Amy Adams - Having a ball

After a close shave at the Oscars, Amy Adams has had a Cinderella year right down to her Hollywood fairy godmothers, she tells Siobhan Synnot

THREE years ago Amy Adams was the one you hadn't heard of among the five best actress Oscar contenders. She didn't win the Academy Award, although she did win several other prizes as a pregnant Southern motormouth in the independent film Junebug.

Since then she's been compared to just about every talented redhead in movies, but especially Lucille Ball, Isla Fisher and Julia Roberts. Not uncoincidentally, these are all actresses who also made their names in perky upbeat roles.

"I tend to be attracted to larger-than-life characters," says Adams. "But I always try to find what's underneath. But now I can just sort of focus on the journey, what stories I want to tell, and what characters."

Already 2008 is shaping up as a very good year for Adams since her delicious turn in Disney's musical Enchanted finally opened the gilded gates for her eight months ago. Cast as a fusion of every animated ingénue in the Disney catalogue from Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty, most people who watched her singing her bracing tidy-up songs to New York rats had no idea who she was when they went into the cinema. By the end of the fairytale, however, it was like rediscovering Julie Andrews. Millions more saw her, perhaps for the first time, when she performed 'Happy Working Song' at this year's Oscars.

Enchanted and Adams' latest film, Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, showcase the 33-year-old's musical powers, but also her ingenuity for comic timing and physical eloquence. "I just like to shake it up and do different things. I want to be challenged, have fun and fail sometimes," she says. "Which is painful, but I learn – although it used to be I would fail in private ways."

Not any more. But after Enchanted's goody-goody princess, she's been tweaking her sunny image with Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, playing Delysia Lafosse, a manipulative, ambitious actress who relies on a dowdy ex-governess (Frances McDormand) to haul her out of trouble.

"What Delysia wants is security. She wants stability, and that I definitely can relate to, that feeling of wanting some sort of certainty and some sort of control over your own destiny," says Adams, whose own lurking anxieties date back to a time before her Junebug breakthrough, when she found herself in a professional holding pattern. Six years ago, playing the brace-faced bride of Leonardo DiCaprio's conman in Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can was supposed to change her life. It did: she hit a year-long dry spell.

"Maybe I allowed myself to think that after working with Steven Spielberg things would get better. And they didn't. Maybe I was too nervous, and under too much pressure. I thought maybe I should move to New York, maybe I should do something else. It wasn't that I was quitting or making a dramatic statement. It was more like maybe this just wasn't a good fit. Then at Sundance, with Junebug, everything shifted."

That's when Adams picked up an acting prize, which led to her first Oscar nomination. Yet she was relieved when Rachel Weisz won the award for best supporting actress, because she would have struggled in the limelight: "I wasn't prepared for the kind of attention that would have brought. And I'm terrified of public speaking. During the ceremony I turned to my boyfriend and said: 'What if I win?' I think I'm the only person in Oscar history that looks relieved at the announcement of somebody else's name."

The run-up to the 2005 awards, with its rounds of promotional lunches and previews, brought an early taste of media exposure that she had found unnerving, but meeting actors and actresses she had always admired and being treated as an equal was heady and useful. "Once, Shirley MacLaine took my hand, looked me in the eye and said: 'You have done something very important here,'" Adams recalls. "You could have frozen me in that moment forever, and I would've been happy." It also put her in touch with McDormand, who had been nominated in the same category for North Country.

"I'd said to my boyfriend that I absolutely have to work with her some day, and when this came around I was so excited. Her performance lacks vanity, and she's such a great role model for me," Adams enthuses. "I pride myself on being someone who never keeps production waiting. I come from small theatres where you had to be on time. But every time I showed up on set for Miss Pettigrew, she'd already be there. So I asked her how it is that she continuously beat me to the set. She looks at me and says: 'I never leave.'" Adams may finally have found her place as a performer, although she likes to say: "My whole family are performers, but I'm the only one getting paid for it." The middle child of seven, born on a US military base in Italy and raised in Colorado, the family left the Mormon Church when her parents divorced. Growing up in a big family, performing gave her the outlet she needed to shine.

Now she is especially excited about her next two films, in which she gets to work with long-term idol Meryl Streep. In Doubt, which opens at the end of the year, she and Streep are cast as nuns who suspect Philip Seymour Hoffman's priest of abuse, and for Julie & Julia, she's a greenhorn chef who spends a year working her way through the recipe book of Streep's stern cooking grande dame.

"I've been really fortunate," says Adams of her Cinderella year. "At one point in my life I really wanted female mentors. Working with Frances and working with Meryl, I feel like I've got that wish." v

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is on release from Friday.