Anna: It started with a kiss

She is bouncing on the bed like my seven-year-old. But in something that looks as if it oughtn't to be bounced in. Anticipating an accident, and not wanting to have to drool about it in approved Lad Mag fashion, I withdraw to an anteroom. Sure enough, a minute's bouncing later, she hollers over the phalanx of photoshooticians to the publicist from the Almeida, the hip theatre where she is about to make her British stage debut: 'My tit's just fallen out! Can you make sure they don't use the picture?'

When it comes to image management, this is as close as Anna Friel gets to control freakdom. Most of the time, she wouldn't know a brake pedal from halibut. After a couple of hours in her company, during which her Rochdale accent thickens and coagulates, I form the impression that she has fewer layers of skin than the rest of us. After paternalistically asking her what time she goes to bed, she starts to answer, then says, 'You ask really good questions.' That's not one of my best, I think, but don't say. I do say I don't think she's been asked many good questions in the eight years since she moved to Brookside Close, aged 16. No one has asked her if she resented growing up in public, or putting career before university. And then something odd happens: 'You know what I feel - I have this really horrible thing... I feel like I want to cry. I don't know why. It's like when you go to a psychologist or something.' This is traditionally the interviewer's holy grail, but I feel like a footballer holding up his hands after an opponent breaks an ankle in a divot, as if to protest, 'I didn't touch him, ref.'

Anna Friel has not waved a white flag at the cadre of personal publicity pamperers. Freud Communications are desperate to get their mitts all over her. For a fee, they'd erect a personal firewall around her. They'd brief her against the 'party girl' label she got tarred with after a couple of nights out with women famous for wearing clothes. They would tell her to keep her trap shut when she says that for her day off tomorrow she's 'going over to Trudie and Sting's'. They'd tell her not to be free with her mobile-phone number, nor to ask the likes of me to come back and carry on the interview in the Clerkenwell flat she shares with the actor David Thewlis. They'd sit in and call time out when she says, 'My favourite place is lying in bed with David and we'll be totally slovenly and not do a single thing apart from make love and watch fantastic films.' And the whole pas de deux would come grinding to a halt when, out of the blue, their client says, 'I've never been unfaithful - that's one thing I've prided myself on.' It occurs to me too late to ask if anyone has ever been unfaithful to her. But for the moment, 'No one is giving advice, saying, "Don't say this, you should say this, do that, do this." I trust myself more than other people,' she says. 'If I make a mistake, I'd rather on my own head be it. I'm not saying that I'll never have one. Some of the best publicists are saying, "You need a bit more protection. You don't need to be doing this on your own all the time."

My impression is that Friel still has no real understanding of the side-effects that came with the moment when, at 18, she kissed an actress called Nicola Stephenson in a soap set on a Liverpool estate. Six years on, she doesn't even watch Brookie. 'I don't know anyone any more. They're all just lesbians. I think I started a trend.' As far as she's concerned, she is just an actress. By an accident of casting and plotline, to everyone else and for the rest of her life she will always be an icon. It hasn't helped that her subsequent career has conspired to keep the teenage Beth Jordache unerased. After a couple of highbrow television roles, in The Tribe (dire) and Our Mutual Friend (brilliant, but on BBC2), she then went on to make a series of films that 'have not been massively successful'. A few more are lumbering onto the launchpad. So the only evidence we've got to go on that she can be as good as she'd like us (and indeed herself) to believe are the reviews from New York of Closer, the play by Patrick Marber in which Friel made her stage debut in 1999, as a stripper called Alice.

All this will be changing. Ten days later than planned, thanks to an ankle injury sustained in rehearsal, Friel will take her first bow before British theatre critics this month, in a role that requires her to be onstage almost constantly. About a year ago, still basking in her post-Broadway glow, she made a gabbling appearance on Clive Anderson's chat show. Jonathan Kent, who co-runs the Almeida, watched it and asked her to play a character not dissimilar to the one he saw on the television. 'Immediately I thought, "How am I meant to take that?" He said, "It's because I saw you as a character. You were incredibly true and frank. I saw a lot of elements that if pushed and exaggerated would become Lulu." He said, "Please, if you take that as an insult then you're not being you."

