When it comes to playing tortured heroines, the ethereally beautiful Jessica Lange has no equal. Not bad for someone whose first role was as the love interest in 1976's King Kong. Here, as she returns to the London stage, the Oscar-winning actor talks about tattoos, emotional men and why she's drawn to 'characters who walk the edge'

She has a riveting presence, a nervous energy, yet she looks as if she's made an effort to be nondescript. Non-fashion jeans, blue baggy top, coloured hair, soft and clean but not in a particular style. She has a pussycat nose and feline smile. She's looking at a manicured image of herself that will be used in the first posters to sell the play The Glass Menagerie. She's a little disturbed. She twitches and says in a plaintive voice to the avuncular theatrical impresario Bill Kenwright: "Why do we have this big picture of me? What about the rest of the cast?"

Can it be that she really doesn't get it? That she's the star. She's the sell. She seems self-conscious and I wonder if she's going to be brittle, fragile, snappy. But then there's also a softness to her and a warmth. Kenwright says, "Most actresses would be demanding their picture was made bigger. With her it's the opposite. No razzmatazz, no chauffeur-driven cars. She's very much jeans and T-shirts to the rehearsal, committed to the project."

As she reaches for her water. I see a tattoo on her wrist. It seems incongruous. Jessica Lange, femme fatale, Tennessee Williams ethereal heroine; the last person you'd expect to have a tattoo.

Much later on, when she's more at ease, she tells me randomly that Aperture magazine is publishing some of her photographs. "The camera affords me a kind of anonymity. I like being behind the camera, watching. I've always liked that. I don't like being observed much... and do it for a living." She has a long easy laugh at this admission. Is it because you're not confident in your looks, I say - and instantly wish I hadn't. She was, of course, delectable, gorgeous, and it's not to say that she isn't striking now. But maybe this is all about lost youth. "No, it's not that. You get a period where your face really begins to change. It's one of those transitions and it takes a while to get used to and then you are used to it. I'm going to be 58 in April."

The walk up to Kenwright's office has wall upon wall of theatre posters. Jessica with a Twenties marcel wave and haunted eyes peers out of many of them. This London revival of the Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie will be the fourth time she's worked with him. The first time was when he put on A Streetcar Named Desire. It was Lange's second incarnation of Blanche. Dangerous and vulnerable, Kenwright says: "She was mesmeric. If there are two or three better actresses than Jessica, I've yet to meet them. I'm also very aware that she could be doing movies instead of the London stage, so I'm very grateful."

Perhaps, I suggest, theatre has more range and is more interesting for women in their fifties. "I'm not sure it's to do with my age or the age," Lange says, "but yes, theatre affords much more interesting roles. In movies, if you look at what's come out this year, there's only been Volver, Notes on a Scandal and The Queen that have had interesting parts for women. Fifteen years ago there were many more women's roles that were great. So I'm not sure if it's a natural kind of evolution to do with one's age or whether something has shifted in films, but I can't just make a decision to do a film now because I haven't worked for a year."

She says this with a hollow laugh because in the past this is what she has done. In her film roles she has shone brightest playing neurotic, sexy sirens on the verge of self-destruction. Sometimes they actually destroy themselves, as with Frances Farmer; sometimes they are flecked with a little more sexy survivor spirit. She was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of the tragic country singer Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams (1985). She won her first Oscar in 1982 for Tootsie: she played the sweet-faced love interest of Dustin Hoffman, who spent most of the movie dressed as a woman. Her second was for her role as the super-stressed military wife of Tommy Lee Jones in Blue Sky (1994).

Goldie Hawn famously quipped that there are three ages for actresses: the babe, the district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy. She laughs. "There's definitely an element of that. And the district attorney has never interested me too much, not unless they have a dark secret..." She shakes her head, remembering with amusement, not bitterness: 'There are so many things I shouldn't have done. I mean, quite a few movies.' Like what? "Just, wooh." A warm, gurgling wooh is what she says when she doesn't want to be pinned down but she doesn't want to be brittle or cold.

