the prime of Miss Gina Bellman

Gina Bellman has never been quite what she seems. The poised actress is the daughter of an East End market trader, and she began school with a Kiwi accent. Now she's on a roll with her comic turn in the BBC's fourth series of 'Coupling', and a handsome movie-star boyfriend.

Just don't mention Dennis Potter, says Allie Byrne

Heads turn when Gina Bellman walks into Raoul's, her local cafe in Little Venice, despite the fact that she is dressed down in jeans and a zip-up cashmere sweater. There's something about her striking, angular face and huge black eyes that is impossible to ignore. However, Gina claims modestly that the attention is because she's a regular. This is surely not the case: her BBC sitcom Coupling, the British answer to Friends from the makers of Men Behaving Badly, gets millions of viewers and Blackeyes had her on the front pages of most tabloids when it came out in 1989. 'Someone did recognise me the other day from Blackeyes. I was amazed. I can't believe people still remember it.' It is hardly surprising that Blackeyes stayed in the public consciousness. The drama, which was written and directed by Dennis Potter, had as its theme the exploitation of women. In it, 22- year-old Gina played a promiscuous model, a part that required her to engage in the most explicit sex scenes on TV at the time. In a Potter twist, the model was a fictional male fantasy. The press frenzy was stoked by tabloid rumours that Dennis Potter was obsessed with his protegee. In a biography of Potter, Humphrey Carpenter dwells on the relationship, but Gina sighs when I bring it up: 'Dennis Potter said playfully in one interview that he had to fall a little bit in love with the actress who played his creation,' she says. 'He was just being mischievous. But the words were out there and people ran with them and all of a sudden he was in love with me. There was no resonance in that original comment.' After this scandal, Gina stayed off the front pages.

She was still getting work, although not until Coupling did she have a major role on TV. Zany bisexual Jane from Coupling is one of TV's most popular characters. 'People sometimes perceive me as serious and composed, so it's fun to surprise them and play someone who is quirky and outrageous.'

According to one of her co-stars, Jack Davenport, working with Gina is a unique experience: 'Gina has to play this demented surreal character. She has to keep finding new ways to be funny and weird.

She does, and always with great style.' He isn't the only person who appreciates her comic talents the fourth series of Coupling is about to be shown on BBC2 and has just won Best Comedy at the Comedy Awards. It's a cult hit on BBC America, whereas the American version on NBC bombed. There are even billboards of Gina and her co-stars (among them Sarah Alexander) plastered across the US. 'A friend called from New York to say he can't leave the house without seeing posters of me on every bus stop. I get a thrill from hearing that.' Gina's career doesn't consist solely of Blackeyes and Coupling, though.

Over the years she has appeared alongside Richard Gere in King David and in Silent Trigger with Dolph Lundgren. On stage her choices have been eclectic, from Ophelia in Peter Hall's Hamlet to Janet (opposite Ade Edmondson) in The Rocky Horror Show. She was also cast against type as Marilyn Monroe in Terry Johnson's awardwinning play Insignificance. 'The frustrating thing about this business is people want you to fit snugly into a type. There's nothing I like more than breaking down preconceptions.' One critic wrote: 'Bellman's Marilyn is a virtuoso portrait of generosity, loneliness, loss and pain.' Gina Bellman, now 37, appears, and sounds, like a woman from a privileged family. Intriguingly, she is not quite what she seems. She was born in New Zealand to Russian-Polish-Jewish working-class parents who emigrated there from London's East End in the Fifties. 'I didn't move to the UK until I was 11. Before we left my parents got a TV so we could watch Coronation Street as our introduction to England. My two brothers and I thought when we got off the boat we were going to be living next to the Rovers Return.' For a girl who had spent her childhood in the open spaces of Auckland, moving to suburban London was hard.

'Coming here from New Zealand had a profound, traumatic effect on me,' she says. One good thing did come from Gina's feelings of dislocation.

