It's a wonderful life

Gina McKee is hovering on the verge of international stardom. Nick Roddick talks to the star of Wonderland about how she got there.

It's the kind of thing that restores your faith in Cannes. It goes like this. Thursday night: see Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland, a vibrant, wonderful, edgy, emotional account of a disastrous weekend in the life of a London family, which recalls the verve and simplicity of the early New Wave. In Cannes terms, it's a stylish, zippy little Vespa that leaves the clunking juggernauts of the previous day's Competition screening standing at the lights.

Friday morning: come into town, ascend to the vulgar elegance of the Carlton's seventh-floor Belle Otero - all plush and mirrors and naff oil paintings and neatly aligned glassware. Step out onto the terrace, look down on the rooftop of the Savoy and watch Julia Ormond being interviewed. Again. Come back inside and meet Gina McKee.

Well, all right, it wasn't quite as casual as that: it took a dozen or so phone calls and as many missed ones to make it happen. But it was worth it.

McKee is in the early stages of orbit, about to become an international star rather than just a familiar face on British TV. She won multiple awards (including a BAFTA Best Actress) in 1996 for Our Friends In The North, one of the best bits of British TV this decade. She's been in Mike Leigh's Naked and Mike Figgis' The Loss of Sexual Innocence and just did Luc Besson's Joan Of Arc.

In the past 12 months, her schedule has also incorporated Notting Hill, in which she plays a major role, and the TV drama Passion, which was in rehearsal while Notting Hill was shooting and which was finally filmed late last summer in Devon. Passion wrapped on the last Saturday in September. On Sunday, McKee was on a train to London. On Monday, she started Wonderland. She had some time off in December, then launched into Women Talking Dirty with Helena Bonham Carter for Elton John's Rocket Pictures.

Oh yes, and she's in that Kelloggs commercial in which she looks across at the building opposite and sees lots of people doing sexy things and eating cereal. Cereal is sexy, it says. Not a lot of people could get away with that.

So how did it all start?

"I lived in Easington: it's a colliery village in County Durham," says McKee, in a voice that, these days, is only North-of-England-tinged. "I went to a drama workshop when I was a teenager and I was asked to do a television series. Then I went back to school and back to life and that kind of stuff. I tried for drama schools when I was 17, but I wasn't the right kind of girl for that stuff. It wasn't really until I was 19 that I decided, yes, I can really go for this."

Nowadays, McKee is the kind of actress who is recognised on the street. "That's happened for ages, since before Friends In The North, strangely," she says. "People think they know me but they don't know why: there's a lot of that stuff."

So does she tell them why?

"I do now, because it just gets ridiculous," she says. "I was on a flight with this woman who was convinced I'd delivered her baby and, after she showed me the third picture of her child, I just thought, 'OK, I have to come clean'..."

And Wonderland? "I loved it, completely loved it," she says. "We didn't have a clapper board, and there was no crew, apart from camera and focus and Michael. And radio mikes."

Wasn't that scary?

"You know, there are good nerves and bad nerves," she says. "These were good nerves. It gives you that boost. Sort of, 'God, I'm slightly scared, but it's good'."

The comparison with Mike Leigh - with whom McKee worked on Naked - is obvious, although the end result is quite different: less mannered, less structured and, for my money, much truer. The process is also quite different.

"Mike Leigh works in a very specific way: his improvisations and his development time is really intense, but once you have reached the formula - the shape, if you like - the script is decided and it's very, very structured. By the time you come to shoot it, you really do know what you're doing, just as you would in a regular film. But Wonderland was much more fluid and 'in the moment'. We had two weeks of preparation, and we were asked to go Christmas shopping for the family.

We had to buy a present for every member of the family."

"Go on," I say, "tell me what you bought them."

McKee giggles. "All right, then," she says. "Bearing in mind that you've got a budget that is realistic to what the character is: I bought a blow-up chair for my nephew. I bought these really naff kind of sex gimmicky things from Ann Summers for Debbie. For Molly, I bought a lime-green folding wine rack. For Mum, regular, regular smelly stuff, the sort that always has floral patterns on the front: talcum powder, a powder puff. It had to have a powder puff - that was crucial: a baby blue powder puff. And Dad, I can't remember... oh yes, I found a bargain for Dad: you know those little drawers that you put screws in? It was brilliant."

And what about her own character, Nadia?

"I have a lot of affection for Nadia," she says, "but I think she's sort of living in an environment where she had ambition, but she's not ambitious enough. You know, she's not driven? Yet she isn't following a conventional lifestyle and she probably never will, so she's in this no man's land." So does McKee, the star-on-the-cusp, the constantly working actress, relate to a vulnerable loser like Nadia? McKee shoots me a look. "No, I don't," she says, with such vehemence that you realise no one really gets to be a star by accident.