In the course of her rise to Hollywood stardom alongside Connery, Pitt and Gere, Julia Ormond acquired a reputation for frostiness. "So who's it from, then?" she asks Demetrios Matheou.

IT'S A CLASSIC HACK'S nightmare: you've got a precious hour in which you want to learn as much as possible from a star with a reputation for being elusive, in a venue with all the suffocating appeal of a dinosaur of British culture. Julia Ormond and I are sitting in the Ritz. As tourists tinkle their teacups in time to a cheesy piano player, and a waiter rushes over to insist I don't remove my jacket, I feel the proverbial boot shifting to the other foot: instead of a primadonna star, it's the journalist who ismaking a fuss. I have to get out.

As it happens, Ormond is game for a move. "I think it's quite hard to find somewhere [for interviews]. You do get borcd with the Groucho Club," she admits. "We can go to a noisy pub instead, or sit in Green Park in the drizzle!? I'm going to have to find some quiet little cafe where I can meet people, but I've been away for so long." When the waiter rushes over, all apologies, to pour the coffee that she was more than happy to pour for herself, Ormond throws me a glance and we know it's time to leave . . .

Julia Ormond has always been something of a phenomenon. A Surrey girl, she studied acting at the Webber Douglas Academy, before bursting in quick succession onto the stage (an adaptation of Wuthering Heiqhts), television (Traffik, Young Catherine, Stalin) and film, with Peter Greenaway's controversial The Baby of Macon. Before you could say "Julia who?" she was voted the ShoWest Female Star of Tomorrow (previous recipients being Winona Ryder and Nicole Kidman) and had become one of the very few current British actresses to succced in Hollywood.

But her meteoric rise, starring in a trio of major US titles in the mid'90s (Legends Of The Fall with Brad Pitt, First Knight, as Guinevere opposite Sean Connery's Arthur and Richard Gere's Lancelot, and with Harrison Ford in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina), was matched, atter a disappointing reception for the latter, by the inevitable backlash and the speed of her apparent disappearance.

However, the rumours of her professioual demise are premature. We are meeting shortly after Ormond's return to London after three years on the road, during which time she has made two films (Smilla's Feeling For Snow, which opens this month, and The Barber Of Siberia, a year-long shoot throughout Europe that has just wrapped) and established her own production company in New York. She may have been out of sight, but she's been far from idle.

Although the idea of sitting in the summer rain with Guinevere/Sabrina/Ormond was rather appealing, I suggest a dash down Piccadilly and a grovel to get into the Met Bar (rather more contemporary than the Ritz, if just as clubby). Ormond stands back and lets me do the talking, before walking in, exclaiming "Oh good, we've got the sofa," plonking herself down, ordering a vodka and tonic and lighting up. the first in a series of Marlboro Lights. The publicist's "hour" now becomes a long afternoon, in which the actress spends much of the time huddled forward, talking intently, laughing often, occasionally flying into some physical exclamation when she wants to send herself up ... and I wonder how this could be the same pent-up Ormond of repute, once dubbed "the ice queen" in an American magazine? Either she never deserved the reputation in the first place, or Ormond, like her latest character Smilla Jasperson, has been doing some serious thawing out.

For those who haven't read the book, Smilla is the tough, abrasive and determined heroine of Peter Hoeg's existential thriller Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow.  Half Greenlandic, half Danish, Smilla is living in Copenhagen when a young boy she has befriended dies mysteriously, and her mission to find his killers takes her back to Greenland on a voyage of self-discovery. An international best-seller, its screen adaptation, directed (rather poorly) by Bille August, has been something of an international flop. Which is hard on Ormond, who works wonders in a demanding and largely unsympathetic role.

"I was offered the part, but if I'd known about it first I would have chased it," she says. "Smilla's very much her own person, which is so unusual in a female role. I loved her emotional dilemma and her intelligence and her tenacity. And I loved the fact that it was a different cultural background."

Indeed, Orrnond's preparation included visiting Greenland before the shoot to talk to Inuit families. "We went into their homes, went out on fishing boats and went dog sledging," she recalls. "It's such a harsh environment, but a kind of beautiful way of life in the sense of living in harmony with nature."

Hoeg's poetic descriptions of ice and snow have clearly rubbed off on the actress. "When you fly over Greenland, it's like a white elephant skin. All grooved. You can sense that it's a dangerous beast that's moving and breathing," she says. "There were icebergs that looked as though someone had stood on top of them and poured ink into them, because they were such a brilliant blue. And you really do have to know the difference between these different ice formations in order to survive. The Inuit get to know the sound when the iceberg is about to crack, it's like a gunshot, and they smell it, because of the gas that's released, and they all get the f*** out of the way!"

Not surprisingly, the film made physical demands on the actors which Ormond especially embraced. She did most of her own stunts, including climbing between decks on a ship, with a 60-foot drop below, and escaping from a sinking boat, which she describes as "fun".

Legends Of The Fall was another film in which the stuntwoman didn't really get a look in. "I loved the riding. And the roping was hilarious," says Ormond. "They were lucky to find an English actress who could lasso! That wasn't actually on my c.v. before I went. I love taking on a physical skill and I get very frustrated if I can't do something. The lassoing was incredibly hard at first. You watch the cowboys do it and you think, That looks easy. And you do it and you've got a rope around your neck."

