"The only way you can do that voice," she says, "is to go to Moore Street and work at it. At some point you have to jump in, and that's always a bit terrifying. It's like skiing, you have to fall on your face sometimes, so you might as well do it big time." Upon which she launched into a spectacular Dublin accent ("Par-snups! Toirnups!") which had me in hysterics.It was a kind of homecoming for the divine Ms Huston, who spent the first 12 years of her life in Co Galway. It was her second shot at directing, and is the result of her enthusiasm for the work of Brendan O'Carroll, the Irish author "Jim Sheridan told me about it The script is tremendously engaging It has great curves. Brendan does this rare thing of combining street comedy with very poignant stuff, the rollercoaster between comedy and tragedy happens a lot and it's really intriguing to play." She takes the lead, playing a woman whose husband dies suddenly (like Rodmilla's), leaving her with seven children, a new romance and an obsession with the singer Tom Jones, who has a strut- on part in the movie.For purposes of research, she hung out in the fruit 'n' veg market in the roughest part of Dublin, listening to the thick accents of the women traders. To be very black and white, very Kabuki, is one way - but I've done those witches.

This is something else".Ms Huston isn't keen to sit around becoming typecast. Apart from Ever After, she's also currently appearing in Buffalo 66 by the egregiously- talented Vincent Gallo, playing Gallo's mother. And also lurking on the must-see movie shelf is The Mammy, which Ms Huston filmed in Dublin earlier this year. The satisfaction lies in pulling off the transitions between moods. She is a formidable talker when in full flow, interspersing real insights with slightly grating cultural-studies jargon. ("I don't think Lady Macbeth sets out to be evil, she has a very serious agenda for her husband and she empowers him to go for things.") Didn't she like playing as black as possible when she got such a role? "I like playing all kinds of stuff, but the shadings are what interest me.

She's terribly disappointed and thwarted and hasn't made the marriage she wanted, and consequently had invested everything in her daughters..."Well, gosh. In Anjelica Huston's torrential analysis, the villain of a simple Cinderella tale turns into Jane Austen's Mrs Bennett. She comes to this marriage with two lovely daughters of marriageable age, the second husband brings her to a farmhouse instead of the glorious palace she was expecting, then dies leaving her with all kinds of monetary problems, and this girl is in the way, with whom she's never had any connection and whom she considers a serious rival to her daughters in the Prince's affection. "No," said Ms Huston firmly, "I have many sympathies with the woman. She plays Rodmilla, the stepmother, with exquisite, cooing relish, murmurously scheming to marry off her two minxy, non-Utopia-reading daughters, arching her phenomenal eyebrows like a McDonald's logo above a face of frightening angularity, her hair tucked into a Medea- like headdress, her body languorously lain on a bed, a sturdy odalisque dreaming of Christmas in Paris.I said I thought the evil-stepmother thing was softened down from time- to-time in the modern Hollywood fashion where nobody can be wholly nasty and even Lady Macbeth would be given a "special moment" to describe how she really liked kids Ms Huston didn't buy it. "There's something about playing an evil role, that, unless your character is generically warped or Hitler-ian, an actor can always ask - what are the underpinnings of the person's life and why are they so dreadful? I think it's a more realistic rendering than the caricature of a woman who mindlessly beats a girl." But surely, I said, that's what a Wicked Stepmother is for.

It nods at post-feminism (Ms Barrymore, as the Cinders figure, holds Prince Charming Dougray Scott entranced by quoting from More's Utopia, which, her father assures her, "means paradise" (though, of course, in Greek it means "nowhere"), and drags in Leonardo Da Vinci as an avuncular Merlin-figure. Its main raison d'etre is to give dumpy teenage girls hope of finding romance, and its finest moments are those when Anjelica is on screen. Ever After is a sweet film with a leaden script, some gorgeous photography but prosaic direction, pitched (I'd guess) at bovine American teenagers. Shall I go on?") but I doubt if their ancestors would be all that impressed. The reasons were actually much simpler ("It was fun, it was a nice part, it was a fairy tale, it was a lovely summer, it was the Dordogne, it was very good food, it was an easy job compared to some I've had that are more twisted and soul-searching, it was well paid and nicely rounded-out, it was a big studio.