What was interesting about Inside I’m Dancing is that, while our society is obviously still full of prejudice, it has an awareness of disability it doesn’t have with mental health. So,” she says, finally pausing for breath, “[at the audition] I banged on in this vein for about 40 minutes! At which point, I think in order to shut me up, they gave me the role.”So now what? I ask her You said you weren’t going to be Nicole Kidman. Just look at Lord Of The Rings: 18 characters and two girls who appear on the poster but are only in the film for two minutes! So it’s really hard to find anything that isn’t somebody’s love interest or the totty, and Calico so wasn’t that.”Lucia was genuinely disturbed and the mental-health aspects are really important. Bryant – her husband and children now dead – was sent back to England for trial.

It is quite a saga of feminine derring-do, and perfect for Garai. And, as with Vanity Fair, Romola Garai once again didn’t even have to audition for the director to give her the part.Perhaps this habit of walking into roles other young actresses would sell their souls for has something to do with a story Garai tells me about her audition for Calico, the West End play that was a fictionalised exploration of the budding but doomed relationship between James Joyce’s daughter Lucia and a young Samuel Beckett.”I was very, very passionate about that part,” Garai says “Cinema has become incredibly male in its perspective. Word has it we’re only going to get Hai, last year’s album by The Creatures (the longest-running and most fruitful side project in rock), a rumour bolstered by the presence of Japanese percussionist and Creatures collaborator Leonard Eto in a band which also includes Sioux’s husband and ever-present drummer Budgie, and Psychedelic Furs guitarist Knox Chandler.Instead, after a couple of Creatures cuts, she indulges and thrills us with Banshees hits like “Happy House”, “Dear Prudence”, “Christine”, “Kiss Them For Me” and “Arabian Nights”.Given the proximity of her roaring greasepaint to the smell of the crowd, she’s necessarily a warmer, friendlier presence than her Ice Queen image would suggest: “I can.. touch you! It’s… Faced with starvation she, her husband, children and two other convicts escaped by rowing 4,000 miles to the Dutch colony of Timor A vengeful British Navy tracked them down.

When she is finished promoting Inside I’m Dancing here and in Venice, she’s off to Australia to shoot Mary Bryant, an ITV drama to air next autumn, in which she plays the titular heroine.Bryant was a 17-year-old Cornish woman sent to Botany Bay on the first penal convoy She had a child on the boat, and another within a year. “She’s got an incredible maturity for her age and comes across as a lot more worldly-wise than you’d expect from someone who is only 22. She’s very intelligent and emotional in her acting, which is really all you can ask for.”"It was amazing to work on something that is, for want of a better word, an ‘issue movie’,” Garai says “It just opens up a can of worms. What you’re dealing with is no longer ‘material’, you’re dealing with politics.