Laura rises higher on Moth wings

Laura Linney has reason to be grateful for the Best Actress Oscar nomination she picked up last year for You Can Count On Me. "There's definitely been a shift," she says. "The scripts are better and I'm a little more well known."

Crucially, that movie was a low-budget, independent film, so there was no pressure to choose a bigger name to draw in the crowds. "Normally, I'm cast opposite a big male star and my job is to support them and to make them look as good as possible," says Linney. "I wasn't in that position on You Can Count On Me."

Previously, she's played second fiddle to Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, as well as Clint Eastwood in Absolute Power, but the man who really likes having her in his films is Richard Gere. He plucked her from near-obscurity to play a lawyer in 1996's Primal Fear and now she's co-starring with him again in The Mothman Prophecies, a supernatural thriller about a journalist whose wife dies in a car crash that he believes has been caused by a mysterious entity known as The Mothman.

With Linney playing a cop who helps out, and falls for, Gere's journo, the film takes its cues from the eerie Sixties TV series The Twilight Zone, as opposed to the alien-obsessed X-Files. That suits Linney, who's no great fan of Mulder and Scully.

"I wish I did like The X-Files because everybody's talked about it for years," she grins. "I haven't had a television for a while anyway. I only got one after 11 September."

A pale, elegant woman, whose blonde hair has been dyed brown for her latest role in Alan Parker's The Life Of David Gale, in which she plays opposite Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet, Linney looks younger than her 38 years. She's a cautious personality and comes across as being far too sensible to believe in ghosts.

"I am interested in the supernatural," she offers unconvincingly. "I am open to it, but I sort of put it in its proper place."

She's frank about the fact that it was the prospect of working with Gere again, rather than the genre, that led her to choose Mothman.

"Yeah. I adore him so, I think he's a great guy," gushes Linney. "He's been a wonderful friend to me. He was so supportive on Primal Fear when I was terrified. I had done some films but I was still so green and if he hadn't approved me, I would never have been cast. So the man took a big risk because all he'd seen me in was a silly movie about monkeys."

That was Congo but Gere might also have caught her in 1993's Tales Of The City, the TV adaptation of Armistead Maupin's novel that was her first big role on screen. Before that, she was a Julliard-trained theatre actress who had played on Broadway in The Seagull and Hedda Gabler.