Kelly's star

Wow, the girl's in love. Kelly Brook, three months into her relationship with the heart-throb rugby player Danny Cipriani, is positively glowing with happiness. Her new soft-eyed, soft-voiced protectiveness is a million miles from her calm, self-controlled manner the last two times we met, when she was dating the Hollywood actors Jason Statham and Billy Zane respectively. The first interview, seven years ago, was when she was deep in the relation-ship with Jason, and though she maintained he was amazing, she seemed tense and her skin was terrible. We met again four years ago, just as she was breaking up with Statham and getting together with Titanic actor Billy (she cancelled our first appointment after being caught by the paparazzi eating ice cream with him in St Tropez). Then, as always, she was charming, but still a little self-contained and closed-off.

They see each other every night. Her on-off engagement to Billy Zane - it lasted years - is a distant memory. But then he did seem an unlikely choice for the scaffolder's daughter from Kent who burst into the public eye at 19 presenting The Big Breakfast with Johnny Vaughan. Esoteric and intellectual, Billy came from Chicago and was into psychology. 'Love under will,' he remarked gnomically, when I interviewed him two years ago. 'It's a potent force, whether you know the power that you yield or not...' Danny, by contrast, has a similar background to Kelly's. His single mother put him through prep school by driving a black cab.

'Sundays we just basically lie on the couch all day and veg out, because we're so tired,' Kelly says now. We are sitting in the sumptuous Gore Hotel bar near Hyde Park; she has just finished an eight-week run in Neil LaBute's Fat Pig at the Comedy Theatre. 'It's so crazy. People assume we live this celebrity lifestyle when the reality is that, since the day I met him, all I've done is work every night in the West End in a play and all he's done is train every day. We've been out, like, three times: my birthday, his birthday and the opening night of my play. So people trying to paint him as this... you know, it's so unfair. He doesn't drink. And I don't really either.'

Kelly lowers her eyes, swiftly taking in the piece. Sweetly, she doesn't take offence. 'Oh,' she cries in her new soft, protective voice. 'This is the opening night of my play.' I hover. 'Very superficial apparently,' she reports. 'Well, of course it is. We're in a little bar trying to have a drink and then they ask to take a picture and neither of us wants to have our picture taken, so of course it's superficial. Oh my God, poor thing.' I've never seen her with this soft-hearted focus on someone else. It must be hard for Danny, with the paparazzi? 'Of course it is,' she says quietly. 'There's a lot of baggage, going out with me. I'm followed round by paparazzi all the time. Who wants that? People think it's glamorous. It's not when you want to go out and get a pint of milk.'

And she didn't find Danny's friends on the young side? 'No. Not at all.' Does she see Billy Zane at all now? 'We, like, call each other now and again, check in, but I'm sure that'll phase out as well, those things do,' she says matter-of-factly. 'Sad, but, you know, life goes on, you both move on and - weird, it's strange. Relationships are weird. You can be with someone for so much time and then all of a sudden... I just feel like a completely different person now from when I was with Billy.'

In the best way, she is not one to wallow. We are talking the week after the first anniversary of the death of her father Ken, at 59, the main reason for the transformation in the girl sitting in front of me. When he was diagnosed with cancer 18 months ago, she decided to leave Billy and LA. 'Cancer - you think you can beat it, and I know so many people do, but it was the one thing I couldn't control, as much as I tried, and I tried to do as much as I could,' she admits. 'It was really hard. I'd been in America. I was engaged. I broke off my engagement, I came back to England - I changed everything. My whole life turned upside down. And it was a really dark place, I have to say.'

She is a powerful woman, I think again, every time we meet. Like Katie Price, she has made millions from a portfolio of businesses: she has two perfumes, Kelly Brook and a new one, Vivacious; is planning a make-up and body lotion line; and has her acting work (she commands hundreds of thousands a film, in works such as the unlikely sounding Fishtales, in which she plays a mermaid to Billy Zane's Greek history professor); TV presenting (notably Celebrity Love Island, where Billy apparently went with her and listened into everything she said on headphones, and most recently as a judge on Dirty Dancing: The Time of Your Life); swimwear and lingerie ranges for New Look; syndication from her glamour modelling; a new dance fitness DVD with Flavia Cacace called Strictly Come Dancing: The Workout, following her appearance last year in Strictly Come Dancing; and a part in the new series of the ITV drama Moving Wallpaper. Property-wise, she has an old farmhouse in Kent and a flat in Notting Hill.