Amazing Trace

When Tracey Ullman first went to America, back in 1983, 'I'd sit in my jacuzzi, pregnant, and write to Woody Allen saying, "Better put me in a film or I'm going back to England."'

She didn't... he didn't. Or not immediately. She had a small part in Bullets Over Broadway - but now, at last, she has a starring role. In Small Time Crooks (the Evening Standard Gala screening at this year's festival), Allen and Ullman play Ray and Frenchy, a love you, loathe you working-class couple landed in the money by a laughable scam. When they dance, it's Frenchy who leads. Ullman too, arguably.

'As Woody says, it's not going to start any new religion. It's a romp of a movie.' But this, Allen's most broadly successful film in years, reflects Ullman's more robust style of comedy. This is perhaps the first time Woody has cast himself against an actress who is funny in her own right, and everyone, Ullman herself included, is giving credit where it's due. 'He needs me,' she says. 'Funny is money.

'It's great to see Woody doing physical comedy and having fun. And what I love is that Woody had the courage to cast me. I'm 40 years old - yes! - there's salt and pepper in there' - she grabs her hair. 'I'm closer to him in age than some of his leading ladies. But I like to be the boss. And when I saw him in those denim shorts I wasn't scared of him.' Seeing Woody's knees emerging under stonewashed, as she says, is worth the price of admission to the movie. Not that Frenchy is without her own sartorial idiosyncracy - 'a big arse in green leggings'. Perhaps this is a reaction to living in LA, but Ullman mentions the big arse and the leggings rather frequently.

'I've lived in America for 17 years, I've spent a lot of time in New York and you see people like Frenchy. You see the arse in the green leggings walking along Madison Avenue and you think, "She's from out of town".' Ullman goes into imitation mode, as she 'does' a raucous American housewife, the kind who loved Cats and thought Phantom was fabulous. 'I like that this film is about ordinary working-class people, not the Manhattan intelligentsia.' Snobbery of all sorts has provided some of the girl from Slough's best comedy. 'The British class system fascinates me.' The American one too, evidently.

You wonder, suddenly, how she got on with Hugh Grant, who plays a shallow sophisticate in the movie. Very well, apparently. 'A Rolls Royce of an actor' - and she means it (fairly) kindly. 'He just wants to be looked after. We rehearsed a lot together in our trailers. I'm the same age, same country, same profession so the first day we were Brits on the set together. Make him a cup of tea and he's anybody's. He's just lovely but he is living in a time warp. He uses language I haven't heard since the Forties...' Two different styles of Englishness, basically.

Englishness, or the lack of it, is an issue in Ullman interviews. 'I think I'm an international artiste - like Sacha Distel or Topo Gigio,' she says rather wryly. But we in this country don't forgive our absentee celebrities. Worse, we tend to discount any success of theirs which we cannot see. Ullman's time in the States has brought her several Emmy awards and rave reviews, not to mention two children and a long-running marriage to one-time Essex boy Allan McKeown, the excessively successful TV producer behind her shows. But we tend to see her as a light that failed. Well, we try to, anyway.

Film was the medium she had not really cracked. She says she doesn't want to be 'a movie star or a leading lady...I'm not attractive enough'. That's just as well, since the roles she used to be offered ... small parts from Allen and Altman apart ... tended to be the goofy Mom in a McDonald's tie-in movie. But that may be about to change. 'The success of Small Time Crooks has given me the confidence to write a film myself. It's time a woman got out there and wrote a funny film.' If it works for Mike Myers and Jim Carrey...