Madeleine Stowe: 'If it's worth a damn, it's done in Europe'

Madeleine Stowe has made an awful lot of money in Hollywood. So much, in fact, that she once forgot to cash a cheque for $35,000. So what is she doing shooting a low-budget film in Britain? Geoffrey Macnab meets the actress to find out

It's a rule of thumb that when Hollywood stars' careers begin to falter, they come to Britain. That's why we saw Bette Davis in a Hammer horror film (The Nanny) and Judy Garland as an over-the-hill chanteuse in I Could Go on Singing. It's also – perhaps – why Madeleine Stowe has accepted an unlikely role as a mum in peril who loses her daughter to a religious cult in a lowish-budget, British-made teen thriller, Octane, directed by newcomer Marcus Adams. The film has just started shooting and on the afternoon I meet her, Stowe is talking up a project far removed from the films that made her sought-after in the first place: films such as The Last of The Mohicans, Short Cuts, Twelve Monkeys and The General's Daughter. And even Impostor (released today).

"My character [in Octane] has a very short fuse, she's a drug addict and an insomniac and very high-strung," she cheerfully explains as a make-up artist brushes her lustrous dark hair. "I thought it was a very bold choice, trying to hang a thriller on a woman with these qualities. She's also trying to hang on to her daughter, but her daughter is rebelling against her." Sitting out of the sun in a tent, wearing a short red dress, she certainly doesn't look like a neurotic, drug-addicted insomniac, but there's something disconcerting about her face. Her skin seems stretched unnaturally tight and her mouth is slightly askew.

The Californian-born Stowe is an actress almost by default. As a child, she studied to become a concert pianist. Her venerable Russian tutor, Sergei Tarnowsky, clearly had faith in her. He had taught Vladimir Horowitz at the Kiev Conservatory; then fled Russia in the wake of the Stalinist terror and eventually decamped to the US. She was one of his last students. He gave her lessons from his death bed, getting her to play while he listened behind a trellis. When he finally died, at the age of 96, she quit.

A simple question about what attracted her to classical music prompts a monologue about her miserable childhood. "I did it initially because I loved it. Then, during my teen years, I was so unpopular that it was humiliating to be doing the same things as the other kids. I always had piano as an excuse. I could say, 'I've got to go home and practise'." She can still play "a couple of Mozart concertos" from memory, but her skills have largely deserted her. "I was an interpreter, not a natural. I look at Chopin's Nocturnes and I realise I learned every one of them, but it's all Greek to me now."

Stowe paints a remarkably negative picture of herself as an adolescent. She was "scrawny" at a time when California boys were only interested in "the blonde-haired, buxomy types". She was "probably an incredible bore". She had stick-like legs. She wasn't bullied and did have friends, but "they were not the ones I told myself I should be friends with. We were all the girls who didn't have dates." The more self-deprecating she becomes, the more she sounds like the 11-year-old misfit heroine from Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse. She admits that she was vain, very critical, and that she always knew deep down she was "special".

When beautiful movie stars embark on confessions about how gauche they were as kids, it's hard not to suspect that they're spinning a line dictated by some crafty publicist. After all, the myth of the ugly duckling transformed remains as potent as ever. Lana Turner, the most famous example, was reputedly discovered at the age of 15 in Schwab's Drugstore in Hollywood. Stowe's "lucky break" sounds almost as unlikely. Once she gave up her dream of being a concert pianist, she studied journalism at the University of Southern California. She was handing out programmes at a theatre when an agent spotted her and asked her if she wanted to act. She said yes – and her career was launched.

Now in her mid-forties, Stowe accepts that her standing in Hollywood is not what it was. "Am I doing the things that Gwyneth Paltrow or Nicole Kidman are doing? No, that's not part of it." She continues to work regularly in both mainstream and independent films, but is openly disdainful of the films the US studios have been making in recent years. That's why she was so keen to work in Europe. "Anything that's worth a damn is done over here."

She has never been bashful about complaining when film-makers let her down. And she isn't reticent about attacking the in-built sexism in Hollywood. "What bothers me most is when they tut-tut and say I'm being a little too abrasive, when if a man did that, they'd embrace that quality."

Over the years, however, she has become philosophical about an industry in which women are still invariably paid less than men. "It would be wonderful to make $20m a movie, but what do you do with it? It would be wonderful to establish a foundation like Paul Newman did, but on a personal level, what do I need? I lead a beautiful life. I have a closet full of clothes that I never wear."

She tells an anecdote which, she claims, sums up her attitude to money. A while ago, she was driving a friend in her car. The friend put her foot on a piece of paper. It turned out to be a $35,000 (£24,000) cheque for Stowe's overtime on The Last of the Mohicans. She had dropped it and forgotten all aboutit. "My friend looked at the date and saw it was eight months old. She thought I was incredibly distorted. But it wasn't that. I just wasn't thinking of it."

Between jobs, Stowe holes up on the Texas "dude" ranch she shares with her husband, the actor Brian Benben, and daughter. It's a working ranch, but it runs at such a loss that she may one day rue those misplaced cheques. "The joke is, you ranch until it's all gone. It's an expensive hobby. The only way you make money is if you have oil on your property." What do they make of her in the Lone Star State? "They allow me to fit in because I'm a novelty."

Texas has inspired her to become a screenwriter. Prompted by her friend Randall Wallace (who directed her in We Were Soldiers), she has just completed her first screenplay – an epic Western set in the 19th century. She aims to produce and appear in it, even though The Western isn't a genre of which she has fond memories. In 1994, she appeared alongside Drew Barrymore and Andie MacDowell in the ill-starred cowgirl adventure, Bad Girls.

"That was a terrible, terrible movie," she says with a certain morbid glee. The original director, Tamra Davis, was sacked days after shooting began. Jonathan Kaplan (a director she'd worked with before) was brought in to complete the film. He turned what was intended as a feminist Western into a Roger Corman-style exploitation pic. "There's really nothing I can say about the experience that is positive, except that it brought me to Texas."

For all her love of the state, there's an arrogance about Texans that irritates her. She also disapproves of the ease with which Texan kids can get hold of guns, and is educating her daughter in LA as a result. Not that Hollywood is her kind of town, either. Even now, after more than 20 years as an actress, she still feels out of place there. "I go to certain Hollywood functions and I have exactly the same discomfort as I did when we were having lunch at school. People would be standing around, thinking about who they would be sitting next to, and I would always be on the outside."

'Octane' is due for release next year