Andie lets it all hang out

'I think it would have been an issue for him,' she says carefully. 'But I can't hurt him any more because he isn't my husband.'

The suggestion is that MacDowell allowed Qualley's views to limit her career choices. The impact of this was two-fold. At a time when nude scenes and highly charged sexual situations were becoming almost mandatory for A-list actresses, MacDowell was required to keep her clothes on, and arguably didn't achieve the kind of success she deserved. The second consequence is MacDowell's perceived on- and off-screen froideur.

MacDowell and Qualley met on a 1985 Gap shoot during her modelling days. At the time, Qualley was a model, too. It was a short courtship; they were married a few months later. For eight of their 13 years together, they lived on the 3,000-acre ranch, where he became a property developer. He also looked after their children - Justin, now 15, Rainey, 13, and Sarah Margaret, seven - while she periodically went off to make films.

Five years ago, the family moved to North Carolina, near Gaffney, MacDowell's home town, where much of her family are still based. 'I realised our lives were just going by,' she says. 'We would go to the beach back home for two weeks every summer with my sisters and the whole family. Then we'd go back to Montana and I'd dream about it for the other 50 weeks.'

Her motives for moving seem a little bizarre, but she's unapologetic about them. 'There are a lot of qualities Southerners have that I wanted my children to have,' she says. 'Mannerisms like saying "Yes, ma'am". Maybe outside the Carolinas that sounds like they're being brought up by an Army sergeant, but at home it sounds right and proper.

'I want my son to learn to stand up when a woman comes to the table. I grew up with those old-fashioned mannerisms, that gentility, if you will, and I like living that way.'

Shortly after the family relocated, MacDowell's marriage crumbled. At first, she was content to focus solely on the kids. But after about a year, she realised something was missing. 'I had gotten to this point where I was single, and it seemed like there just weren't any guys around,' she says. 'I think it was because of my lifestyle.

'I was living in North Carolina, and I had custody of three children. I liked that responsibility, but I was cooking and putting them to bed every night. How was I going to meet somebody? I'm not interested in going to bars. I was never one to have one-night stands or frivolous relationships. I'm into intelligent conversation.'

While the press speculated wildly about MacDowell's relationship with Dennis Quaid (with whom she shot Norman Jewison's HBO film Dinner with Friends last year), and - randomly - Russell Crowe, MacDowell quietly rediscovered a teenage crush. Her sister Julia encouraged her to get back in touch with Rhett Hartzog, an ex-school mate, who was a jeweller in Atlanta. The two discovered they had secretly fancied each other as youngsters, and took it from there.

'I was aggressive enough to go after someone - although,' she says conspiratorially, 'I did it in a very ladylike way. I tricked him completely. He told me he'd never have had the nerve to call me.'

Hartzog and MacDowell married in November 2001. Clearly, she vetted him to ensure that he'd have none of Qualley's issues with her professional life, before she made the commitment to him.

'He trusts me and is totally proud of me,' she says. And then she adds in a slightly steely voice, 'If I do something he doesn't think is proper, he doesn't have to watch.'

Arguably, much of our ambiguity concerning MacDowell is rooted in her refusal to play the Hollywood game. She's never lived in LA, never embraced the Viper Room scene, and she rarely attends premieres for films she hasn't appeared in. She's patently focused on being a mother, which is unsurprising. MacDowell's own childhood was, in her words, 'pretty difficult'. She and her three sisters had to look after their alcoholic mother, who died at the age of 53. Her father left them when Andie was six.

'It was complete chaos,' she says. 'Each of my sisters had her own set of neuroses. When we get together, we're all completely out to lunch.' But she gets a strength from it all. 'My mom got drunk and terrified my friends,' she once said. 'I learned how to deal with her, and with the people she shocked. I learned to deal with people in general. I'm not easily intimidated now, and that's an asset.' Little wonder, then, that she's hellbent on eschewing LA for a low-key domestic existence elsewhere.

'People made a big deal out of it, that I'm not the Hollywood girl,' she explains. 'It's not like I'm trying to say I'm better than they are. It's just that I want to live in North Carolina with my sisters. I'm not a big-city person. I probably would be more successful if I lived there. Work-wise, that probably would have been a very good thing for me, to be able to know people and understand who's who. But I love being with my family, and I love being with my sisters, and that's more important to me.'

She stops to sigh for a moment. 'I feel a little out of the loop. I can't keep up with who's who. I don't even know who the studio executives are any more.'

MacDowell may not be manipulating the Hollywood execs, but her career doesn't seem to be suffering as a result. After Crush, she will star in Harrison's Flowers, a distinctly non-rom-com movie based around the Bosnian conflict. Plus, MacDowell insists that success doesn't matter to her anyway.

'Just the other day,' she announces, 'someone was very blunt and said to me, "You are successful, but you have not made it really huge." But in whose eyes? I do not care - honestly. If that's the way it's going to be, so be it.'

Somehow, you get the impression that she doesn't really mind about the mixed feelings she inspires in the movie-going public, either. So we're free to go on being awestruck, irritated, suspicious and intimidated by Andie MacDowell.

Crush is released nationwide on 7 June