"Am I blind or are you hiding?" I get this text from Joanne Whalley as I'm looking directly at her, eye to eye, at a coffeeshop near her home in West Hollywood. She's the one who seems to be hiding: slender and on the small side, wearing sombre colours and sunglasses on a gloomy winter's day. She might be a suburban mother picking up the kids, or one of those quietly dangerous film-noirish women – in shades, dressed to blend in – she has played on more than one occasion.
After the release of Scandal in 1989, in which she played Christine Keeler, Whalley seemed on the verge of something huge. She had recently married the Hollywood star Val Kilmer and moved to the US. But the marriage lasted eight years, and the career did not. Some people talk about you like you're dead already, I tell her, more bluntly than I mean to; but she laughs, seeming not to care. "Well, I tend to keep myself to myself," she says, traces of Manchester still flickering through her voice. "I'm not very good at the whole being-out-there thing. I usually try not to get too tied up with the off-stage stuff, the baggage of it, all this . . ." She points at my tape recorder.
She made an exception, though, for her most recent film, 44 Inch Chest, a movie with an impressive lineup of top-shelf roughneck British men (Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, John Hurt). Whalley plays Winstone's cheating wife, with the femme-fatale shadings that made her Keeler so memorable.
"My character is the trigger for Ray [Winstone]'s meltdown and, really, the film's all about love – and are you man enough to handle it?" she says. "What's interesting is this array of men: older, younger, gay or straight. All their perspectives, no matter how awful, are valid from their own experience of love. One thing that worried me was that people might think it was some kind of anti-woman thing, which it's really not – she's no angel, but she's not an out-and-out villain either. She's the catalyst for everything that happens." It almost seems her career is circling back to the mid-1980s, when Whalley appeared in the BBC's Edge of Darkness and then in Dennis Potter's controversial The Singing Detective (her sexy-nurse-plus-lotion scene with Michael Gambon is justly famous).
Born in Manchester in 1964, Whalley's career began when she was 11, with small roles on various soaps, including Coronation Street during the Pat Phoenix era. "On Emmerdale Farm, I smashed up some old man's vegetable garden. I was a tearaway sent to stay on a nice farm to learn to behave myself and – oooh, I caused all sorts of problems."
Tearaway was her default position (those dark, watchful eyes seemed to promise many things, especially mischief), right from her first role, in 1975. "Again, I was this troublesome kid. I had to say, 'If I show you, will you show me?'" This led to parts as truants and shoplifters in everything from Crown Court to Juliet Bravo, although she did find time, around 1978, to join Stockport punk band the SlowGuns, who released two singles now said to be highly collectible.
Whalley's early Hollywood projects, neo-noirish thrillers like Shattered and Kill Me Again, failed to catch fire. "It is different working over here," she says without rancour, "but that's really good for an actor. You can do a Star Trek and then do a play at the Royal Court, something radical or political. The worst thing for an actor is to be stuck in one kind of thing. But if you're not in people's faces all the time, you can lose traction. And that affects the choice of things you get offered."
Family seemed a better option (she has a daughter and a son with Kilmer). "Kids have been a great clarifier, incredibly rewarding. And it goes so fast. I can't believe my daughter is 18 and looking at colleges in New York; and my son is 14 and a good foot taller than me."
Whalley may have acted with some of the biggest names on either side of the Atlantic, but the role that seems to have thrilled her most was Scarlett O'Hara, in a 1994 sequel to Gone With the Wind, called Scarlett. (It makes sense: Scarlett was quite possibly the greatest tearaway and schemer in movie history.) "The idea that you – I! – could get to be Scarlett O'Hara, marry Rhett, get shipwrecked and had up for murder at the Old Bailey . . . It's everything I grew up loving. I wanted to swish my train and say, 'Fiddle-de-dee!' I did scenes with Gielgud – he was my grandfather. We had an absolute ball. Who wouldn't want that kind of experience?" And for a moment, she is that little girl again, who grew up watching 1950s classics on a sofa in Manchester, dark eyes wide with wonder.