So she is known for her dark-edged, fragile characters. "Those are the only characters that interest me, those that walk the edge." She's said in the past that she's suffered bouts of depression herself, so maybe connecting to these characters with their exaggerated sense of tragedy is some kind of therapy for her. She once said, "Every time I think about Frances, Blanche and Mary, I think: there but for the grace of God go I." She says, "Yeah, there has been black stuff in me, but I don't allow myself to go there."

She has in fact a couple of films coming up. One is Cheri, an adaptation by the brilliant Christopher Hampton of the story by Colette (which is incidentally being produced by Kenwright). It's about an ageing courtesan and how she tries to hang on to her young lover. Next up will be Grey Gardens, which is the story of the Beales - a wealthy society mother and daughter who were aunt and cousin to Jackie Kennedy. Drew Barrymore is set to play the daughter to Lange's mother in the film, which spans 40 years. Lange ages from 37 to 77.

Lange's movie presence has always had a sweetness and a sadness and Jack Nicholson, who worked with her in 1981 in The Postman Always Rings Twice, has described her as 'a cross between a fawn and a Buick'. She screws her nose up. "That thing's been floating around for 26 years. The Buick's solid survivor spirit and the fawn's... well..." She does an impression with her arms in front of her as a graceful shy fawn, maybe because she can't bring herself to describe herself as a fawn. So is she in touch with her inner Buick or inner fawn? "Inner Buick, definitely. There are extremes in all of us, aren't there?"

It seems that Lange feels comfortable in extremes. She lives now in New York, in the city, but grew up in rural Minnesota. She went to college in Minneapolis, then to New York and then Paris on a pilgrimage to bohemia, a rebellion against her homespun roots. At 20 she married photographer Paco Grande. They had met in an art class in Minneapolis. In Paris she studied mime and dance. She looks dreamy as she recalls it. She came back to New York to be shaken up and down in the paw of the gorilla in the first remake of King Kong. Deeply uncomfortable in bimbodom, she dug herself out of it. A few years later, in 1979, Bob Fosse cast her as the angel of death in his memoir All That Jazz. She was ethereal and he fell in love with her. Next was Mikhail Baryshnikov, the greatest dancer of his age. Then in 1982 she met Sam Shepard on the set of Frances. It seems she was always attracted to genius. He was then mostly acting, but has since become revered as a writer and director.

They are still together but have never married. In fact she has only been married once. Was one husband enough? "It just didn't seem necessary. Sam and I have been together 23 years, so it's not like I don't feel married. The legal thing never seemed important. The commitment is to Sammy. The average marriage lasts seven years. I've done well."

She has only worked with Shepard a couple of times. More often she has acted in plays that he has written. They are usually dark. Exactly the kind of play she likes. She has said before that Frances was her most emotionally demanding role. Beautiful Frances was gorgeously self-destructive, compellingly so. Was it hard to have such a demanding role and have what must have been an emotionally demanding love affair?

"Yes," she laughs. "It was a very vulnerable time, very emotional. There was a lot going on, let's put it that way." She laughs a little more feverishly and you get to sense a bit of the cauldron that must have been going on. She looks to the side as if she's looking at her former self playing it out; a movie of her life, a woman that felt things so acutely but who seems to have grown a thicker skin.

So which was more emotionally demanding? "Playing Frances was definitely more demanding than meeting Sam. Frances was a huge thing to jump into. The affair was fun. A great love affair is a great love affair. They are wonderful." She tosses her hair back. And terrible, I say. "I guess," she says, but not really seeming to identify with that, or at least not choosing to. I had read that, in the past, if her life was too peaceful she liked to use a metaphorical Magimix to mix things up a little. I read that she enjoyed any extreme of emotion as long as it was passionate - either negative or positive, that's how she knew it was love. When I remind her of this she laughs extremely loudly, maybe embarrassed, maybe relieved, maybe just joyful as she conjures that part of herself. "Yeah. I think there was that part of my life, but hopefully that era has come to an end - of wanting everything at high pitch all the time. As you get older the last thing you want is an emotional hurricane, being in the eye of the storm all the time." Did she mix things up on purpose or subconsciously? "I don't know, but certainly mixing things up, although I don't think I've ever been self-destructive."

