Return of the King

At first glance, it's easy to see why Jaime King has become Frank Miller's actress of choice.

Miller, the celebrated comic book and graphic novel writer turned director, whose films such as Sin City and 300 are renowned for their stylised quality, litters his movies with confident, powerfully sexy women, and in Jaime he has clearly found his muse.

Curvy yet slim, her blood-red lipstick offset by a shock of peroxide-blonde hair, she stands out even among the clientele of Beverly Hills' resolutely trendy Urth Caffé as a hipper version of Gwen Stefani.

She wanders in hand-in-hand with her husband of just over a year, director Kyle Newman, who discreetly disappears as she takes her seat at our table. 'We know the owners of the Urth Caffé and they catered our wedding,' smiles Jaime wistfully, clearly still floating around somewhere in the midst of an extended honeymoon period. She is starring in two further Frank Miller movies: The Spirit (already released in the UK), with Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson, and Sin City 2, featuring Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen, in which she will reprise her roles as twin sisters Wendy and Goldie. In the first Sin City, as well as getting to look powerfully sexy, she enjoyed a rather torrid love scene with Mickey Rourke, currently on a career high after his Golden Globe win for The Wrestler.

Her boyfriend, Davide Sorrenti, who had taken the picture, died at the age of 20 of a suspected drug overdose, prompting the then President Clinton publicly to denounce heroin chic and those who seemingly conspired in it as 'destructive'.

Glancing at the vision of health in front of me now, it seems impossible to equate her with the images of her teens. 'I started young,' she says with a small laugh, 'but in a way it was perfect for me. My mistakes or wrongdoings have made me what I am and I made the best choices I could make at the time, even if in hindsight they were stupid ones. I've made my peace with that and I have absolutely no regrets.'

'I was already lonely before I left school to model, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing - it happens to most teenagers who don't feel like they fit in. And although Omaha was a nice place to grow up and was full of kind-hearted people, I always felt this need to escape and experience different places and cultures. When the opportunity to model came about, it couldn't have been more perfect.'

She was taken under the wing of New York model agent Michael Flutie and assumed jobs under her childhood nickname James in order to avoid confusion with Jaime Rishar, a more experienced model at the time. Soon the work flooded in and a teenage Jaime found herself jetting to Paris, London and Milan to model alongside Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Karen Elson. 'I was friends with all the Brit girls apart from Kate, who just used to run in a different crowd.'

Jaime's lanky frame was celebrated in modelling circles. 'I must have been a size zero then because I was only 14, and although the girls were small then, they seem ridiculously small now. I was such a stick figure and when I got hips and boobs, it took a while before I could accept myself. But now I've learned to be much more confident. I'm proud of my body and after spending so much time worrying about what I looked like, it's really liberating to care more now about my work than about my looks.'

At the time, though, Jaime admits that she loved modelling, 'particularly travelling around the world - Paris and London were my favourite places,' although when Davide Sorrenti's photo surfaced and the whole discussion around heroin chic erupted, Jaime found herself caught up the seamier side of the profession. 'That whole thing where [Clinton] took that picture and turned me into the poster child for that whole heroin chic thing was just so retarded,'Jaime scoffs.