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Vomiting down men's shirt fronts and starring in a movie about bingo seems an odd route to megastardom. But Kelly Macdonald knows exactly what she's doing ...

Hollywood legend has it that Lana Turner was "discovered" in a drug store. Scottish movie lore has it that Kelly Macdonald was first spotted working as a waitress. Like most such myths, it contains a germ of truth, but Macdonald wants to set the record straight. "I wasn't working at the time," she protests when I ask her how she came to be plucked from obscurity to have Ewan McGregor to breakfast in Trainspotting. "I was unemployed. I'd left my job a couple of weeks before." Besides, she grumbles, it's not as if she's the only waitress who's ever taken up acting. "People keep clinging on to that."

Macdonald patiently explains her first teetering steps into the movie business. It's a story she has clearly told many times before. She was given a flyer to go along to an open audition. She didn't know who Danny Boyle or Irvine Welsh were or what Trainspotting was, but thought the audition would be good preparation for drama school. The rest is history. "So I missed out on the whole drama school thing, for which I'm now very grateful." Macdonald is five foot three. Her hair is brown, her eyes are hazel. She doesn't really conform to the stereotype of a movie star at all. She has a very toothsome smile. She wears hardly any make-up. There is no aloofness and hardly a hint of glamour about her. It doesn't really come as a surprise when she says that her next film is going to be shot in Wales rather than Hollywood. "It's called House and it's about bingo, not dance music," she explains. "It's a very light comedy which makes you think of Brassed Off ... it's about people in a community struggling away and still smiling." It's a Sunday morning and Macdonald is to be found at a smart hotel in West Berlin. The event is unimaginatively called Shooting Stars, organised by the city's film festival as a kind of supermarket for young talent. Seventeen other young European actors and actresses are sitting alongside her with their arms folded and their legs crossed. Journalists and photographers scrutinise them as if they are organic avocados. She is somewhere on the right of the group, blushing mightily. We see a montage of clips from her films. We hear Ben Kingsley deliver an interminable speech, praising Macdonald and her colleagues in the kind of fulsome language that only Ben Kingsley ever uses. "Every actor will chip into the stone of his subconscious and out will come some extraordinary fossilised creature," he says as Macdonald squirms beside him. Kingsley likens her and the other unfortunates (who hail from Iceland, Portugal, Greece and just about everywhere else) to snakes. "There is a serpent curled inside each of them which will slowly unfurl in character after character, story after story," he announces. Macdonald looks as if she is sitting next to a madman. As an exercise in embarrassment, this toe-curling bash would be hard to trump. Nevertheless, it was a reminder that Macdonald really is one of the most sought-after young actresses in the UK. She entered popular consciousness via the ubiquitous Trainspotting poster then disappeared just as fast when Stella Does Tricks died a silent death. Then she re-emerged in Elizabeth and, over the next year, we're likely to see at least four of her new films. She is in Gregg Araki's Splendor (which had its world premiere in Sundance recently), My Life So Far (the latest effort from Hugh Hudson and David Puttnam), and Phil Joanou's Entropy. She also has a cameo in Mike Figgis' new movie, The Loss Of Sexual Innocence (which received its European premiere in Berlin earlier this month). Like most Figgis films (with the possible exception of The Browning Version), this is wildly and wilfully experimental. Macdonald, who admits that she didn't really have a clue what the film was about, plays a precocious Geordie schoolgirl. The first time we see her, she is at a funeral. Five minutes into the film, she is tipsy on wine and whisky, and lying in bed with a strange man on whose purple shirt she vomits. When she next appears, it is to engage in heavy petting with Jonathan Rhys Meyer on the sitting room carpet. This time round, she is interrupted by her spluttering, ailing father. That's the last we see of her. "What an actress this girl is," Figgis rhapsodises about her. "She has all the right instincts and never oversells a thing ... she has a rare spark." Macdonald had to moonlight from Elizabeth to work on the movie. As in Trainspotting, she is only on screen for a matter of minutes, spends most of those snogging, but still makes an indelible impression. She also gets the Tyneside brogue spot on. Jimmy Nail would be proud of her. (Macdonald is an an excellent mimic who has always been good at accents. She admits that she sometimes pretends to be a Scouser when she goes shopping at the supermarket and that nobody ever calls her bluff.) Star stories are meant to be gilt-edged fables. Macdonald's exemplary rise abounds in both hardship and lucky breaks, two key elements that make for a great legend. Before Trainspotting, she was skint. Even now, she sometimes has long lulls between roles. "But I've been lucky in that the people I've been working with have been accomplished or up-and-coming filmmakers. I haven't felt forced into any films by agents. I've gone with my gut most of my time." Macdonald, who was born in Glasgow in 1976, left Eastwood High School without completing her Highers. Without the intervention of Spud she would not even have had an agent: Ewen Bremner, her co-star in the film, was so impressed with her performance that he recommended her to Michelle Braidman Associates, who have been representing her ever since. Macdonald has gone on to appear alongside an array of stars. She was Jessica Lange's niece in Des McAnuff's Balzac adaptation, Cousin Bette (in which her close friend and fellow Scot Laura Fraser also starred); she shared the screen with a certain Eric Cantona in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth. She has Gina McKee (Our Friends In The North, Naked) as her mum in The Loss Of Sexual Innocence. Her protective agent may sometimes question her choices, but if Macdonald is set on a project, she'll never stand in the way. Michelle Braidman (who sounds like a solicitous aunt when I speak to her on the telephone) didn't want her to make Gregg Araki's Splendor. Given Araki's reputation as the edgiest, worst-behaved and most iconoclastic director on the US indie scene, this is hardly a surprise. Even Araki's British producer, Graham Broadbent, sounds a little wary of him. "Greg veers off into some real weird territory ... he's like a box of fireworks that you never know when is going to go off." Macdonald isn't intimidated by him in the slightest. "He's in his thirties, but he looks as if he's about 16. He's very enthusiastic. His films always look fantastic, but Splendor is very different from his other work. It's got more of a storyline and pays more attention to character." Ask Macdonald, who is now London-based, whether she plans to move back to Scotland when (and if) Sean Connery builds his long-awaited studio, and she sounds equivocal. "I don't want to do just Scottish films," she says. "I'm only 23. I moved down to London because I think it's important for anybody, no matter what they do, to live in a different city and soak up different things." She delayed her departure to dirtytown until she felt "emotionally able and confident enough to do it". She goes back to Glasgow to see her folks whenever she can, but claims she is just as likely to live abroad as to return to Scotland. "I might move to France or New York - I hope I get to live in different countries." Back at the ghastly Shooting Stars thing, Macdonald finds it in her heart to be upbeat. "I think it's a really great idea. It's great to be seen by producers, directors and writers, and to meet the other actors." She manages not to cringe when she is introduced as: "AND FROM THE UK - KELLY MACDONALD!" She bounds on to the stage to a round of lukewarm applause from the jaded crew of corporate sponsors and freeloaders who attend such events. Only one group pays anything more than desultory attention. The photographers are keener to take her picture than anybody else's.

Copyright 1999
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