Because she's worked for it

Born into difficult circumstances but with a 'great attitude', Andie MacDowell's success has been hard-earned, she tells Róisín Ingle

A few years ago, Andie MacDowell was on her way to Los Angeles to star in one of her regular shoots for a skincare manufacturer - she's one of those actors who likes to look you in the eye and declare "you're worth it" - but found herself snowbound at the nearest airport to her home.

"Now I knew that if I did not make that flight, the company would lose so much money. So I hired a car. I drove two hours to catch the next flight from another airport so I could make the appointment," she says in that distinctive Southern drawl made famous in films such as Groundhog Day, Green Card, Sex, Lies and Videotape and Four Weddings And A Funeral. "That is the way I am, you see. I am motivated. I am always on time. That kind of attitude got me here."

She is in Dublin to promote her new film, Tara Road, the adaptation of a Maeve Binchy novel in which she plays Marilyn, an American mother who, in order to come to terms with her teenage son's death, does a house-swap with a woman in Dublin. MacDowell gives a mock-sigh when told this interview is due to take half an hour, which is something of a marathon for your average Hollywood star. But then she smiles sweetly and requests some chocolate for later ("oh, the dark kind, please").

The story about the dash through the snow to be photographed while slathering cream on her face has been hauled out of the anecdote closet to illustrate her work ethic. She says it irritates her when people assume her success, her fame and her wealth were not hard-earned. According to most mini-biographies of MacDowell, her childhood growing up in Gaffney, South Carolina, was "profoundly unhappy".

"Well, that might be an exaggeration," she says, crossing her long legs, which are shod in Dick Turpin knee-high boots, setting off a leather mini-skirt which clashes somewhat with a demure lilac cashmere cardigan. "It was difficult, yes. My late mother was an alcoholic, but please don't call her a drunkard because I hate that word. And she was a single mother, so it was hard. The heat would be switched off, bills would not be paid. But I had a good relationship with her. She was my best friend".

She concedes that her upbringing gave her a steely ambition, and she can't stand it when people assume she was handed everything on a plate. Not long ago MacDowell was in a horse-riding store, stocking up on items for one of her favourite pastimes. A woman came and gave her the latest horse-related magazine.

"I was so touched. I said 'thank-you very much', but then the woman turned to the store assistant and said: 'This store is for normal people like you and me, not for the rich and famous like her.' I thought of so many things to say to her after she left: 'Excuse me for standing here and thinking I was normal, thanks for reminding me I am not.' So, you know, I don't mind saying my childhood wasn't peachy-keen if it means people don't throw darts at me in the street. Do you see what I am saying?"

She says that often she feels like justifying her success. "You want to say to people like that lady: 'Wait a minute. I did work. I worked. And how do you think you become rich and famous anyway? It doesn't happen just like that.' "

It happens like this. You grow up in an impoverished household with an alcoholic mother, three older sisters and a smouldering ambition to be somebody. You go to college but are not motivated, and because everyone is telling you to try being a model, you go to New York, where the people in the agency immediately ask whether you can move to the city. You go home to Gaffney, pack a bag and move there within two weeks, knowing "not one soul" in the city.

"I was crazy. I had no fear and I didn't know a thing," says MacDowell, her mouth opening in silent laughter that ascends into a noisy cackle. "I remember showing up for the first big job in jeans and T-shirt, and people said 'you don't look like a model'. I went on jobs and the other girls sat around being really lazy, so I ended up being willing and waiting and ready. I had a great attitude. I still do."

She quit modelling at 23, except for the skincare deal which still provides an income 24 years later, and put herself through acting school. After the acclaim of Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, the roles came steadily, some less successful than others. Still, MacDowell proved likeable enough to bounce back from cinematic disappointments such as Hudson Hawk and Bad Girls.

WHEN YOU TELL female friends you are going to interview MacDowell, they all say the same thing: "Ask her does she really use those products, and get a good look at her skin."

"Cross my heart I use them, and cross my heart they really work. You can spend hundreds on other creams, but you are just paying for a concept," she says.

Her skin looks pretty good actually. She wants to write a beauty book some day. During a recent interview she was asked "how do you feel about losing your beauty?" by an Italian journalist, who promptly turned "50 shades of red".

"I don't think I am losing my beauty, although some might see it that way," she says. "I am evolving. I am not the face of someone in their 30s, I am the face of someone in their 40s. I really don't care about being young, you know. I am tired and at this great time in my life there are other things I am interested in. Riding horses. Growing roses. Not tucking and changing and creating something I have already done but not even do it half so well. I don't even see the point in trying to go backwards. But I still want to feel like a beautiful woman."

Spirituality is also an interest. "I am a Christian, I grew up around the church, and you know I love the Bible," she says. "I always feel I have to defend myself and say I am a Christian but not one of the wacky ones. I am not judgmental."

MacDowell does yoga but "not for religious reasons".

She will next be heard as the voice of Etta the hen in the animation feature, Barnyard, but there are no other major projects in the pipeline. In seven years, she says, when the youngest of her three children turns 18, "I will be free. I could do anything. Direct. Produce. Spend time in a foreign country helping others. Anything".

I TELL HER that what has always fascinated me about her is the fact that she has played so many of these buttoned-up, characters, whether it was the community gardener in Green Card or the prudish wife in Sex, Lies and Videotape. In the past she has addressed this issue, saying: "The character in Sex, Lies and Videotape was repressed. She was terrified for her sexuality. The morality of the way she was raised made her fearful of sex, and that does happen in the South. You have to understand the South before you can understand that - it's a very 'different' place and you're taught that sex is dirty. My mother was . . . I mean, that's the way people were raised. If you don't behave in a certain way, you're dirty. And it can really mess a woman up."

Now, though, the issue of repression is disregarded when it's put to her. "I have both sides. Did ya see me in Crush? You should see me in Crush," she says, laughing uproariously, which is understandable given that one scene in that 2002 movie sees her making love with a young boy on a tombstone. "I am not repressed. I could tell you some things that would show you I am not repressed, but I am not going to do that," she admonishes in a "don't even go there" voice.

MacDowell won't discuss the recent break-up of her second marriage either, saying only that "it lasted a minute, it was one of those things that just shouldn't have happened, it's that simple".

She does occasionally let down her guard, though, hinting at the moral views which shape her life. Referring to her passionate screen kiss with Gerard Depardieu in Green Card, for example, she has this to say: "I don't know if you can really enjoy a screen kiss. I think a man can though; it seems a man can enjoy anything sexually."

I tease her, saying that for a non- judgmental Christian there is a hint of judgement in that comment.

"Wasn't there though?" she says, smiling. "I don't know where that came from."

Of course she knows exactly where it came from. I try once more and ask her how she got on with her co-star in Sex, Lies and Videotape, James Spader, who played a man obsessed with taping girls talking about sex. In her answer, she could be talking about herself: "He's very interesting, one of those guys who is very enigmatic. He either showed up acting like that or he is like that . . . I don't know."

When it comes to MacDowell and the question of how much she draws on personal experience for the emotionally repressed characters such as the one in Tara Road, it's equally unclear. One suspects that just the way she likes it.

Tara Road is on general release