She says she's never been interested in bad boys, attracted to that kind of damage. "Let's say I've always been interested in very big men. Not big physically, but big emotionally." She's still laughing as she's recalling her own big emotions, a real vicarious thrill from her own past.

You had some great boyfriends, I say. "I sure did." Are you friends with your exes? "Very close. We spend time together. We see each other." Even when you were with one and you left that one for another one? She just giggles. "The main men in my life I'm close with." By this she means her husband Paco Grande. She still refers to him as "my husband." And Baryshnikov, who is the father of her daughter Shura, 25. "I love them dearly. They are good people."

Why do you think things didn't work out? "Oooh,' she says. What she means is: don't go there. "Things change, and when you're young you're kind of careless." Have you changed? "I think, a lot. My children changed me." She has two more with Sam - Hannah, 21, and Walker, 19. "It gives you a perspective that you didn't have before. You are no longer the centre of the universe. It really opened my heart, made me a different person. Every decision you make, every move you make, is with someone else in mind. I never worked when the kids were young, and then they were always with me. Literally on the set, in my dressing room, in the trailer being tutored, always there."

In the beginning of her acting career she felt completed by it. Then she felt completed by her children. At the time when there were the most juicy, sexy roles was the very time she wasn't particularly interested in acting. 'I was always happier when I was with my children. Ninety per cent of the time I'd rather be with my children.' She once said she only wanted one word on her tombstone: "Mother".

When in your life were you most happy? She pauses to give it real thought. "So many different extremes. Those years of living in Paris and being completely free and young, so romantic and exciting. That was a very happy time. And being home and with the family, having my children. That was sublimely happy in a different way. This Christmas I had the whole family together in my cabin in Minnesota and I thought: "I can't remember when I've ever been this happy." Everything about it felt so natural, so pleasurable. Your ideas about happiness change."

So what is your current concept of happy? "Today was a good day. We did good work. We began rehearsals. It's exciting, the beginning of a project. It's pretty simple stuff that makes me happy now. To know that my kids are well and safe. To be with the people I love. And now I think of travelling more and more. I can envisage that now my kids have left home. It allows me that space."

Was it a sad space when they left? "This year was a hard year." There's a sudden change of mood - you feel her inner sadness as opposed to her inner Buick. "My last child went to college, and for the first time in 25 years my day did not revolve around a child. Even when they grew older I was always thinking: 'I've got to get home to cook dinner.' I felt horrible," she says emphatically, as if this is the thing she's most certain about and she somehow enjoys the intensity of this certainty. "It was a huge loss. At first I didn't know what I would do. But I'm getting there. I'm getting better."

The children will come to visit in London and Sam will be directing one of his plays in Dublin for part of the time. His work is often very dark. Is it easy to live with someone who has such darkness, or is he only dark in his writing? "I wouldn't call Sammy easy-going and funny, but everybody has their dark side, and he always does it with a sense of humour. He isn't a dark presence in the home." Maybe she likes a man to be a little brooding? "Yes, a little brooding is all right. But not someone who broods all the time. In recent years I've tried to get to grips with the idea that you can actually choose to be happy. Not if there are extraneous circumstances, things that happen that make you really sad, but you can choose not to let things affect you negatively. I've always had such a quick temper. I realise now it's such a waste of energy. You can actually choose to let things roll off you a little more."

From time to time she dips into Buddhism, from where, no doubt, some of these ideas stem. "It's been a discipline that makes sense more than anything because it's like a science. I've never been a religious person. I've always looked for some kind of spiritual meaning. I didn't grow up going to church. My mother's family were atheists and my father's side was confused. He had been raised Catholic, but did not practise it. His mother converted to Mormonism very late in life, so there was no set religion."

