To say that Gina McKee doesn't like being interviewed is a bit like saying cats don't enjoy swimming. Despite years in the business, she has granted only a handful of interviews, and these read more like transcriptions from some on-going courtroom defence than the usual blandly colourful lifestyle profiles Not for McKee the easy anecdotage of the seasoned luvvie. No, what you get is a combination of shyness, circumspection and blunt stonewalling.Even the most anodyne of enquiries about her private life are viewed with suspicion. In one interview for that notorious scandal sheet the Radio Times, a suggestion that McKee, who grew up in County Durham, might have identified with Our Friends in the North was roundly refuted. "The first part of my life was in the North, but now my home and a huge part of my work are in the South, so I'm not a southerner or a northerner."Thanks to such stringent self-censorship, both McKee's background and opinions remain sketchy. When we meet she chats amiably enough about growing up in Peterlee, a new town that replaced the traditional back- to-back colliery villages with rows of flat-roofed houses that "looked like little boxes".

But she freezes when I ask what her parents did for a living "Didn't they tell you? I don't talk about my personal life". Even questions about her own feelings can be fraught - as if she fears that she may be held accountable for the most trivial admission.Asked what it was like to move to London at 18 years old, she says it was "no big deal I felt totally ready for it. It made perfect sense." Well, was there an early revelatory role, perhaps, one that fired her enthusiasm for her new career? "I don't know, because that often happens," she replies cautiously. "Even if it's not the most successful project, you can still learn on various levels. You can learn something that furthers your understanding of the business or you can learn very private, creative things. I can't really pinpoint anything in particular."What about Our Friends in the North? Didn't McKee think that playing Mary Cox from the age of 18 to 52 might mark a turning-point? "When I read Mary's character I got a slight turn of my stomach, because I really related to her," she says.

"I really, really wanted to play her, and I thought, `the disappointment potential here could be huge', but I put that to one side because it wasn't useful. Anyway, anything can happen between your taking the job and its being transmitted."Like all actors, McKee speaks from experience. Four months into a seven- month rehearsal period for Mike Leigh's Naked, McKee discovered that the character she had created was not going to play a large part in the final film. "It was disappointing," she shrugs, "but I was having the time of my life. I was learning about habits I'd got into and how to break them.

I went on my own private journey." A more recent role in Luc Besson's Joan of Arc went the same way.Surprisingly, perhaps, for someone who takes their work so seriously, McKee has never shied away from the comic or the commercial. Along with several advertisements, McKee's previous television work includes the sitcom An Actor's Life for Me and the role of a moustachioed reporter in Chris Morris's satirical sketch show Brass Eye. Working with Morris was, she says, "liberating - a breath of fresh air He's hilariously funny. Often when you are on camera he can throw out the odd, improvised line that tests your every strength not to laugh."Somehow you can't imagine McKee cracking up. When I turn to her latest role in Notting Hill and ask whether she shared her character's starstruck feelings on meeting Julia Roberts, she appears to regard the question as an affront to her professionalism.