Euro star: Carice van Houten

So it's rather odd that, as I wait in the lobby of the No 11 hotel in Chelsea, I'm wondering if I'll recognise her. As Black Book's Jewish undercover agent, she was plump-cheeked with tight blonde curls. In her follow-up Nazi epic, Valkyrie, where she took an almost diametrically opposite role as the haunted wife of Tom Cruise's SS officer, she was a hollow-eyed brunette. When she materialises, Carice is wearing granny glasses and brown tweed, her dark hair piled into a messy chignon. You shouldn't polish the floors so much!' she rebukes the receptionist, her brow crinkling with irritation. I got out of bed this morning and fell down flat.'

Carice's chameleon-like qualities are not the only natural advantages that make her such a wonderful actress. She is unguarded, outspoken and appears to have no protective carapace. You can see every emotion flitting across her face. This means she's a favourite choice for directors looking for heroines to traumatise.

This year, for instance, she's appearing in a Dutch film, A Woman Goes to the Doctor, as a breast-cancer sufferer who's cheated on by her previously devoted husband. In 2008 she was in Dorothy Mills, a horror film about a possessed babysitter. She's just wrapped on another Dutch film, The Happy Housewife, a tale of a woman who suffers from catastrophic post-natal depression as a result of her father's suicide. And the day after our interview, she's due to fly to South Africa to start filming Black Butterfly with Blade Runner's Rutger Hauer, a biopic of Nelson Mandela's favourite poet Ingrid Jonker, who killed herself following her father's rejection. Then she's in Black Death, which stars Sean Bean and is all about the plague; Carice is playing a Satanic necromancer. How does she cope with all this trauma? Well, I'm not a method actor,' she says. I usually find it quite easy to switch off. But doing the cancer film was intense. Dying on screen can be tricky and really ugly.'

Bang on cue, a bowl of porridge arrives. She shudders delicately. I said no to porridge,' she tells the waitress. She hasn't eaten porridge since she had to spend a day naked having a cold vat of it, mixed with pea soup and masquerad-ing as excrement, poured over her head in a humiliation scene in Black Book.

It was horrible. I was so dirty and it was so embarrassing and cold, standing there naked in front of all these people. So I said to Paul Verhoeven, "When we're done with this day, we're going to wrestle in this shit because I want you to be in it as well." And when we finished, I was crying as I walked off the set, and I heard Paul say, "Hey, where are you going?" He was standing in the middle of this soup with his arms open, going, "Come on then!" He was a hero to me,' she goes on with shining eyes. I would do anything for him.' The admiration is mutual: Verhoeven has described her as the best actress he's ever worked with.

Fortunately for Carice's mental health, it's not all doom and gloom; this year she can be seen as Jude Law's rejected wife in the sci-fi comedy Repo Men, and she's also starring in Julian Fellowes' From Time to Time, an adaptation of the well-loved children's book The Chimneys of Green Knowe. Carice plays Maria Oldknow, the ghostly great-great-great grandmother of Maggie Smith. That was fun. It was very British. It was the first time I've ever worn a corset.'

Carice, 33, was born in the small town of Leiderdorp into an intellectual, middle-class family. Her mother, Margje Stasse, is a broadcaster and her father, Theodore van Houten, who is half-Scottish, is a writer and journalist. They separ-ated when she was young, and her father seems to have used his silent cinema collection as an electronic babysitter for his five-year-old daughter. He would put me in front of five-hour films like Napoleon when I was little. I must have picked something up because I really love acting when I don't have to say anything.' When she wasn't watching epic films she was listening to her father's Beatles collection, which had a similarly positive effect, making her fluent in English from an early age.

Carice has performance in her genes: her uncle was an actor and is now a radio presenter; her grandparents met through am-dram; her younger sister Jelka is also an actress, albeit a less famous one; and her niece is a mime artist.

But Carice herself was a very shy, grey mouse' of a child. I remember my mother saying, "Come on, please sing!" when people came over and I would always be too embarrassed.' It all changed when she was 12 and was cast in a school play. I finally felt that I wasn't invisible. I could connect to people and they would respond to me,' she says. It sounds a little sad but that's how I felt.'