Pandora's soapbox

KATHERINE Heigl may be hot property right now, but she has never been one to keep her mouth shut, marking her out as a rare woman in her acting community.

Picture: Getty

"People who know me well know that I have an opinion about pretty much everything," Heigl agrees. Tall with thick, blonde hair, soft features and an easy smile, in the past 12 months, the TV star turned big-screen Hollywood actress has made a perfect transition between media, while continuing her role as intern Izzie on hospital drama Grey's Anatomy and fitting in marriage during a rare break in filming.

Hollywood carries its own set of taxes; Oscar dress scrutiny and high-profile divorces are just two of them. Yet Heigl seems all too willing to pay for another movie-star rite of passage: controversy.

For instance, she's not afraid to call her co-stars to account for bad behaviour. Last year, her Grey's Anatomy colleague Isaiah Washington allegedly used an offensive word ("faggot") to refer to TR Knight, who plays George on the show. Washington denied uttering the slur, then while denying it again to reporters backstage at the Golden Globes last year, he used the word again.

An exasperated Heigl declared that Washington "needs to just not speak in public, period", and told Entertainment Weekly he was "thoughtless and boneheaded". In an otherwise tight-lipped community, Heigl stands out because she speaks as she finds. "Oh I didn't have a courageous moment," she says dismissively. "I had a couple of glasses of champagne."

But it hasn't put Heigl off speaking her mind, part of a conscious decision she made some years ago. So, when she won her acting award at the Emmys and her name was mispronounced, she corrected the announcer. More recently she has said she doesn't like the relationship her Grey's Anatomy character is having with a married man in this current series, calling it "a ratings ploy". However, when her comedy hit Knocked Up was released, it was hard to find anyone who could express dissatisfaction without sounding like a Victorian aunt.

After all, the film acknowledges some of the difficulties of family life in the post-feminist age when Alison, played by Heigl, becomes inconveniently pregnant by a jobless, pot-smoking loser called Ben (Seth Rogen). The difference between men and women, however, seemed to be that the men explored their choices with good humour and some imagination, while Alison and her sister were fretful, obsessed by domesticity and devoid of one-liners. Usually, these gripes are left to critics, but while the film was still on release, Heigl admitted that she'd found it "a little sexist".

"It paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it. On some days. I'm playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you're portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie."

Months later, she stands by these remarks but is anxious that her reservations should not be read as ingratitude: "I realise I was very lucky to be in that movie. They took a huge chance on casting me. I was a TV star and that was it. The way it came out sounded like I wasn't somehow grateful," she squirms. What she finds salutary is that she is still being asked about her comments, "because they're just opinions. They weren't that interesting, and it wasn't that outrageous".

"It's kind of opened Pandora's Box," she laughs. "Now I won't shut up – ask me anything!"

Heigl does have a point. The world does need more films starring fun-loving, wisecracking women, and she has been busy on two more. Gerard Butler will be her sparring partner in The Ugly Truth later this year, but first there is 27 Dresses, an ambivalent frou-frou of a romantic comedy about a woman who loves weddings, but is always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

27 Dresses certainly dodges the charge of providing Pronuptia porn for girls of every age, but it still tries to have its wedding cake and eat it too. The film may vaguely float the notion that a single woman who reads Brides magazine in the privacy of her home is sad, but ultimately, all the wedding paraphernalia – the bridesmaid dresses, the wedding chit-chat, the last-minute crush on another guy – is what ultimately drives the story. Heigl brings a spark to her ostensibly mousy character, even with her hair dyed a little darker, to signify that she's the plain sister, but Jane's fatalism is still in stark contrast to Heigl's default assertive go-getterism in life.

Tired of waiting for her boyfriend, singer-songwriter Josh Kelley, to propose, she demanded to know what his intentions were, picked out the diamond for her ring, and organised their wedding last December, eschewing her character's little-girl obsessions over the perfect wedding.

"It actually makes me angry because those women have ruined it for the rest of us," she asserts. "Weddings have become such a racket and they can charge three times as much for everything because women insist on the dream wedding."

Heigl's star is on the rise: her price has risen from the $300,000 she got for Knocked Up to $6m for 27 Dresses but any working actor knows that it's luck, as much as the talent and connections, that end up paying the bills. Heigl was nine years old when her aunt sent pictures of her to a modelling agency who signed her up for catalogue work. Three years later, she made her film debut in That Night, starring Juliette Lewis. And at 14, she played Gérard Depardieu's bratty daughter in My Father The Hero. She went on to star in Under Siege 2 with Steven Seagal, after he invited Heigl out to Los Angeles and booked her a suite at the Beverly Wilshire for over a week. "He flew me in, put me up at this extravagant hotel where Julia Roberts' character stayed in Pretty Woman, and didn't even come and meet me," she says.

Aged 18 she landed a lead role in teen extraterrestrial alien show Roswell, but when that was cancelled, and she started being turned down for everything from cable weepies to Wedding Crashers, she thought her career had stuttered to a halt.

"I was just about to call it quits," she admits. Then she was hired for Grey's Anatomy, although "I had never wanted to do a medical drama. I never even watched ER," she confesses.

Grey's Anatomy never pretended to be as deep as, say, Lost. At its best, it's a serious guilty pleasure combining death, disease, and fit bodies swaddled in scrubs, and despite a pay dispute last year, Heigl plans to stick with the show's contract, making movies in the three months of the year when she isn't holding dummy thermometers.

Despite being painted as a forthright Jane Fonda, she has no weighty political projects in mind, preferring to stick to the shallow end of the pool for now. "I'm a commercial kind of gal so I don't have any grand aspirations to do my Academy Award-winning movie," she laughs. "I mean, I love Kate Winslet, but I know I couldn't have her career." v

• 27 Dresses is on release March 14 www.27dressesthemovie.com