HARPER’S BAZAAR UK – I am sitting in the basement of a glamorous London hotel chatting to Gemma Arterton over paper cups of tea. She is make-up free in black jeans, a jumper and a pair of ‘ancient old Chelsea boots’, and is mesmerisingly beautiful. We are supposed to be concentrating on her astonishing performance as Tara, a married mother of two in The Escape, a film in which the dialogue was entirely improvised and for which Arterton, also a co-producer, has won Bazaar’s coveted award. But her joie de vivre makes it difficult to remember we are not just there to have fun. And Arterton is fun, whether exclaiming over homemade coffee cake or choosing a deliciously sparkly pair of Jimmy Choos for the upcoming fashion shoot. This is not to imply that she doesn’t take her work seriously; a good word to describe her approach to acting is ‘dedication’. She researches, she reads, she visits locations, she asks questions, she listens. Her interest in everything she takes on, her sincerity and her warmth all inform the intelligence with which she approaches her work.

Although only 32, Arterton is a professional lifetime away from those inevitable post-Quantum of Solace, lace and lipstick offers to play what she describes as ‘sexy girl in this and sexy girl in that’. Over the past decade her roles on both stage and screen read like a cast-list of factual and fictional female stand-outs, a multifaceted pageant from the past, a sequence of the tragic and the triumphant, the misunderstood and the wise. They have included Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the Duchess of Malfi, a Dagenham Ford-worker activist, Joan of Arc and Nell Gwynn. Her gorgeous depiction of Marilyn Monroe’s innocence and knowingness in Sky Arts’ ‘UrbanMyths’ series focused on the 47 takes Monroe needed to say ‘It’s me, Sugar’ in Some Like It Hot. More recently, Arterton has played the poet Vita Sackville-West and a reclusive writer in World War II in Summerland, and will soon take on the enigmatic 1960s singer Dusty Springfield (Arterton loves to sing).