Ready for ravishing

The last thing one might expect Emilia Fox to be is a bundle of nerves, but here she is having her photograph taken and she's aquiver with anxiety. 'You will tell me if I go red?' she asks. 'Is my lipstick smudged?'

Immaculately turned out and immensely sweet, Fox must be used to having her photograph taken by now, but it transpires she's not as confident as her profile would suggest. She's just bought a house in Acton, for example, and appears quite bewildered by the whole process. 'It's so expensive. I can't afford anything.'

Yet Fox is also about to open as the chaste Madame de Tourvel in Tim Fywell's new production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and the more one thinks about it, the more perfect the casting appears. 'Yes, I suppose I do have an affinity with Tourvel,' she says, now settled into her chair. 'She's such a strong person. One always hopes that one can be as strong.'

This is the first major production of Christopher Hampton's dazzling adaptation of Laclos's epistolary novel about a doomed, sexually amoral group of aristocrats since the original hit London and Broadway, and Fox is aware of the weight of expectation. 'I know people will inevitably compare us,' she says. 'I watched the film [starring John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer] again the other day, just to get the worry of it over with. Yes, Michelle Pfeiffer is a brilliant Tourvel, and if only one could just be Michelle Pfeiffer again, but you can't. I just hope people will allow us to tell the story too.'

Fox has been stuck with two image problems ever since she landed a role in the TV adaptation of Pride And Prejudice while still at Oxford University - that her father, the actor Edward Fox, helped pave her way, and that her background means she is capable of doing only posh. She is ruefully aware of both. 'Actually, my family has closed more doors than it's opened. People don't want to be accused of having employed you because of your father.'

And the posh bit? 'That's been the spur. It's a challenge to prove to people that I can do Scottish working class or evil witch as well as English rose. Over the summer, I did the TV film Gunpowder, Treason And Plot, and my character was quite horrible. I think it depends on what mood you are in when you audition.' It certainly worked with Pride And Prejudice: Fox says she only got it because she was blushing with nerves. Yet she never intended to be an actress. 'I saw what it had done to my parents - the highs and lows, all that pain and pleasure. I just wanted to potter along doing something nice.'

Instead, she found acting less stressful than studying. 'I was a hopeless waitress and acting was a better way of earning holiday money. It was a relief to realise that I might never have to depend on the academic side of my brain again.'

It's a typically self-deprecating statement from Fox, who is an engaging set of neuroses, and who confesses to accepting almost any role offered to her to avoid the terror of not working. She now loves her job because 'it's an extension of childhood', but also admits that she feels more confident expressing other people's emotions than she does her own. She has gained excellent notices for much of her TV work, and most recently appeared in Roman Polanksi's The Pianist, but says there is no secret. 'If I'd been brought up a butcher's daughter, I'd know how to prepare meat,' she says. 'I can't do that.

I can't cook or repair my car. I'm useless in a million ways. One thing I can do, however, is learn lines.'

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