'When I got to school, I was teased because of my Kiwi accent. I asked to go to an elocution teacher, who was also a drama coach and agent.

My accent changed and I got the acting bug. I saw acting as a passport to interesting people and new places. There is an element of joining the circus each time I get a job. I am attracted to people who share my quest for culture. As a child I didn't have access to art, music or theatre. I was hungry for culture. My father was a retailer and wholesaler he still runs a market stall. I didn't get a job the other day because they thought I was too posh, which is hilarious considering my entire family are Cockney.' Her own received pronunciation voice is far from Cockney. I wonder what her family make of her reinvention? 'I think they have always tolerated me being different with mild amusement,' she says. However, Gina is not the only ambitious member of her family: one brother is a record producer who has just released the new Kool and the Gang album and the other is a property developer.

I first met Gina eight years ago through friends. To me, her life has never been better. On the home front, she is clutching the details of the flat she has just exchanged on in Little Venice. 'I need cook books. It has a huge kitchen. I am finally upgrading from the tiny flat that I bought in my twenties.' Gina's boyfriend, the American actor Sam Rockwell, has been filming in London since November. Sam, 35, whose credits include Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and The Green Mile, has been doing two films back to back: Piccadilly Jim and now Disney's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

When I ask Gina how they met, she blushes and whispers, 'This is going to sound like the biggest namedrop of all time.' George Clooney hosted an engagement dinner for Mariella Frostrup, who has since married the lawyer Jason McCue. 'Mariella said to me, "OK. There are two single men coming: George Clooney and Sam Rockwell. Who do you want to sit next to?"

"What's Sam like?" I asked her.

"Really talented, scruffy, New York actor." "Sounds just my type. Can I sit next to him?" ' Her relationship with Sam is obviously very happy. In the past, she had a relationship with the documentary maker Nick Broomfield, but they broke up just after his infamous Courtney Love documentary.

He is still a friend. 'I do have a history of long-distance relationships.

I am fiercely independent. Sam's a kindred spirit in that way but we are really enjoying life in the same city. We have a lot in common.

We spend weekends wandering around galleries.

I am passionate about contemporary art. He has educated me about film.

This spring we have both been working full-on. We are not outofwork actors, contemplating our navels. Not that he doesn't have a very nice navel!' What about the future? 'Sam is set to do five months on Broadway in a play to be directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and, weirdly, I have just been offered a film out there. So it does feel like the fates are shining down on us.' Gina has done various stints in LA and says: 'You have to take those trips with a pinch of salt. In America you have to be good at grooming, wear the right clothes, have "work done". We don't have that pressure to have Botox over here.' She would, however, love to work in the right sort of American television: 'But you get sent ideas for laughably bad projects. Women cops on Rollerblades?

Maybe exciting to them!' For years, Gina and Mariella were a girlie double act, out and about in London, rarely with men in evidence. Just like her character in Coupling. 'I want children and I'm sure that will happen, but to my parents' chagrin, I've never felt the strong urge to have a wedding. After all, I get to dress up and be in the spotlight every day at work,' she explains.

Until then, Gina will be living as she has for the past two decades: working and having fun in London. Much of that fun involves trawling for antiques and dragging friends round flea markets. Her friend, the actress Beatie Edney, sums her up: 'She has great style and is effortlessly elegant. She looks good without spending a fortune on clothes like the rest of us.' 'Well,' responds Gina, 'I sometimes go mad and buy a Prada dress, say, but I am a born rummager.

I buy from a second-hand shop called Wellingtons in St John's Wood.' She takes me to Wellingtons. It's a teeny shop stuffed with racks of designer clothes. Within two minutes, Gina has spotted a pink floaty Ungaro dress, for Pounds 99. She looks a million dollars. 'This feels like the time of my life,' she says as she leaves. I can see why: an award-winning TV show, the best theatre performance of her career, a new home and madly in love with a movie star. No wonder she's smiling.

The fourth series of Coupling starts on Monday on BBC2 at 9pm

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