Her father seems one of those men with big emotions. He threw her off the dock to teach her to swim. Was he drunk? "No, it was his way of teaching me. It was scary, but it wasn't like he endangered his children." He gave her the sink-or-swim mentality, the survivor bit, the Buick? "Probably." He certainly gave her an adrenalin rush. "The first time I rode a horse he gave it a smack on the ass and the horse ran off and he expected you to hold on, and I did. Years later I was a pretty good horsewoman, but it wasn't because of that." She laughs, throws her hand up for a stretch and I ask her about the tattoo.

"It has to do with the circular nature of life. I have another tattoo on my hip of a crescent moon. I got that when I arrived in Paris. I went to Bruno's in Pigalle. That was when Pigalle was really Pigalle, you know, sailors and rough trade. You could have the last supper or crucifixion or ships sinking. It had no special meaning except it was the smallest on offer and I'd arrived in Paris and it was great. My oldest daughter has the same Celtic knot." Was it a special bonding? "No, she asked me to come with her because she needed parental approval and that was her way of getting a tattoo without written permission, as she was only 16." So something that was completely random is permanent. She laughs hard in acceptance.

I leave Lange with a great feeling of warmth. She's created an illusion of intimacy. I have the feeling that I know more than she's actually told me. That she has in some way revealed herself, that she has been vulnerable. Kenwright confirms this when he says, "One of her greatest assets is her warmth, the feeling of intimacy that she can create in a theatre." It's not just her fragility or her strength or a mixture of the two that makes her mesmerising, it's her ability to create intimacy on stage and off.
 

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Jessica Lange is back in the West End, reinventing her Broadway role in A Glass Menagerie. But she's more keen to talk of her family and her despair over the Iraq war.

"I'm amazed how many films some people have done," says Jessica Lange, tossing back her tousled blonde hair and stretching out on a comfortable sofa in the residents' bar of the Covent Garden Hotel in London. "I mean, I've only made 25 films in 30 years. So I now realise there's an awful lot of stuff I didn't do."

This is one way the twice Oscar-winning actress - for the supporting role of a soap-opera star in Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman in 1982, and for the mentally unstable wife of Tommy Lee Jones in Blue Sky in 1994 - rationalises her status as a leading lady and an active mother. And she won't itemise the films she missed out on. Because the actress who took the role went on to win an Oscar, right? "Right!" Cue guffaw and sexy curling-up act on the comfy sofa.

You couldn't imagine Lange behaving this way at the Dorchester or Claridges. She's one of those stars who retain their allure while appearing to be just a little low-maintenance. She lives in the real world but travels with a chauffeur. An on-the-record enemy of Botox and all the deceptive wiles of cosmetic surgery, she is now an irreducibly attractive snub-nosed 57-year-old with the fewest of facial lines and the post-middle-aged bonus of an interesting neck and character-marked hands.

She has good taste, too. For a start she's married to Sam Shepard, the playwright and actor who makes even Brad Pitt look a bit of a dog. And she knows - and likes - Bob Dylan (Sam's a big rock and blues muso buddy of Dylan, and an honorary north Londoner)whose latest album is her constant companion: "It's uncanny," she says, "how each album absolutely connects to that exact moment in your life, whatever your age or experience. He's my idol. So is Che Guevara."

Whoa there; this might be too much information already. Next stop, George Bush - but he's definitely not on the dinner-party list: "Being at the mercy of that President for the next two years is going to be really frightening."

A passing West End producer calls at our table and pays suitably deferential respects. Lange is utterly charming with people she doesn't know. Then the minder arrives, the chap who's been ferrying her around London to look at apartments. She sends him away with a lovely smile. She thinks she will end up in Kensington, but Shepard is always going on at her about Hampstead, where he lived in the early 1970s to get away from a New York flop, drugs and his nearly ruinous affair with the high priestess and poet of punk Patti Smith (they remain good friends, for the record).

Lange is missing New York and her three grown-up children, but she seems comfortable for the time being in the West End, where she opens in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie next week. But where - and why - did all that movie work go?

