Samantha's journey to stardom

Her parents, Pamela and Peter Jackson, split up when she was just three, when her father began an affair with the babysitter.

Samantha, her brother and sister went to live with their father and stepmother on a grim Nottingham council estate. Her father regularly beat her and her stepmother, and Samantha rarely saw her mother, who remarried a violent alcoholic and lived in a cramped bedsit.

At the age of 11, Samantha was taken into care, and spent her formative years being shuttled from one foster home to another like, she says, 'an unwanted parcel'.

'Some of the children went out nicking cars and turned into prostitutes. I was so angry that one night when there was a riot at the home, I set fire to the bins and turned the taps on,' she says.

'I stole from shops and skipped most of the third, fourth and fifth forms at school. I began to take LSD and ecstasy regularly when I was 13.'

At 16, Samantha was penniless and leading a dissolute, rootless life in a grotty bedsit with a boy she had met in a care home.

She was also pregnant. Her decision to have a termination caused her so much anguish she was almost driven to suicide. But, after joining an afterschool drama group at the age of 13, she had dreams of stardom away from the squalor.

After the abortion, she left her lover and the bedsit and moved to London to join the Royal Court Young People's Theatre. She auditioned for TV roles and won parts in Cracker, Soldier, Soldier and Peak Practice before she got her big break playing Tracy the teenage prostitute in the hit 1995 ITV drama, Band Of Gold.

Her 'eccentric' behaviour was remarked on by the rest of the cast.

'On the set, Sam made an impact on two levels,' says one. 'First, that she was an amazing natural actress. Second, that she was a nightmare.

'You never knew what was coming next. She'd start off as nice as pie, but then if something extra was demanded of her in a scene, she could just flip in a second.

'One night, there was an awful lot of banging and crashing in Sam's hotel room and lots of screaming. The weird thing was that she was on her own.

'It was obvious she was a girl with a lot of baggage - there was this incredibly dark side to her.'

But it was this torment that gave a rawness to her performance and so

impressed fellow actors and directors. A stream of TV parts followed, including starring roles in Tom Jones and Jane Eyre.

Her biggest break came when Woody Allen sought her out to play opposite Sean Penn in Sweet And Lowdown, for which she won an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.

She wasinvited to an awards ceremony at Buckingham Palace, where she met the Queen in flipflops, having left the shoes she had taken for the event on the train. Today, she is on the verge of worldwide fame, with Hollywood big shots fawning at her feet.

She is wealthy and lives with her three-year-old daughter, Esme, in a fine four- storey Georgian terrace house in Islington, North London, immaculately furnished in a traditional style with 'a modern edge'. Her collection of art is growing ever larger.

But there can be no doubt that Samantha's troubled upbringing has left an indelible mark on her. Indeed, her ability to immerse herself so completely in a role, say friends, stems from the fact that she prefers being in character to being herself.

When she is being herself, her personality is 'completely unpredictable'. As one puts it: 'You never know where you are with Sam.'

This volatile nature has not been conducive to long-term relationships. She lived with the actor Hans Matheson for a couple of years in a cottage in Kent, before meeting another actor, Charlie Creed-Miles, at a party.

In 1999, she fell pregnant with his child, but the couple split up 15 weeks into the pregnancy. They have remained on friendly terms for the sake of their daughter, who accompanied her mother to the Oscars at the age of three months.

Samantha, say friends, finds it difficult to sustain relationships; and men, frankly, find her hard to handle. 'She is very controlling and also quite happy to be by herself,' says one.

'Then there is this incredibly laddish side to her. She'll go out and get drunk and behave like some lout out on the town in Blackpool. Her favourite meal is chips smothered in brown sauce with mushy peas. She makes no attempt to be ladylike.'

One Hollywood insider recalls seeing Samantha - who wore a trouser suit and Sex Pistols T- shirt to the 2000 Oscars ceremony - at one of the genteel tea parties in the run-up to the big night.

'Everyone is on their best behaviour on these occasions, but Sam was holed up with a girlfriend, drinking, smoking and chewing gum as if she was at a school disco.'

Samantha's habit of disregarding social conventions can be extreme. At a party at the Dorchester after the premiere of Minority Report, she took off her dress and ran around naked, pretending to kiss her female friends.

'She'll just sit with her belly hanging out, not giving a damn. Not many men would find that sort of behaviour easy to deal with.'

For the past few months, Samantha is believed to have been having a turbulent on-off relationship with Barry Reigate, an artist and former boyfriend of the model Rosemary Ferguson. Perhaps, being an artist, he takes a bohemian attitude to her propensity to nudity.

Samantha is also outspoken at times when others would stay silent. 'She'll go to a party and tell someone: "That dress you're wearing is s***," which doesn't always win her friends,' says a source.

As for relations with her family, there has been an official 'reunion' with her parents.

At the premiere of Minority Report, Samantha put her father up at the Dorchester for the night. While not forgiving him for the horrendous childhood he put her through, she had decided that as her father and Esme's grandfather, he ought to have some sort of relationship with them.

She is also in touch with her mother, who lives in Holland with her third husband, Tony, a painter and decorator, and works in a bar. They speak occasionally, but are not close.

Samantha's relationship with her daughter is, say friends, 'all or nothing'. 'She'll go off filming and won't see her for a month, but then she'll come back laden with presents and will be all over her.

She is desperate for her daughter not to go through what she did and wants her to have a lovely home and a private education - everything she missed out on.'

Likewise, Samantha devours classic novels and poetry to make up for her lost education.

By turns, she is generous to a fault or aggressive and rude to her close friends.

'She can be amazingly attentive and thoughtful and buys people incredible presents. But then it could all suddenly change. You just don't know where you are with her.'

Perhaps one of the reasons she doesn't care how she behaves is because she is so sure of her talent. Until she got fed up with it, the screen on her mobile phone was lit up with the words 'I am a star'.

'Sam knows she is a cut above the rest,' says a friend. Her confidence in her ability means she is not in awe of anyone. 'On the set of Minority Report, she treated Tom Cruise just like she treated everyone else, which surprised people,' says a source.

But Samantha is a mass of contradictions and even now, coming to the apex of her career, she still feels like an outsider.

'She can't quite believe where she's got to and feels she does not fit in with this glitzy world she's become part of.'

Not just part of, but very much at the centre of, though she plays by her own rules. She has a reputation for not being shy when negotiating her fee.

'Sam was deprived of a lot as a child, so her attitude is to go for it. She is not afraid to ask for lots of money.'

And to her credit she refuses to lose weight, as she has been urged to do, to win parts. She was offered a role by director Terry Gilliam, only to have it vetoed by an executive because her arms were deemed to be 'too big'.

Her refusal to kowtow to Hollywood also lost her another coveted part. She was desperate for the lead in Girl In A Pearl Earring, which went to Scarlett Johansson.

To get into the role, she would wander around the house in a headscarf like the one worn by the girl in the painting after which the film is named.

She bought books on the painter Vermeer and read them from cover to cover.

When she lost the part, she

went completely berserk. She thought Scarlett got it because she was thinner and more Hollywood,' says one friend.

But this was a mere blip in Samantha's career. Later this month she begins filming The Libertine alongside Johnny Depp.

'Johnny is really taken with Sam, because she's so off the wall, and is looking forward to working with her,' says an industry source.

Which will not please Kate Moss, who used to go out with Depp and who has recently become one of Samantha's friends. Such is the cosiness of the friendship that Samantha is on the verge of being invited into Kate's inner circle.

'Kate will not like the idea of Sam working with Johnny and doing sex scenes with him. She will thoroughly hate it,' says a friend.

So will Samantha Morton care? Not a chance.