DON'T YOU MEAN TIARA FITZGERALD? Ha ha. If the pun was predictable, at least she's won the right to be crowned as one of Britain's very own princesses of screen and stage. At 28, Ms Fitzgerald has won a steady stream of accolades since she shot to fame straight out of drama school as Nancy in the film Hear My Song. "That set me up really well. It gave me a a very - maybe it's rose-tinted, maybe it's very positive - way of viewing the business. I've been very lucky. I don't take it for granted, but I love working, I like the actual hard graft, the discipline."
REIGN TO DATE: Made her television debut as promsicuous Polly in Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn and played another offbeat Wesley heroine in The Vacillations of Poppy Carew. She also starred as sexpot Dolly in Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, a part that, as with many of her roles - including clergyman's wife Estella in the film Sirens - required her to appear naked, although she kept her clothes on in the subsequent Hugh Grant movie, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain*. She has made a substantial impact on the stage, too, both as Peter O'Toole's mistress in Our Song and later as Ophelia opposite Ralph Fiennes in Hamlet, which last year toured to New York.
BARE NECESSITIES: "I'm not doing it as any kind of political thing. It's what I believe, for me. But I respect that other actors don't have that feeling because it's a delicate area," says Fitzgerald of her numerous nude scenes. "I would never whip off my clothes willy-nilly but I'm not about to close down, either…It's quite liberating really. When you're nude on a set and you're actually going through your motions, you're not thinking about it, so it's probably one of the only times in your life that you can be nude and not be self-conscious, weirdly enough."
HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD? "I don't want to live there and I doubt I ever will," says Fitzgerald, who resides in Barnes in West London with her fiancé, actor Dorian Healy (of Soldier, Soldier fame). "As a child I had such a naïve and idealistic view of Hollywood - it was very much the golden gates and Gene Kelly - and when I went out there it was the antithesis of that. I was so shocked by the superficiality. And it's very bad for women. It plays with what they value to be important. If you're prepared to go for the face lifts and all that, fine, but I don't see how anybody can be happy."
SO BRITISH IS BEST? "Americans think what we do is quaint and they love our costume and they love our heritage, so I'm quite happy to stay here and be quaint. I really, really love this country and if I can work here, I'm happy. People make some of the best films in the world here; the problem is that we haven't got the money. But so long as we embrace what we have and don't try to emulate Hollywood - we're not about slick action-dramas - I really believe we can't be bettered. People work here because they love it, not because of an extra dollar on the highest-paid actor list."
ROYAL ENGAGEMENTS: Stars in a two-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, starting on Radio 4 this week, while next week sees her co-starring with Albert Finney in A Man of No Importance, Barry Devlin's 1950s drama set in Dublin. She's currently filming Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfowl Hall in on location in Yorkshire, due to be screened this autumn; meanwhile she will be flying the flag for British films again in May* with the release of Brassed Off, in which she appears with Pete Postlethwaite and Ewan MacGregor as members of a colliery band whose survival is threatened when the local pit closes.
BBC Worldwide Ltd 1996.