Ensconced in a London hotel suite last week, Cameron Diaz and I got carried away. The conversation had turned to a mutual pet subject - cats - and we started comparing notes on mine, Ginger and Fred, and hers, The Little Man and Kitty. Cameron got Kitty from the cat pound recently, as a companion for The Little Man. "He's so huge and Kitty's such an itty bitty thing - I miss them so much," she sighs. She says that if she were reincarnated and had a choice in the matter, she would prefer to return as a cat - a perfectly understandable wish from anyone who pampers their cats. "I believe in fate completely," she says. "I believe everything happens for a reason and I believe we come back over and over and work it all out." The hereafter happens to be a prominent theme in her new movie, A Life Less Ordinary, the third film from the Shallow Grave and Trainspotting team of writer John Hodge, director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald. The movie opens in Heaven, represented by an all-in-white police squad-room wherein the angel Gabriel bemoans the decrease in the number of earthlings falling in love, and he despatches two angelic operatives (Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo) on a mission to bring an unlikely couple together and have them fall in love.
Cameron Diaz plays one of the would-be lovers, Celine, the spoiled daughter of the wealthy businessman, Naville (Ian Holm); the other is Robert (Ewan McGregor), a young Scot working as a cleaner in Naville's US corporation building. When Robert is replaced by a robot, he takes Celine hostage and they go on the road. The twist is that Robert is too good-natured to play kidnapper and it's Celine who's in control. Anyone expecting another Trainspotting will be disappointed by A Life Less Ordinary, a romantic fantasy whose parts are more satisfying than its whole, although it looks gorgeous and the two leads give it their all. Ewan McGregor is perfectly cast as the hapless Robert, and he milks scenes such as the one in which he cries his eyes out as he's forced to dig his own grave. However, it is Cameron Diaz who lights up the screen in A Life Less Ordinary, and her brash, extroverted Celine is the flip-side of the sweetly and innocent Kimmy she plays in the current release, My Best Friend's Wedding.
In person, Cameron Diaz is even more beautiful than on screen. Gliding into the hotel suite, she's dressed in a black, v-necked, long-sleeved sweater, black, designer trousers with slits up the back of the legs, and red shoes with precariously high heels that push her height close to six foot. She used to be a model.
Danny Boyle says he cast her in A Life Less Ordinary because he wanted someone "almost mythically American". "I don't know what that means," she says with her infectious giggle. "I guess I fit that image because I've got blonde hair and blue eyes, but there's such a mixing of breeds in America . . . Look at me. My father's Spanish-Cuban and my mother's German-English-American Indian."
She started working as a model when she was 16, working in the US, Japan and France, and eventually earning up to $2,000 a day on shoots for Coke and Nivea. Was modelling even more competitive than acting is? "Yes, there's less work," she says, "and the girls who work work and that's it. It takes a while for a new girl to break through and get editorial. There are about 10 girls who dominate the magazines. And modelling is a lot of work. It's hard and pretty desperate, too - you hang around a lot for opportunities."
She's thrilled to declare that she's on the cover of American Vogue this month. "As a model, would I have ever been on the cover of Vogue? I don't think so. I get to work with all these amazing photographers now, whereas when I was a model I was doing catalogue and that kind of stuff. That was fine at the time, but I aspired to something else and I moved away from modelling as soon as I got into acting."
Curling up on the settee, she recalls that transition. In line with her belief in fate, she was in the office of her commercials agent one day and noticed a script on her desk with the names of five models the agent was putting forward for a film. "I saw the script and asked her what it was. My agent said, `It's a feature, a comedy. Are you ready for it?'. And I kinda went, `Sure, I'm ready'. I was kidding, but she put my name on the list and I was called for an audition the next day."
That audition was followed by a dozen others before she finally got the part, co-starring with Jim Carrey in the manic, flamboyant The Mask. "They wanted me to read for another part the first day - the part of this sexy girl, but I didn't want to do that because I wasn't feeling very sexy that day. I asked to read for something different and then I came back and read again and again."
The producers of the movie were sceptical about casting an unknown opposite the relative newcomer Carrey was at the time, and Diaz says she will be forever grateful to Chuck Russell, the director of The Mask, for persisting with his demands to cast her in the role. The movie became a huge box-office success and put her firmly on the Hollywood map. She followed it with a number of undistinguished low-budget pictures, most of which disappeared without trace - The Last Supper, She's the One, Feeling Minnesota, Head Over Water - before bouncing back with a vivacious and wholly endearing performance as Kimmy, the unsuspecting victim of Julia Roberts's schemes to wreck her nuptials in My Best Friend's Wedding. With more than $120 million in US takings alone, that movie is one of the biggest hits of the year so far.
"The film was challenging for everyone and it was very rewarding when it was accepted as it was," says Diaz. What does she think of the much-expressed view that Dermot Mulroney's character was so bland that it was hard to credit that two women would be vying for him? "Well, that's the way the character was written," she says. "I don't think Dermot could have done any more with it, and I don't think any other actor could have done anything more with it. Julia's character is the most important person in the film and is the one meant to look the best. That's the flashy part."
One of the high points in the movie comes when Julia's character, Julianne, sets out to embarrass Kimmy in front of her fiance by setting her up to sing in a karaoke bar. But Julianne does not reckon on the engaging appeal radiated by Kimmy who, even though she hasn't a note in her head, wows the whole bar with her rendition of Dusty Springfield's I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself.
"That's as good as I sing," laughs Diaz: she found herself performing another karaoke scene - and bringing the house down again - in her next movie, A Life Less Ordinary, when she and Ewan McGregor perform an all-singing, all-dancing version of Beyond The Sea. "The two karaoke scenes are so different," she says, "just as the two women are so different. Kimmy is terrified of getting up there and doing it. She sucks. Whereas Celine doesn't care what she sounds like. I started this movie three days after finishing My Best Friend's Wedding, so I was trying to get rid of Kimmy and get into being Celine. But that's what I love about acting - the opportunity of being so many different people."
Working with the British team of Danny Boyle, Andrew Macdonald, John Hodge and Ewan McGregor presented few problems. "Once we were all speaking the same English, it was fine," she says.
Ewan McGregor was "amazing", she says. "There's just no censoring him. Whatever he thinks or feels, he just says it. It's a breath of fresh air to work with someone like that. You know exactly what you're getting. He's a total natural actor and he's witty and charming and intelligent. We hit it off from day one." As a former model, what did she think of Ewan's kilt in the movie? "I find a man in a skirt very interesting," she giggles."Ewan told me he wasn't wearing anything underneath."
A Life Less Ordinary will released here next Friday