There are those people in the public eye who like to pretend they are "private," and there are those who really are, such as Laura Linney. Maybe it comes down to the fact that, after a lengthy career as an acclaimed Juilliard-trained New York theater actress, Linney came to movies relatively late - international stardom later still. Her breakthrough film was Kenneth Lonergan's 2000 sleeper hit, You Can Count on Me, a dry, beautifully observed drama, for which Linney was deservedly Oscar-nominated as Mark Ruffalo's uptight sister.
Since then, Linney has somewhat cornered the market in tense, textured blondes - seemingly unglamorous, delicate as china, but with eyes that spit fire, ice and everything in between. Of men who've heard of Linney, it is difficult to find one who isn't wild for her. Clint Eastwood is a long-time fan, as is Richard Gere: both cast Linney in their movies (Eastwood in Absolute Power and Mystic River and Gere in Primal Fear) before she hit big.
You can see why they rated her: Linney has one of those deceptively bare faces - classically beautiful - that can switch through emotions ("harassed," "soft," "hurt," "reflective") as easily as a child's flick-book. She also exudes a patrician quality, in common with other stage-reared thoroughbreds such as Joan Allen and Meryl Streep (Linney cites Jessica Tandy, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith as major influences).
All of which could explain why, in person, Linney often radiates a similar formality, a kind of coiled tightness, and, past interviewers have noted, "primness" that lends itself to long pauses and agonizingly careful answers. When there is a question Linney clearly considers too personal, there is even an "aghast" raising of the eyebrows, straight out of a French farce.
Not that this comes as any great surprise: Linney rarely does interviews and hates having her photo taken. As she says of herself at one point during our conversation: "I don't think I'm exactly gregarious, you know. I'm not usually known as the loud person in the room."
When she shies away from the more personal questions is it just because she thinks people have no right to be so damn nosey?
"There have been times when I'm incredibly awkward and uncomfortable," she says. "When I ask myself, 'What am I doing here?' But as I see it, it's your right to ask and my right to respond how I feel it's best to respond. The good thing is that I'm always honest."
All that said, at other times, Linney, 43, is warm and friendly, with exquisite manners. She is extremely nice when, settling down to talk at a central London hotel, both my tape recorder and my back-up machine malfunction. "Oh no," she cries, running over to the window with me, as I miserably decant batteries and stab at buttons. "Perhaps you have a poltergeist!" She couldn't be sweeter, adjusting her day so that I can come back later.
Armistead Maupin, the San Francisco-based author who was instrumental in getting Linney cast as the jumpy ingenue Mary Ann Singleton in the 1993 television adaptation of his urban saga, Tales of the City, and who now counts the actress as a close personal friend, says this may be Linney's southern side coming out.
"Laura grew up in New York, but she was raised by southerners, so she has that gentility and courtesy that often comes with a southern upbringing," Maupin tells me over the phone. "We had that in common, and it means that sometimes we bury our thoughts to smooth things over." Maupin chuckles dryly. "The reason we're friends is that we liked each other first of all, but there was this other thing - how we also both understood the burden of being a good little boy or a good little girl."
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