Ormond's attention to the physicality of her parts extends to sex scenes, which she tends to lend a rare authenticity. Take Captives, a tiny British thriller co-starring Tim Roth, in which the pair- as prison dentist and con respectively - have a steamy clinch in a lavatory. "There was a big battle about whose arse was in the shot," she says, smiling (it was Roth's). "We'd meet in the toilet to discuss how you would f*** someone in there. We decided it wouldn't be some inventive thing. You'djust end up on the floor. Both of us said, `You don't have to take your kit off for it to be sexy.' And a lot of people responded by saying it was a very sexy film. Tim and I were cracking up when we shot it."

She's much less confident with the glamour that she's meant to exude off-screen. "I'm not very comfortable with it and not very good at it," she confesses. "It never feels like me. I have a really hard time stepping out of a limousine and confronting a shitload of photographers who are all screaming at you, because it's like saying, `Yeah, yeah, here I am!"' She's waving her arms and wriggling in her seat. "See, I can't even do it as a joke!" She also fails to understand (or approve the fuss made about her looks. "I have average features, and I don't have a body that's up to what you're supposed to have in Hollywood," she says, dismissively. You wonder whether she's dressed down - hair tied back messily, what must be a Marks & Sparks cardie - to prove the point, but it doesn't work. Her dark, intense eyes are all it takes.

So what does she make of the Hollywood hype machine that seemed obsessed with propelling her to stardom? "I did suddenly get a lot of attention. All this work got jammed together and came out in one year . . . It kind of flummoxed me, because you're thrown into this publicity machine, but at the end of the day it's up to the public what they make of the actor they see on the screen. I don't think a studio can tell them that somebody is meant to be a star."

She tries equally gallandy when asked if she feels the LA suits have lost interest since Sabrina. "They talk about these lists, `A' list or `B' list. I don't even know what list I'm on. Am I on a list?" she says.  "Obviously there are women above you who are being offered roles first. I guess that because I'm not in LA constantly, I'm not aware of the doors that have closed. I am aware that maybe the films that I've done since Legends haven't been as successful, but they haven't been the failures that some people make out."

Ormond is in agreement that she shares certain characteristics with Smilla Jasperson. "I think I can open my mouth before I've really thought it through. And I know I can be quite tough." And difficult? She frowns. "You know, I've asked people why I've got a reputation for being difficult. They say, `It's not from anyone you've worked with.' So who's it from then? It is something that concerns me." As for journalists, she ventures, "they find me difficult because they'll push on personal stuff and I'll just say no."

So we don't talk about her brief marriage to actor Rory Edwards, or her recent reported affair with Gabriel Byrne, a co-star on Smilla. When I ask her what her brothers (three) and sister do, she politely insists, "I don't talk about them, because they haven't chosen the profession I have. But they're all great." Her stance is fair enough, especially since she seems to be someone who values friendship, whose pals "are old established friends who aren't doing the same things as I'm doing" - someone who, at 32, misses relationships others take for granted.

"Sometimes I come back and people have moved on and they know about each other and what they've been doing," she says, "and I feel a little bit out on a limb."

She's in similar vein when talking about The Barber Of Siberia, an unusual story about turnof-the-century Russia, which was directed by Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt By The Sun) in Siberia, Moscow, Portugal and Prague. "It was great. And it was gut-wrenching when it finished. It was such a good experience, especially with most of the crew being Russian, you look around you in the weeks that lead up to finishing and think, I'm never going to see them again. And that's really sad.

"Nikita is just brilliant," she continues. "A genius. The way that he constructs things is so beautiful and there's so much care and integrity. He came up with something extraordinary every day, for a whole year." She'd love to work with Mikhalkov again, Woody Allen, do more improvisation. And she'd like to do comedy. "I've done an awful lot of characters, for the last nine years or whatever, who either commit suicide or die of a disease or go crazy, and it does effect you. So many of my friends say, Julia, please do something where we don't have to break open the tissues."'

But for the time being she's concentrating on her production company, Indican (independents, in the can), with which she has a first look deal with Fox Searchlight. "I've always wanted to get involved with the other side of things, developing the script and looking for material, and not being so dependent on stuff that comes your way," she says. That doesn't mean vanity projects in which to star. She's currently working on her first feature as producer, a Harold Pinter adaptation of an Isak Dinesen story, The Dreaming Child. And at some point she'd like to direct.

Indican's first project was not a feature at all, but Calling The Ghosts, a harrowing documentary about the horrors inflicted on Croatian women in a Serbian death camp, and their brave struggle to tell their stories - with the result that for the first time in history rape was designated a war crime. The two women making Calling The Ghosts had approached Ormond for a voiceover, but found not only a producer and fundraiser, but a very vocal supporter for the film. "The documentary's so moving. It tells the story on a human level, and it puts you in their shoes and you do think, There but for the grace of god go I," says Ormond.

Calling The Ghosts is one key to unravelling the enigma ofJulia Ormond, who has taken the opportunities Hollywood offered while retaining an intelligence and sensibility all her own. Like Smilla, she's hard to categorise - and has no qualms about taking on (if not biting) the hand that feeds her. While we're waiting for the bill, Ormond tells me about a summer job she had while at college, at Tie Rack. "The guy who owned Tie Rack used to test the managers in each different shop by coming in and shoplifting; if you didn't catch him, everybody got fired," she says. "He came into the Heathrow store once and I recognised him and he took this whole row of ties and walked out with them. I ran after him and said, `Are you looking at those in a better light, sir?' I think I was the first person in the history of Tie Rack to do a citizen's arrest on the owner."