Mary-Louise Parker tells a story she once read about an actress ("I won't say her name because that would be really cunty") and a plate of broccoli, a story that she says epitomises much of what's wrong with famous folk. "She was being interviewed over lunch and she sent back her steamed broccoli three times. Three times. If it's not right once, then it's not right, and I guess it's OK to send it back. And if it's not right a second time and you really want broccoli, then maybe it's fine. But three times? Either eat it or don't. They said she was really polite, but how can you be? And how can the chef make it right? I was like, 'It's broccoli, babe!' It wasn't even as if it was a steak."
Similarly, when she rages about Los Angeles, she's thoroughly captivating. "In LA, I have to go out like I'm having an interview, all made up. You walk into a restaurant and everyone turns to see if you're famous and, if you're even marginally famous, they stare like you're on TV and you can't see them. In New York, I go out looking like I just woke up and no one looks at you in a restaurant. Or if they do, they don't care."
Odd, then, that Parker has a dash of the prima donna about her. Stalking into the hotel suite in which we are to do the interview, she surveys the room with undisguised disdain, a certain weariness. She looks every inch the American actress - which is to say, like a regular woman, but scaled down by about a third. With wide eyes, porcelain skin and lots of hair, she's on killer heels and has a stare to match. It is unleashed whenever an out-of-bounds subject looms. Perhaps understandably, these include her relationship with actor Billy Crudup, the father of her three-and-a-half-year-old son, who left her after almost eight years - when she was seven months pregnant - to take up with Claire Danes. For now, though, the Arctic gaze is in check. As I discover, she has two settings: glacial and genial, with few degrees in between.
Parker is one of those actors who is instantly recognisable, if not immediately placeable. A veteran of indie films, she has only occasionally strayed towards the movie mainstream, with the likes of Fried Green Tomatoes, Bullets Over Broadway and Romance and Cigarettes to her name. She is best known for her TV work. In 2004, she won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing the Valium-addled wife of a closeted gay lawyer in Angels in America, Mike Nichols' TV adaptation of Tony Kushner's Aids epic, shown here on Channel 4. But she is probably most recognised for her Emmy-nominated performance as tough Amy Gardner in The West Wing. A women's rights activist, Amy became chief of staff to Stockard Channing's First Lady and a love interest for Josh Lyman. Amy was only supposed to be a minor guest character, but West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin was so impressed with Parker, he turned Amy into a recurring one. Plans to make the character a regular were, apparently, thwarted only by Parker's pregnancy. Her face melts at mention of Sorkin.
"Every time I got a script, it was like opening a present. The West Wing was one of those shows in which the female characters weren't sidekicks or addendums to men. With Amy, I really conceived of her in a strong way after that first episode. I went shopping with the costume designer and I wanted these high boots and sexy clothes because I wanted her to be sexy because she was political. I wanted to show that you could be both and that one fed the other."
She is friends with Alison Janney, who played CJ, and Janel Moloney, who played Donna. In what must be a delight to behold - if a little bizarre - the trio regularly have girls' nights out in Los Angeles. She prefers New York, of course, where her theatre career has included a Tony-winning turn in 2001 in the Broadway production of Proof.
Parker, born in South Carolina in 1964, is in London to publicise the second series of Weeds. She won the best actress Golden Globe last year for her portrayal of Nancy Botwin, a suburban widow who deals marijuana to maintain the lifestyle to which she and her sons have become accustomed. Weeds is a darker Desperate Housewives, the engaging story of a family interrupted by grief and struggling to get by in a world ruled by aspiration and keeping up appearances. Undeniably soapy but rarely saccharine, it is also a sharp satire on suburbia - the lengths to which residents go to fit in, the ways they intoxicate themselves to distract from the emptiness and uniform superficiality of their existence. Parker was offered the role of Susan in Desperate Housewives, but turned it down. "I wouldn't normally say, because I think it's rude to the other actors, but Teri [Hatcher, who plays Susan] has said it. It's been really fantastic and it's worked great for her but it didn't feel like my part."
So what of Nancy? Parker wrinkles her perfectly pert nose. She had something of a falling-out with Weeds' creator, Jenji Kohan, over the direction the drama was going: "For me, it got aggressively comic, while I favoured the last few episodes of the second season when it got darker." They have now reconciled, although it sounds more ceasefire than armistice. Still, she isn't overly enamoured by Nancy. "I play her, but I don't know that I'd hang out with her. I think she's repressed. She has this enormous sadness and she hasn't found any way to express it. It manifests itself in a general numbness, which allows her to do the things that she does. If she was thinking about her kids properly, would she put them in the jeopardy she does? She doesn't reflect much, so she makes grave mistakes." Like most of the characters in the show, Nancy is a narcissist, doing what she feels she has to do in order to get on. "If you study most people, they are going to look a bit lost. I think we're all a bit lost in the world. The way I conceived Nancy was that she was greatly loved and was suddenly robbed of that."
Now it is tempting to bring up Crudup but, perhaps sensing that that door has been opened, Parker turns chilly again. With frostbite a distinct possibility, we return to Weeds, to which Parker is contracted for another four years. It provides security and a schedule to suit her as she raises her son, William, solo. "It's four months out of the year and I do try to keep it to a minimum because I want to be with my son. Having said that, I've been trying to work a lot now in the hiatus because when he's older I don't want to work while he's at school."
So alongside Weeds, she has starred opposite Brad Pitt in the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride, for which she was nominated for yet another Emmy, and Small Tragedy, a film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Patricia Clarkson. Her fierce personality is matched, it seems, by an ardent work ethic.
"I spend a lot of time around little kids and I see little acts of generosity that are inherent in some children and not in others. It makes me wonder: people are really out for themselves, in a way. It makes me worry for my son, of course. I think, 'Oh God, some girl's gonna be mean to him, or what if he breaks an arm?' I think about those little things. But you also know that you need that as well. A lot of what's happened, the worst things that have happened to me in my life are ... you know ..." The things you learn most from? "It's part of your story and you have a bigger story. It's about having compassion for your torturers, for people who do you harm."
Such compassion is hard, surely? "It's a muscle," Parker says, positively warmly. "You have to
work it".
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