Older actors who become "overnight sensations" are often those who, through sheer professionalism, give performances that appear so natural their talent goes unnoticed for years. Kevin Spacey, now acknowledged as one of the screen's most prodigious talents, took 10 years to impinge himself on the cinema-going consciousness.
It took Sharon Stone a similar time to hit the jackpot with Basic Instinct. Although hugely commercial, this was a film of dubious artistic merit, made plausible largely through the performances of its two female leads, Stone's and Jeanne Tripplehorn as the is-she-lesbian psychologist (ultimately killer) wife. While Stone got all the plaudits - largely due to her lack of underwear - Tripplehorn's performance was pivotal to the film's hold on the audience.
Its box office success led to offers of similar roles but Tripplehorn, who was theatre-trained, like Spacey, at the Julliard School in New York, turned them down, opting instead for John Ford's gloomy Elizabethan tragedy, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, at the Public Theatre in New York. It was a year before Jeanne (pronounced Jean) Tripplehorn began work on The Firm where, yet again, she was pipped to the acting honours by Holly Hunter. Then came Waterworld, when Tripplehorn's acting abilities were powerless against the combined forces of nature and Kevin Costner. In Reality Bites she quietly gave this early twentysomething movie a degree of gravitas but once again was out-glamoured by Winona Rider. And last year saw her playing second fiddle to Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors. We meet in a London hotel a few hours before the premiere of Mickey Blue Eyes, the latest Hugh Grant vehicle, in which she costars and demonstrates an unexpected talent for comedy - though not that unexpected, it turns out.
"I was dealing in comedy way before anybody ever heard of me. And in fact my family and friends back home in Oklahoma think it's a comedy that I did all these big dramatic roles, because I was always doing comedic parts. In Oklahoma I had a TV show - a satire and sketch show. It was very cheap humour and I would do anything for a laugh - wear the most terrible clothes and outrageous wigs."
Reference to her long apprenticeship, however, makes Tripplehorn uneasy. "I have no regrets about the choices that I've made. In my beginning years films were few and far between. I am so stubborn, sometimes I think I should probably have worked it differently and taken everything that was offered to me. But I'm not that kind of person. There are other things I can do in life. But I continued to work and chose roles that were hopefully different from what I had played before." This is complete contrast, it would seem, to her costar Hugh Grant, who is now positively building on the floppy-haired Englishman of Four Weddings and Notting Hill. Mickey Blues Eyes is a product of Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley's jointly owned production company, Simian Films, in which Grant plays a naive Englishman in New York who falls for Tripplehorn with disastrous (and very funny) consequences when it turns out Daddy is a mafioso.
Jeanne Tripplehorn believes Hugh Grant is unjustly maligned. He is a fine comedy actor, she says. "In movies we shouldn't believe that the persona on screen is the real thing, just because they've played a similar part before. They may give the impression they're playing themselves but when you work with them you find out that they are very different and the screen image is just some sort of persona they feel comfortable acting in.
"It's a crazy set of circumstances to work under when you're doing a film and to be able to play yourself and be that natural and relaxed, I think, requires a real talent. I'm certainly not a snob saying, `Oh, I'm an actor, I play many roles, I wear many hats.' I don't perceive myself in that way at all. The roles I play are all facets of my personality."
What film does offer, she says, is the kind of coalface research that no theatre budget could run to and for her role in Mickey Blue Eyes Jeanne Tripplehorn was initiated into a world she knew only from cinema. "I grew up with mafia movies like The Godfather; I grew up with the myth and the legend of what they do. On the one hand that gave me a feeling of being really intimidated - not exactly knowing what I was dealing with and how seriously they were involved in this business - on the other hand I was utterly fascinated by them, but I just didn't want to know too much.
"When I was around these people they were so charming, welcoming in that way you know about through movies and books, that Italian `come and join us and have some wine'. At the same time I didn't want to hear anything, I didn't want to see anything, I didn't want to know anything. I just sat there with a big smile on my face and enjoyed them immensely, and you never know because nobody speaks of what they do."
Whether Mickey Blue Eyes will lift Jeanne Tripplehorn to the Spacey/Stone league is another matter. A consummate actress, she never lets her ego get in the way of her performance. Now 36, her talents must soon be recognised and rewarded. She has just finished shooting the Noel Coward comedy Relative Values - a stage play translated to the screen. Now that I would like to see.
Mickey Blue Eyes is on general release