Lulu is the central character in a play of the same name by the German fin de si?cle writer Frank Wedekind. She is from the wrong side of the tracks, but her beauty has allowed her to marry into 19th-century Berlin society. She plays a serial adulteress, desired by and available to all. For the succession of men who pull apart the net curtains of her innocence, she is no more than a fantasy figure, not unlike Alice in Closer. Friel thinks that if Lulu were alive today, 'she'd be the editor of Vogue. And find it quite boring but do it really well.' I disagree. If Lulu were alive today, she would be a goddess of the Lad Mags, treading the same fine line that Friel does, somewhere between exploited and exploiter, victim and temptress.

Friel's middle name happens to be Lulu, and her parents call her by it. Even before she tells me this, I am alarmed at the astuteness of the casting. Both Lulus have had an idea of who they are imposed upon them. I ask Friel who she thinks this other Lulu is. 'It's really, really hard because we are discovering so much as we go along. I remember on the first day when we read through, I was like, "I can't be the object of every single man's fantasy from every single walk of life!" That's not putting myself down. That's true. I could list a page of adjectives that would describe her. It's so true what she does. She plays the role that's expected. The sadness is that all the way through she is saying, "What do you want? What do you want me to do? What can I give you?" She's got to pretend to be all those people. But she knows how to use her body. She knows her best strength is the way she can control and manipulate men. You can be as powerful and intelligent and as rich as you like, but still if I make your penis erect, you're in my control. That's being a bit direct but it's quite true.'

I ask her if she has found the truth of Lulu inside herself. 'Massively. No director has ever said to me, "I want you to come through." Jonathan will say, "Use your laugh. You've got the most fantastic laugh." I think it's horrible. It sounds like a big fishwife. That is how I will put myself down. You've got to realise the whole thing about being sexy. Patrick from Closer said, "You are a sexy girl. You've got to allow yourself to feel sexy." Because I'd gone through so many photoshoots, I was made to be what people thought of as being sexy, and I'd see it and go, "No, you're showing lots of skin and it's titillating, it's not sexy." David has helped a lot with that. Of course I can be sexy but posing to look like you're going to be mounted - it's not me. You feel suddenly like a thing.'

The men in Lulu's life are much older than her, though she ends up most unhappily of all with the son of her third husband. This is the reverse of Friel's romantic journey. Up until last year, the men in her life have been boys, growing up, like her, before the paparazzi's eyes - people like Darren Day and Robbie Williams. Thewlis is a dozen years older and, at least in his work, no populist. You wince when celebs speak of their happiness in print. It always looks like a hostage to fortune. 'It is. I get scared then. It's like you're setting yourself up for a major falldown. I am. Truthfully and completely I am incredibly settled and incredibly in love and incredibly happy. But whether you can say that's forever, nobody knows that. All I can say is that I know everything I've ever wanted or needed is in front of me and is here now. All the people I see who can't seem to sustain a long relationship are the ones from broken families. I won't do that to my children. Well, I'll try my best not to. They'll be the most important thing and I'll sacrifice everything. My mum and dad have been together for 26 years and are so in love. It makes such a difference. It's also not thinking the grass is greener. It's like I could have a relationship with the most fantastically sexy, wonderful person, and there'd be all that excitement - and I could go for that. But where would that get me? I'd absolutely despise myself.'

She has recently been advised not to wait too long for children. Filming in the Isle of Man in December, she was discovered to have endometriosis. 'The major worry was my fertility. The doctor said, "I wouldn't leave it longer than 30. You'll be fine but it'll be harder." Whether she'll deter any future children from the choice she made to join a soap and terminate her education remains to be seen. She regrets not going to university 'because I'm frustrated. It's not the articulacy. It's the knowledge, it's about being able to back up your opinions. I was an A student. That's what pisses me off. I was A in everything. Most of my reading now is crap scripts. I'm not feeding my brain enough. But it's so hard, because you're self-employed, to make yourself do those things. I've just got to not be as lazy: when you go home, sit down and get a book off the shelf rather than watch a movie.'