When I arrive at the Haymarket theatre, I am given the key to Anna Friel's dressing room and told to wait. The leading lady is having a bad day, explains the stage doorman. She's dropped her iPhone into a glass of water and is running at least half an hour late. Time enough then for me to breathe in the history, and worry slightly about the whereabouts of the Haymarket's resident backstage ghost.

The dressing room, where John Gielgud lived during the Blitz, looks like a vintage clothes shop. Tiny high-heeled shoes clutter the floor, and a mobile clothes rail is taken up with dozens of tea dresses. More frocks are suspended from the picture rail, and a flock of feathered hats roosts on a coat stand. It is with these accoutrements that canny Anna does a nightly catwalk show for the waiting paparazzi; barely a day goes by without her making the papers. There are also dozens of bouquets of white flowers and good- luck cards, as well as a letter from Ian McKellen in pride of place on her dressing table.

'Is anybody in there?' a querulous voice says, interrupting my investigations, and Anna finally appears, dishevelled and apologetic, complaining about the iPhone debacle. It takes a strong cup of tea with half a basin of sugar in it to restore her composure.

I'd been wondering whether her prolonged sojourn in LA might have blunted her downto-earth edge. Monogram Watercolor Handags Replica She's been living there for the past two years, having won the lead role in Pushing Daisies, an off-beat TV comedy drama in which she played a dead girl resurrected by her miracle-working pie-maker boyfriend. This unlikely sounding show became a huge hit and Anna was nominated for a Golden Globe and found herself the toast of Hollywood.

Occasionally, sinister-sounding reports have filtered back home. There have been rumours of a keen exercise habit, obsessive workouts on the Power Plate in her trailer, and gleaming dentistry. I'm rather relieved to see that she looks pretty much as usual, that is to say, petite and fragile with large brown eyes and ripples of chestnut hair, and ridiculously young-looking to be 33 and the mother of a four-year-old, Gracie. But what has changed is her allegiance to Blighty. Initially, she carted tea bags and Fawlty Towers DVDs with her whenever she went, and insisted on a Northern nanny for little Gracie so she wouldn't develop an American accent. Ironically, it's Anna's own voice that seems to have metamorphosed, her flat vowels lost in a voice that swoops from BBC to pure LA.

Her scepticism about living in America has undergone a similar change. When she Chanel Replica first headed over there in her early twenties, it seemed like minutes before she scuttled back to England with her tail between her legs. 'I didn't feel rooted because I didn't have a job, a house or friends,' she says. 'I remember my agent saying to me, "You've got to toughen up if you want to brave it out here. You can't take everything so personally." I did become oversensitive, wondering why parts didn't work out. It's easy to look at the negatives rather than the positives.'

Going back again ten years later as a star, she has had a very different experience. 'We just have a great lifestyle,' she says. 'I really like my house and the street we live in, which smells of night-time jasmine, and I like my friends.' (She reportedly hangs out with Brit-packers Jonny Lee Miller, Sophia Miles and Lena Headey.) 'The weather makes such a difference. That's why I think there's been such a mass exodus of British actors. They get drawn into this wonderful lifestyle. That and the work. There just isn't enough work here.'