Booty queen Jennifer strikes gold

Jennifer Lopez takes risks. In a brief but soaring career, she's verbally attacked Hollywood stars, plunged into a short-lived marriage with a waiter and been thrown in police cells after a shooting incident involving boyfriend Sean 'Puff Daddy' Combs.

Lopez wears her hot and dangerous reputation with style. She sits deep into a sofa, the smooth olive skin of bare arms and bare legs on display under a short green dress, brown hair piled up and much glittering jewellery on her neck and wrists.

'I may have stumbled and tripped over a rock or two,' she says of the five years since she made her big Hollywood debut alongside Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in Money Train. 'But I do not spend time looking over my shoulder.' She has now stoked up her risk-taking image even further, choosing her first leading role in The Cell, a highly original and at times disturbing film about a serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio) who imprisons and then slowly drowns his young women victims.

Lopez, 30, plays a therapist with a skill to tap in to the minds of her patients. As the police, led by an FBI agent (Vince Vaughn) close on the killer, he collapses into a coma. His latest victim already awaits her death at a secret location. Lopez's therapist has the only key to his thoughts. She begins a sequence of events, taking in his childhood and bizarre fantasies in some of the most distinctive film sequences and images of the year. It paid off handsomely last month by becoming America's number one film, and gave Lopez the best reviews of her career.

While others hesitated to take on such a project, Lopez grasped it with both hands. 'The right things were not coming my way, so I had a general meeting with Michael DeLuca, the head of production at the film company New Line Cinema,' she recalls. 'I saw that on a list of things they had in development was The Cell. I remembered the script from years before and said, "I'm surprised no one has made this." Michael said, "I like that script, too, so let's do it." He then said that we needed to get a director who could deal with such a story. I was sent a show-reel of Tarsem Singh, who had done videos and advertisements. I liked this guy, had a meeting and hired him from there.'

It is a clear example of how much Lopez has engineered control. Actresses, particularly those with such slender experience, do not get to choose a director; it's usually the other way around. And few would volunteer for an unknown first-time director on anything. But she flouts convention. At a point two years ago when she had been in a succession of bad or indifferent movies such as Jack, with Robin Williams, or Blood And Wine, with Jack Nicholson, she launched a pointed attack on fellow stars. Gwyneth Paltrow? 'Tell me what she's been in,' she said. 'I swear to God, I don't remember.' Winona Ryder? 'I was never a big fan of hers. In Hollywood, she's revered, but I have never heard anyone in public or among my friends say, "Oh, I love her."' Madonna? 'Do I think she's a great performer? Yes. Do I think she's a great actress? No.'

Such remarks frightened the life out of Hollywood's politically correct and terminally boring. A frantic scramble followed among the retinue of personal publicists and an apology was issued. But it did not stop her headlong dive into an instant marriage with Ojani Noa, a handsome waiter she met in a Cuban restaurant on Miami Beach. It was over within a year.

'That was definitely love at first sight - and a lesson to me, for life,' she now reflects. 'It came at a point when I was burned out. I had done four movies, back-to-back, and was exhausted. I had also been through a life change, getting recognised and losing my privacy. I should have waited, but I believed that it was going to be forever. I felt we would have kids and always be together.

'I realised, real quick, that it was not going to work. It was not one specific thing, but a combination. A lot of things were happening in my life and I could not take in marriage, too. I am not going to say bad things about him, though. We are still friends.'

No sooner than that was over she began a relationship with the rap maestro, 30-year-old Puff Daddy. He has had a series of run-ins with the police, including a 1995 arrest in Washington DC for threatening a university worker with a gun, a reported verbal assault on a disc jockey in 1999 in San Francisco and a $1,000 fine for criminal mischief after an argument with a photographer in New York.