A tough act

Helen McCrory seems to have devoted her career to playing complex, sexy women whom you wouldn't want to mess with. On TV last year, when she appeared as Charles II's mistress in Charles II: The Power And The Passion, starring Rufus Sewell, one reviewer described her character as a 'manipulative minx'.

Another - referring to the moment when she clamped her teeth round a dead bishop's bits - declared she was utterly 'electrifying'. In 2002, in the TV series Dead Gorgeous, she played the role of Antonia, who agreed to murder her best friend's unsatisfactory husband, and lugged her own murdered spouse upstairs while proclaiming 'I've never had to work so hard to get a man into bed'.

In that same year, she won an Evening Standard Award for her portrayal of Elena, the whitelace-clad femme fatale in Sam Mendes's theatre production of Uncle Vanya.

Despite frequent accolades for her seductive appeal as an actor, McCrory has declared: 'I think I'm very lucky not to be beautiful.' When she played Anna Karenina on TV in 2000, she wrote that 'Many people have compared me unfavourably with Greta Garbo, who played the part in 1935', and when she was about to appear in the Mendes double bill of Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night she joked 'Emily Watson is playing plain.

Now, if she is playing plain, I can play beautiful.' When I meet her in Spitalfields, just round the corner from where she lives, what grabs you first about her face is the mischief and humour displayed across it, an attitude underscored by a voice rich with cigarette-honed irony.

We are here to talk about her return to the Donmar Warehouse to play Anna in Pinter's Old Times, his extraordinary drama about a psychological love-triangle, in which a woman's husband and her old flatmate battle for her soul late at night in a remote country house. 'I didn't know much about Pinter,' she pronounces matter-of-factly.

'I haven't seen many of his productions before. I only had this vague idea of black polo necks and Gitanes --incredibly intellectual. But actually, when I read the play my reaction to it was "God, this man must be good in bed." Because it's very sensual, and very instinctive - you feel that all of his characters are in this magnetic field, and that when one of them simply breathes the other one feels it on their skin.'

Even when McCrory quotes some of her lines half jokingly to show their underlying sexual intent, it is obvious that she is completely beguiled by the role. And indeed, returning to the Donmar Warehouse should bring back happy memories - since it was here that she last worked with Sam Mendes on his farewell double-bill.

'It was fantastic,' she declares, 'he'd done ten years at the Donmar which had been a huge success, he'd won the Oscar for American Beauty, and he'd met Kate [Winslet], so he was very personally happy. He was operating from such a point of relaxation that three days before Uncle Vanya opened, he changed the whole set - which was fine because of the extent to which he'd rehearsed the cast.'

It is obvious McCrory has a mind which is constantly and hungrily observing others. In 1993 she had only just left the Drama Centre, when Richard Eyre cast her as the lead in Trelawney Of The Wells at the National Theatre.