Martine: My career's not over

Martine McCutcheon, it must be said, is not best pleased with all the rumours that she has been forced to return to London with her tail between her legs, having trod on too many important toes in Hollywood.

Lurid tales of too much booze and ar rogant behaviour were, it's rumoured, responsible for scuppering her fledgling film career just at the moment she hoped to find herself in the same bracket as fellow Brits Catherine Zeta-Jones and Keira Knightley, following her sparkling performance in Love Actually.

It was at Elton John's lavish post-Oscars party that the boisterous Cockney - so it was reported earlier this week - upset one too many powerful executives and found herself isolated almost overnight. She smiles serenely at all the gossip but you suspect she's seething within.

"I'm used to people saying personal things about me - I'm either too fat or too thin - but when it comes to my livelihood it's damaging.

"I've worked hard since I was six weeks old [she appeared in a party political broadcast]. I was treading boards in the West End when I was 13. I trained with a drama teacher from Rada for six years who taught me everything, I got all my GCSEs. But all this stuff is pretty hurtful - and wrong.''

I have to say I'm inclined to agree. When I first met Martine it was back at that February party, held in a enormous lime marquee off Sunset Boulevard. Inside, at the core of what can only be described as a rugby scrum, but with more jewellery, was the Cockney sparrow herself, resplendent in a purple floor-length gown, holding court and having the time of her life.

Everyone seemed to know who she was, from the paparazzi penned outside to the Hollywood stars inside. " Christian Slater," she said, "has just told me he loved me in Love Actually."

Sixteen-year-old Joss Stone, who was performing that night, came up all star struck and asked her advice about coping with all the attention.

"Just enjoy it," Martine told her.

The former EastEnders star, who went on to win an Olivier award for her performance as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, was just being herself.

"Sample size," she hissed when I complimented her on her frock.

She was complaining about the fact she hadn't been able to get her hair done for the party - "It's a f***ing nightmare!"

She looked as if she was having a wonderful-time but I didn't quite reconcile that Martine with the one in this week's reports. They said in no uncertain terms that she had gone to LA to launch her Hollywood career, had had no positive meetings or auditions, had been loud and obnoxious at the party, and had been unceremoniously dropped by her Hollywood agent.

Well. I was at the party with Martine and, yes, she had had a couple of glasses of champagne, and was a little tipsy. Yes, she was more loquacious than the majority of the guests, who for the most part would say, "Hi, how are you?" and move on, eyes glazed.

But she wasn't loud, or annoying, and she certainly wasn't berating her fellow guests ("I'd had such an overexciting day," she says, "I kept telling myself to keep calm").

"Come on, Martine," I say now. "Did someone step on your dress, and did you shout Oi! get off, to high-powered TV executives?" She merely rolls her eyes.

"Look," she says. "I have been in LA for precisely three weeks in my entire life. The first time I went, on my birthday last year, I went on my own, booked my own flights and accommodation, and I was really, really nervous about it - I cried my eyes out when I left London. "My then agency in London, ICM, recommended that I should have a meeting with the William Morris agency. So I had two meetings, one with the agency, one with a producer.

"The reason I went back for two weeks in February was to see if I got on with the agent, if the chemistry was right."

She does concede that she wasn't cast in the next big movie and that "things weren't happening as quickly as I thought they would", something she puts down to bad timing.

"I phoned the agency a few times, and they said it was just crazy because of the Oscars. But by the second week, scripts were starting to be sent to me, and I went on a couple of castings.

"Look, I was a beginner, I was pleased to even have an agent."

BUT when she realised that the only time she would actually get to see her agent would be fleetingly, on Oscar night at the Vanity Fair party, she left him a message the next day to say things weren't working out.

"Nobody got rid of anybody, but I need someone who is hungry and has faith in me.

"I'd met some lovely people, I'd gone to the Oscars, which was a dream come true, and I mean I've always been into my grooming but everyone looked so glamorous!

"I was really happy but then I found out when I got back that apparently I'm over before I've begun and, to be honest, I'm baffled. I missed home, and then I read the papers and I thought, 'Why?' "

Another paper even reported that she had dined at the Ivy with close friend Dale

Winton to bemoan her time in Tinseltown among so many "a***holes".

That last bit makes Martine snort on her Diet Coke. "Dale has been texting me ever since, saying, 'I haven't even seen you since you got back'.

"I went to the Ivy the other night, but I w a s with my friend Lindsay, and all we talked about was her love life!"

And no doubt Martine's, too, which, with her 23-year-old property developer boyfriend James Tanner, is a little more stable than it has been.

She says that far from feeling defeated, she is returning to Hollywood in June, this time with her new manager, Charles Finch, at her side, to do the whole thing properly.

"Some people go out there for years before they get their first break," she says. "At least I learnt a lot about the town. It made me stronger."

Is she being disingenuous, I wonder. She admits that although she is in talks with two big record companies in London, she no longer has an agent here - "I don't really need one" .

So I try to lure her into admitting that maybe she just didn't fit in in Hollywood; that perhaps if she had Keira Knightley's cutglass accent and waist measurement she would have had more luck?

"Nah," she says. "I can do standard English. Americans liked the fact I can laugh at myself, that I'm quirky. People over here keep comparing me to Catherine Zeta-Jones but I love Renée Zellweger; she gives me goosebumps.

"People in LA were able to get that I might not look like a model but I can be funny.

"By the way," she murmurs, "Keira is so sweet. After we made Love Actually, she said in an interview that the best thing about filming was meeting me! I was like, 'Are you mad?' "

So, does she regret becoming famous? I mention the criticism she faced when she became ill soon after winning the part of Eliza Doolittle in the National Theatre's 2001 production. Her understudy seemed to make more appearances than she did.

"Nah. People suggested that I was lazy and didn't want to do the job. For me, being on stage, hearing that applause, that was the best moment of my life," she says.

To set the record straight, she had a streptococcal infection, then the steroids she was taking reacted with the antibiotics, then she had thrombosis.

Then she took to watching daytime TV, which was bad enough, but she certainly wasn't, contrary to many reports, remotely suicidal.

She was supposed to do an 18-month run and finished four months early.

Then there were the reports that when she went to Ethiopia with Water Aid, she insisted on being booked into a five-star hotel to keep away from the poor people.

IN FACT, according to the charity, she was brilliant with the kids, shocked at the poverty, and paid for the upgrade herself. And don't even get her started on all the hoohah that surrounded her departure from EastEnders.

"And now there is all this stuff about me wanting to be the new J-Lo," she says wearily. "Well, even if I did want to be Jennifer Lopez deep down, I certainly wouldn't go around telling everyone!"

As I leave, I tell Martine I live off Queensbridge Road in Hackney, in the same spot she grew up in.

At the age of three, Martine had been dangled over a balcony by her father; her mother won sole custody when she was nine, and remarried a year later, to John McCutcheon, a window cleaner.

"When I was little, Hackney was all boarded-up houses and guns," she says.

I tell her it is a bit different now - we even have a gastro pub on Broadway Market - but that her old school friend still lives there. She happens to be the daughter of my cleaner, and hearing I was going to be interviewing Martine, she wanted me to send her love.

"Janine!" Martine shrieks, remembering her immediately. "How is she?"

I tell her Janine is fine, really happy, and now works as a travel agent.

"A travel agent? Blimey. She's done so well, I'm so happy for her."

So, would Martine McCutcheon, another Hackney girl who has also done pretty well for herself, rather have an Oscar or be married to James with kids?

"Well, marriage I can take or leave, and we still don't live together," she says cautiously. "I think I can have both. I definitely want to be a mum one day.

"I just want to be happy."