Hollywood's hottest mum returns

I'm sure I know what Madeleine Stowe's first words will be when she arrives at the LA coffee shop for our interview, uncharacteristically late.

She had called my mobile to apologise profusely though, in her very mannered, very Texan, very polite way. She appears to begin every interview, or perhaps it's just those involving food, by asking the journalist if he/she minds if she unbuttons her jeans. (Oh, to see some of the men's faces when this gorgeous woman not averse to showing all on screen asked such a thing.)

Famously, Madeleine Stowe used to buy her jeans three sizes too big so she could pig out without them getting tight. But today, she doesn't ask about the unbuttoning. Not even after she's eaten her Californian avocado sandwich. But then she doesn't look like she needs to. Disappointingly, I discover that Stowe - the most un-Hollywood of Hollywood actresses - appears to be on a health kick.

'I just came back from running four-and-a-half miles in the hills,' she says. 'I have to now. Although exercise is sort of sporadic with me because I'm lazy.' She means she has to now because she's at an age where she needs to work a little harder to look good - where she's competing with other actresses the wrong side of 40 who do three billion sit-ups a day.

In any case, whatever Stowe is doing is working. Having taken a couple of years' break to raise her daughter May, now five, Stowe is on to a winning cinematic streak once more. But she refuses to pander to celebrity. And yet, she realises that Noughties Hollywood is very different from the one she encountered when she began working in her late twenties.

These days, she knows, it is the media-friendly celebs who wheedle pay cheques with multitudinous zeros from Hollywood suits. So Stowe is trying to work the system, relieved on this occasion that We Were Soldiers is based on a book - We Were Soldiers Once... And Young - written by Joe Galloway and Colonel Hal Moore, a Vietnam war hero who lost a huge number of his platoon during a little-known battle waged during that conflict.

Moore is played with steely resolve by Mel Gibson whom Stowe says she didn't know previously. 'I'd never met him before. I don't know anyone.'

The film is a production of Gibson's company Icon, which leads one to deduce he had casting approval and personally selected Stowe to play his wife, Julie. Though her role is not a big one, Stowe cares about the film, describing it as a 'wonderful, cautionary, anti-war tale'. It's a heart-breaking one, though, particularly in scenes where she intercepts telegrams announcing the deaths of her friends' husbands. 'They sent them in taxis! It was a horror show.'

But initially, Stowe retained some detachment from the film. She found the battle sequences 'interesting pieces of film-making', the film's dying soldiers uttering 'Tell my wife I love her' 'like a Hollywood moment'. She thinks differently now. 'Julie Moore [Hal Moore's wife] told me it's truly the most common thing American soldiers say. And then when you sit next to Hal Moore, the man the film is all about, and have him say he can't watch it...' Her voice tails off and her eyes brim with tears. 'I'm sorry. I'm not normally like this. I think my husband has only ever seen me cry about three times. But it's been a pretty intense week.'

Stowe and her husband of 20 years, Dream On's hilariously wry actor Brian Benben, had just returned from a screening of We Were Soldiers on a US military base. 'They were great people. And you know, they don't want to fight. People think they do because of the rhetoric from Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush. A general said to me, "I worry about the words they've chosen." It was all very illuminating.'