Christina is one smart kooky

You can't believe Christina Ricci. She's been interviewed a thousand times and she's still only 20. What new - you feel - can she possibly have to say?

What you forget, from the standpoint of a thirtysomething, is that things change very fast when you're 18,19, 20. Ricci has a role in The Man Who Cried, Sally Potter's new film, which rubber-stamps her passage into grown-up dramatic roles and introduces her first sex scene. She's just made Prozac Nation, her first film doubling as star and producer. She's switched image from cigarette-stubbing Goth to clever cookie. It's as if when she recently cut her hair into a Louise Brooks bob she did a Samson, and cut all the angst away.

Not bad (and you hate to harp on about this, but really...) for, what was it? 20?

The Man Who Cried casts her as Suzie - born Jewish but stripped of her family in Russia during the pogroms and washed up in the Paris of the late Thirties. The eclectic circle of showpeople among whom she finds herself - emigr?s, gypsies - are just those who will soon be hardest hit by another racial atrocity.

'My family has never been persecuted, so I had nothing to draw on personally. But I heard from so many different people, "Oh, my grandparents, this is their story." It's how a lot of my friends' families came to be in the States.' She is taking it earnestly.

'This is such a rare opportunity for an American actress of my age - so different from the normal angsty twentysomething roles. I loved this character because she's such a watcher, bearing witness to everything that is going on. I like being still and silent, just saying things with your actions and face. Every set I work on, after a week there's a joke about me trying to get as many lines as possible taken away.'

Coming as it does right after Sleepy Hollow, this is Ricci's second role running with Johnny Depp. He plays the gypsy with whom Suzie falls in love. They first met back when she did Mermaids, and he was in his Winona days. 'We work together so well, and get along so well it's... comfortable. But I don't know if we could do it again. It might get a little crazy.

'He's so protective of me, like an older brother, that it's a bit weird to be faking having sex with him. But we know each other well enough to laugh about it. He always joked about us rooting around like pigs.' Of course, there were rumours they were a pair. 'I really liked it!' says Ricci surprisingly. 'It was awesome ... my first tabloid story. If you're going to have a tabloid story written about you, it might as well be with Johnny Depp.' She seems surprisingly tolerant of the sleazier side to her industry. And it doesn't come over as bravado, necessarily.

She has no regrets about going into acting early. 'I think it's really individual on the kid. I was the kind of kid that needed to work. I needed that outlet and I needed the attention, and the structure of it. I always found it so satisfying. The things that I was exposed to and the people I met - everything that I gained is so much better than everything that I missed.'

She's always given short shrift to journalists who suggested her life was abnormal, said that even her brush with anorexia, the time she used to burn herself with cigarettes, were just ordinary teenage stuff, not a Star Is Torn story. 'People are bored if that's what they're talking about. Yes, body image is really a big problem, especially in American society.' She often sounds a tad earnest - pompous, even - as you do at 20.

'I definitely feel accepted in this industry and I feel like it's all worked out for me.' It's a point of pride that 'none of my success is because of the way I look'. Though she does give a little laugh, as if to say it's just as well... A rare touch of uncertainty. 'I work hard and I choose interesting things. I'm not so bad at this, so work it out.' And who wants to be cast as arm candy? 'I'm pretty much outside all that. I'm an unruly ornament. I don't fit into that mood very well.'

But in a sense her career has been built on not being conventionally pretty. The Addams Family team - and John Waters and Ang Lee in Pecker and The Ice Storm respectively - didn't want a budding Baywatch baby. That (besides her prodigious talent) is why for 11 years now her career has run uninterrupted by the 'awkward phase' that hits the cuties. Now - finally in proportion, she says, with the 'gravedigger's forehead' no longer dominating her pearly smooth face - she has her own style of beauty.