The actress spent a great deal of time with the children as they grew up. Parading down red carpets is not really her designer bag. Even more unusually, she has of late relaunched a not-very-packed stage career that began (and more or less finished) in Paris 30 years ago in a festival of new work at the Opéra Comique ("And I don't even sing, for God's sake"). Yet she is undoubtedly an elite American actress, right up there in the same class - in my view - as Joanne Woodward and Meryl Streep.

How dressed-down she is, how ordinary, and yet how oddly appealing; and what a remarkable bundle of paradoxes. She's a reluctant star, a shy siren, a maternal bohemian, a sensual ice-maiden of Polish and Finnish descent, a political and metropolitan sophisticate rooted in the woods and farmlands of northern Minnesota.

She'd pitched up in Paris with her first husband, the Spanish avant-garde photographer Paco Grande, who kindled her enthusiasm for wielding a camera; she is soon to publish a book of photographs that she describes as "mysterious and emotional". Until then, she had worked in New York as a waitress and model.

She married Grande in 1970, had an affair with Bob Fosse, the director of her first film, All That Jazz, in 1979, and was divorced 1981. That was a crucial period in her life, as her career took off in The Postman Always Rings Twice and she had her first child (with the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov) in New York. In the following year, she played the distraught and destructive Hollywood legend Frances Farmer on film, meeting Sam Shepard on set. She has been with Shepard ever since.

They have two teenage children, both now in college. They have made films together, most recently Wim Wenders' generally reviled Don't Come Knocking, but he has never written a stage role for her. "I tell him it's about time he did, but he never gets round to it. I guess he will one day..." and she trails off in wistful laughter. Shepard keeps a farm in Kentucky - he's really a cars and horses kind of guy - and the couple have recently moved back to New York since Lange's mother died in Minnesota.

The family had lived in Minnesota after prolonged stretches in New Mexico and Virginia. "I made a decision," Lange says, "that I was going to raise my children outside of the industry. I didn't want them inundated with that entire thing about film-making." She so loved child-rearing that a few years ago, in her early fifties, she tried for another pregnancy with the help of fertility treatment. The attempt failed, but she's happily compensated by her first daughter's two little girls.

The tea and fruit scones arrive and she tucks in with gusto. She's about to re-invent the character she played on Broadway two years ago, Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. The play was Williams's first success and his most directly autobiographical play. Amanda is a genteel remnant of the old South, trapped in her memories and trying to manipulate her gauche daughter into a romantic liaison with "a gentleman caller". The play is recounted in past and present tense by Amanda's son Tom, the character based on Williams, who is on the brink of an escape into the artistic life.

In New York, Lange's performance met with mixed reviews from the local critics but was much admired by a few London reporters, including this newspaper's Paul Taylor, who described it as "an exquisite study in the drawling self-deception and oppressive nostalgia of a faded Southern belle". The production by David Leveaux, which overcame the last-minute replacement of the actor who was to play Tom (Christian Slater stepped in), was impressively muted and poetic. Lange's Amanda was steely, self-absorbed, dream-like, floating on a sea of lace jonquils, casually cruel.

The production at the Apollo Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue may see a new take on the drama, as Rupert Goold is now directing and Lange was unhappy with the New York reception. Indeed, her publicists in London are trying to pretend that New York never happened: "It's a new production," snaps one apparatchik, as if we were all now supposed to forget that the producer Bill Kenwright had invited London critics across the pond in the first place. But it is hard to see how Lange can alter her initial performance too much without damaging its special, febrile delicacy and its bottled dynamism, qualities that eluded even the excellent Zoë Wanamaker when she played the role for Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse 10 years ago.

"I love London, and I love London audiences," Lange says, a little pointedly. "I've had two great experiences in London..." - those were her visits here as Blanche DuBois in Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire in 1996 and as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night in 2000 - "... and two not-so-great experiences in New York." She doesn't really know why this should be, but she is wearing the same lucky piece of jewellery she wore as Amanda in New York in this version, and the same Parisian perfume that she has worn for all three great roles.

