Martine on Liza and Eliza

Martine McCutcheon is wearing an empire line coat. It is red with a fake fur collar and envelopes her tiny frame so copiously that she looks as if she is hiding behind it. She has big, brown bushbaby eyes and she looks up at me, out of the top of the coat, alternating between confidence and discomfort.

But what does she have to hide? Well, in the past year there have been tales of her skipping performances of My Fair Lady because she wasn't being paid enough at the National Theatre; of going on vodka-drinking binges instead of resting her voice; of being out shopping when she should have been in rehearsal; of being inconsolable after her latest boyfriend, actor Steve John Shepherd, was found to be two-timing her.

"If you believed everything in the press, you'd have thought I was a complete basket case," she says in her trademark Cockney - everyfink, 'ave fort, I woz etc. "It was all rubbish. As if I'd miss rehearsals and performances. It was the chance of a lifetime."

McCutcheon is a confusing combination of being incredibly driven and hard-working on one hand, and yet fantastically insecure on the other. A photographer on a recent shoot called her "sexy, tough and vulnerable". She says she loved that description.

She is overtly sensitive to criticism and, on top of that, believes that just about anything anyone says is a criticism. For example, if someone said to her "I liked your Eliza Doolittle", she'd think they were implying that they liked it but not that much.

Then again, she's tough enough and well-trained enough to try not to let this show.

There's a lot of mateyness going on with her - lots of arm touching and winks and "cor blimey, we're just two girls together havin' a chat, ain't we?î - and I don't know if it's genuine. Maybe it's the real her, a down-to-earth girl from the East End. Maybe it's her showing that, despite her fame and fortune, she still hasn't changed. If she was clever - and you have to have a cleverness of a kind to get to where she is today - she'd keep those Cockney roots, even if they've faded horribly. That's why people loved her in the first place, when she was Tiffany the barmaid in EastEnders.

The past 12 months have been particularly rough. "A year ago I seriously thought of giving up the business," she says. "Everything had gone wrong and the press hated me and I hated myself. I'd forgotten not to believe my own publicity." After an acclaimed first-night performance as Eliza Doolittle, she caught a virus, lost her voice and missed countless performances. She only did a fraction of her contracted performances and bowed out five months early. She says she became extremely depressed.

"It was what I had worked for," she says. "I knew I was good at the part. It was like a dream and the outcome was so cruel." After she recovered from ill health, she felt a changed and more damaged person. "I wanted to forget how awful everything was. I'd hardly been out. I'd become obsessed with my voice - if I heard someone coughing in the rehearsal room I'd get paranoid and think, 'Oh please, not a cold.' The only thing anyone ever asked me was how my voice was. I spent a fortune on it. In the end, I became so paranoid I believed I never wanted to sing again. My voice had become my life and it was ruining me."

So she went out for the first time in ages and got drunk - "Once," she says, "not loads" - - and was photographed and "everything got a lot worse". She ran away to Spain with a friend and if it hadn't been for Liza Minnelli (more of her later) Ms McCutcheon would have jacked the whole lot in.

She's much more starry than she'll admit, though, which is why I think that, despite the threats, she would never have given up performing. She was a show-off at a young age, desperate to become an actress. She used to wear a tiny bikini and put on her mother's flesh-coloured tights and practise singing like a Miss World contestant wandering around the sitting room. Hey! Big Spender was her favourite. And when she got into the Italia Conti drama school in central London, she pushed herself so hard she nearly became ill. She has always been a tough little player, balancing her acting with her singing career (she had a No 1 single in 1998), yet she swears she was '"this" far away (she puts her fingers close together), from never returning from Spain. "I didn't know what I was going to do," she says, "but showbusiness wasn't making me happy and I wondered why on earth I was doing it. I'd signed a contract to do eight shows a week. Since then, people have told me I was mad to sign it, but I did and I failed."

Attention is the one thing McCutcheon craves and loathes at the same time. It all stems from her childhood. She was brought up in Hackney by her mother, Jenny. Her father, Thomas Hemmings, was an emotionally erratic drunk and, like many alcoholics, overattached to the one person he believed could be his salvation, Martine's mother.

