to me and I don't want to think of the job like that."
Emma Thompson is the only English actress with a higher international profile at present, but some think Richardson is the more luminous talent. "Emma may be more acclaimed because she's more reassuring, less challenging," says one leading British film producer. "To me, that was the problem with The Remains of the Day [in which Thompson played a resignedly lovelorn housekeeper]. Miranda would have wanted to start a trade union on behalf of the character. Even with the same script, she would have signalled something that burst through all those cardboard period propositions about repression."
Do people get happier as they get older? "Where did that come from? I sincerely hope they do. I wouldn't want to go back to my 20s, they were pretty angst-laden times. What I tried to do in the past was deal with everything myself and not feel that I could share - confidence, trust, all that kind of thing. That personally has become easier. There are so many unknowns when you're younger. So I have to believe it gets better. It does feel richer. It feels richer."