Milla's moment

Milla Jovovich is coiled like a kitten on a masculine lap, wearing a pair of bagel-sized hoop earrings and running a hand through her just-out-of-bed hair. Her peasant top gapes, exposing a slither of toned tummy. Behind her, the lap's swarthy owner is whispering sweet nothings in her ear. No wonder she's grinning like a cream-fed cat.

'She is so effervescent and fun that she almost bounces off the pages,' says a delighted Giorgio Armani. 'She really embodies the sense of fun that I want Emporio Armani to represent.'

Milla is fresh from three weeks in Armani's private villa on Pantelleria, where she has been shooting the campaign for the Emporio Armani spring/summer collection: a sequence of absurdly sexy shots which are set to bury the image of Armani - or Emporio at least - as a byword for controlled chic.

This year is set to be an exceptionally fruitful one for the model-turned-actress. There's the new multimillion-pound, five-year contract as a 'spokesmodel' for L'Oréal that she's just signed; she has five new films coming out and is about to start work on yet another. In her spare time (what there is of it) she runs her own production company, Creature Entertainment, and is working on a treatment for a comic book. Oh, and she's wondering whether to release an album of her own songs. All this and she's only 27.

It all sounds rather exhausting. But pity would be wasted on Milla: this state of unrelieved busyness is just how she feels most comfortable. 'It's hard for me to sit around and not do anything,' she says. From her earliest childhood she has been brought up to push herself as hard as she can; it's clearly not a habit that's easily broken.

Milla was born in Kiev in 1975, and her early memories are of standing in line for hours, queuing for food. Because her mother, Galina Loginova, was a successful stage and screen actress, she would often get a choicer piece of meat or a larger chunk of butter once she reached the counter - an early lesson in the perks on offer to a famous face. Still, life was tough in pre-glasnost Russia, even for semi-celebrities. So, when Milla's father, Borgi Jovovich, was allowed to travel to London to train as a doctor, his family jumped at the chance to 'visit' him.

They never went back. By the time Milla was five years old, they were living in LA, and a free and easy American childhood beckoned. But for the Jovoviches, such a concept was an unimaginable luxury. Instead, Galina cleaned houses and spent the proceeds on her daughter's education. 'Every last dollar was spent on lessons,' says Milla, who flung herself into acting classes and ballet and piano lessons as her way of helping her family. 'You had to do your share of the work.'

Given the weight of parental expectation, coupled with her natural advantages, it would have been almost impossible for Milla not to have succeeded. But the investment in her career paid off far earlier - and more richly - than even her ambitious parents could have expected. When she was 11, the photographer Richard Avedon chose her as one of Revlon's Most Unforgettable Women in the World and photographed her 'acting like a sexy 20-year-old woman'.

It sparked off a fierce debate, and accusations of child exploitation, but did nothing to harm Milla's career. Quite the contrary: her skinny frame and voluptuous features were soon gracing the pages of glossy magazines around the world, and at the tender age of 12, she was earning £2,000 a day.

Milla has never been one to allow adverse circumstances to affect her work. In similar fashion, the jailing of her father for eight years for his role in a medical-insurance scam when she was in her teens simply made her more determined to succeed. 'I had to work and take the place of my dad and protect my mum.'

Her acting career has not, admittedly, run quite as smoothly as her modelling. Her first major film, Return to the Blue Lagoon, was widely derided and a series of unmemorable roles followed. Then, in 1997, the French director Luc Besson cast her in his futuristic The Fifth Element as a wild-child-cum-warrior, a role that garnered her critical plaudits and won her his heart. He proposed, giving her the part of Joan of Arc in his film The Messenger as a love token. They divorced 16 months later, but remain close.

Right now, she's dating the Geordie filmmaker Paul Anderson, 37, who directed her in last year's zombie slasher Resident Evil and in the forthcoming sequel, Nemesis, and whom she describes as 'the most special person I have ever met'.

They fell in love while filming, and Anderson admits to being 'infatuated'. Milla is slightly more circumspect. 'No matter how great a relationship is, I'm beginning to think that I'll never get round to marrying the guy unless he gets me pregnant,' she's said. No doubt Giorgio will have a charming little wedding dress at the ready for his new muse.