"Oh, she'd tell him to leave but he'd be backwards and forwards. He was very hard to get rid of. When I was very young, he dangled me over the balcony and threatened to drop me. My mother had a hell of a time with him. I'd hear him hit her and stuff and then he'd come back repentant. She couldn't get rid of him, even though we moved endlessly. He always found us."

She is 26 and single and there's nothing wrong with that, but she thinks it's wrong. "Friends of mine are having kids,î she says. "I'd like to have children sooner rather than later.î But she finds it hard to form attachments.

Nearly all her boyfriends seem to have been unfaithful to her: former star of This Life, Steve John Shepherd, millionaire James Mason and longterm love, a businessman, Jonathan Barnham. She seems so independent but perhaps, once they're embroiled, she gets clingy and needy. She denies this but there's something she says about her relationship with her father which, I think, underlines everything.

"My dad used to take me out sometimes. He'd never do much with me or look at me. Often he'd leave me on my own and I'd wander home and all the time I'd think, 'Why doesn't he love me? Why doesn't he notice me? Why does he love my mum and not me?' He was obsessed with her.î

So why do her boyfriends leave her amid tales in the press of romps and misbehaviour? "They don't," she says. "My first boyfriend, Gareth Cooke, and I were engaged and eventually it petered out and we called it off. You know how it is with first love. You think it's the biz and then things change." What changed? "I got successful," she says honestly.

Then there were the others, the most important being Barnham, by whom she was pregnant but had a miscarriage at eight weeks. "It was terrible and Jonathan was very supportive," she says. Then it all started going wrong when he was arrested for cannabis smuggling. And then there were rumours of watching three-in-a-bed sessions and one-night stands. "We'd split up by then," McCutcheon says, "and, anyway, he denied it and I think I know what's true and what isn't. The funniest thing is that if anyone was going to stray from that relationship it would have been me - I was by far the more flirtatious. I didn't care what the press said about him when I put up his bail. He was my friend. Only me and him know what went on between us."

It's rather odd, though, that she can stay staunchly by boyfriends when the press accuses them of misdemeanours but gets so upset when they round on her. Why is that? "I don't know," she says miserably. "Maybe it's a lesson I needed to learn. I'm never going to make those mistakes again."

But, of course, she now has her fairy godmother, in the form of Liza Minnelli. It seems an odd coupling: the Hollywood star who suddenly meets the girl from the East End, and the next thing you know McCutcheon's a bridesmaid at the weirdest wedding of the year.

"It was a bit quick," says McCutcheon, "but if it hadn't been for Liza I would still be really depressed. I met her at a time when I was feeling disillusioned and she really helped me." They met at a club. Minnelli and her future husband, David Gest, were in the celebrity area and Minnelli asked to see McCutcheon. When she joined them they gossiped all night.

"She told me she'd heard I made a great Eliza. We talked about the business," says McCutcheon, "and all the things Liza has been through - her mother and the drugs and the rehabilitation and stuff, and she told me that if she could survive and bounce back and still get up on stage and perform then I could, too. She said, 'It's not serious, this business, you know. It's entertainment. You're there to make people smile and bring memories to people. Stop taking it all to heart and enjoy yourself.' She made me believe in myself again."

It all seems to have worked. There's a CD, Musicality, about to be released on which she sings her favourite show tunes accompanied by friends such as

... Liza Minnelli. Then there's the film she's doing with Hugh Grant called Love Actually. The press have linked them romantically but McCutcheon says: "God, I wish I had the time to go out with Hugh Grant. We're both so busy we don't even get to have lunch together."

She says she is happy to be single. "I have learned a lot over the past year. I'm now much more aware of who I am but there's still me, Martine, and Martine McCutcheon the actress, but that's okay because it keeps me sane."

What are the perks of being the Martine McCutcheon? The money? The recognition? The designer clothes? "Nah," she says, "it's when people come up to me and say, 'I loved that song you did. It reminds me of when I met my boyfriend'. You know, being part of people's everyday lives and their memories." And the downs?

"There ain't no downs." She winks and squeezes my arm and sinks that little bit further into the coat.