These Williams and O'Neill characters are all to some extent delusional, injured creatures, a temperamental strain that Lange has gloriously encompassed on celluloid in her performances as the iconic showbiz victims Frances Farmer and Patsy Cline. But she has also plugged straight into hard-core sensuality, not only in that breakthrough performance in Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) opposite Jack Nicholson - who famously said: "Few are the men who do not want to fall at the feet of Jessica Lange" - but also as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, in Julie Taymor's brilliant and bestial Titus (1999).
When she's finished with Williams, she hopes to continue working with Kenwright on a Christopher Hampton film of a novel by Colette. She will then return to Hollywood to make Grey Gardens, a bizarre domestic story of the ruined aristocratic cousins of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, a mother and daughter who were both called Edith Bouvier Beale and were discovered in self-destructive squalor and poverty at the ends of their lives. The material has yielded a Broadway musical hit, but this project predates that. Lange is to play the old crone, opposite Drew Barrymore.

What will this tell us, I wonder, about her country and its role in the world? In a way, I wish I hadn't put this question. She's off - and she's not toeing any PR line. "George Bush really has whipped up the most poisonous scenario of neighbour against neighbour over the war in Iraq. It's disgusting. I can't tell you." But she does. "There were times when it was really lovely to be out there and against the war. But then I had anti-war stickers on my car and some big fucking pick-up with an American flag tried to drive me off the road. It was scary and I was scared."

I suggest that her mood was the result of her rather soft, hippie-liberal Democratic anti-patriotic fervour, and that perhaps she would be a whole lot worse off if President Bush wasn't defending her "way of life" and "civilised" (read privileged) values against the Islamic threat. The suggestion, I have to say, does not go down well. "What? What are you saying here? I thought you were a nice person. My anti-war work started four years ago when the drums were beating. The few of us who really spoke out at the time took such a beating in the press - even the liberal press - and on CNN; I was on a CNN news programme with an arms inspector who had been in Iraq, and we were treated like shit. Everything he said - and it was all factual - has come to pass.

"There was talk at the time of blacklisting - it was the McCarthy era all over again - and a horrible, poisonous atmosphere. Now we are into an escalation of the war, and it's Vietnam all over again. It's gone beyond right or wrong. It's just become lunacy and danger. Especially now they're talking about Iran as the third front. You begin to wonder why we bring children into this world. We're on the precipice. No question."

Lange has worked for five years as an ambassador for Unicef, joining a roster that has included the likes of Peter Ustinov and Roger Moore, but she is refreshingly honest about the impact she might or might not have. "It all depends on when they call you up and whether you can do something, or travel. I'm always happy to do fundraising, press or field trips. I've travelled to Mexico, the Congo and Russia; it's all about when they call on you." On her most recent such trip, she did some fantastic, highly personal work with children infected with HIV.

Lange never wavers in her commitment to family. "Nothing has changed the direction of my life as much as having children," she says. Hers, of course, are now let loose on the American campus system. "I am in a cleft stick at the moment. My last child has just left home. And we've moved back to New York. We've come to a dangerous spot, in more ways than one. Everything Al Gore is working for now [on environmental issues] is worthwhile and worth paying attention to." Really? "Oh yes. I don't have a car any more, for instance." She arrived at the hotel, of course, in a chauffeur-driven car.

Lange is an enigma, an actor who teases with her mixture of seriousness and sexual flippancy. Her role in the great Williams play is similarly elusive: dominant, dependent, bizarre, contained. Is that Jessica Lange? Will she come alive again on stage? "It's you out there, and that's it. You are much more responsible every night than you are on a film set. You can't say, 'Oh, you should have seen what I did!' That's why I love the stage.

"But I love my family more. Nothing has changed my life as much as having children, and nothing is as important to me as the place where I came from, in those old Minnesota woods."

In spite of all her contradictions, Jessica Lange remains touchingly from-the-heart. Amanda in The Glass Menagerie is an offbeat eccentric in some ways, but the actress playing her this time is no less sentimental, if a mite more hard-headed, in a wayward but emotionally centred sort of way. She would rather be with her children any day of the week, even as they grow into adulthood. "And I still really hate that stupid bastard George Bush!" she cries.