Are we about to witness a diva fit? In the flesh she looks amazing: so tanned and blonde that everyone else in the photographer’s studio seems washed out. But even the most level-headed actress can go a bit bonkers on a photo shoot. She studies the digital images of herself with a critical eye “My features are quite pointy,” she laughs “It’s my Cleopatra-esque nose. There are moments in Nip/Tuck where there’s a side shot of me and I think, ‘Look at the size of that nose!’”

With her strange, arresting beauty Richardson is a genuine one-off. At 5ft 9in, she is Amazonian compared with the average Hollywood waif. “I don’t go along with this theory of the sanitised version of women, that we all have to be moulded to look like people we see in magazines,” she insists. “This obsession with the Stepford Wives’ look is frightening.” Which makes her latest role as the wife of a Hollywood plastic surgeon in the adult TV drama, Nip/Tuck, deliciously ironic casting.
Significantly, she agreed to do Nip/Tuck not just because of the satirical strength of the scripts, but because she saw the show as a drama “about flawed human beings who are desperately searching for something.

The director sees plastic surgery as the externalisation of self-hatred.”For a time Richardson seemed overshadowed by the achievements of her illustrious family: grandparents (Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson), parents (Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson), uncle and aunt (Corin and Lynn Redgrave), and older sister (Natasha Richardson). But now the success of Nip/Tuck – she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama in 2004 – has placed her in a new league.Today her dressing room is piled high with samples from Balenciaga and Chlo?a year ago she was the face of mumsy high-street chain Principles). But more importantly Nip/Tuck has kick-started her film career, which faltered slightly at the end of the 1990s. Her last British film, Shoreditch, in which she starred opposite EastEnders’ Shane Richie, disappeared without trace.While her relatives win plaudits for their roles in Ibsen and Strindberg, Joely is still best known for her boyfriends and her love of catwalk fashion – unfair when she spent the 1980s in edgy, director-driven work from David Hare’s Wetherby to Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers But somehow the frivolous image has persisted. Even when she was a judge on the Whitbread Book Awards in 2002, eyebrows were raised – serious English actresses aren’t supposed to dress up.But now, aged 40, Richardson has thrown off the ing?e tag. In Nip/Tuck, she plays a desperate housewife with a 17-year-old son (“I don’t see her as a victim She’s someone who pretends she’s a victim”). And next week she’s on our screens as Wallis Simpson in a lavish TV film about the American socialite’s love affair with Edward VIII, which led to his abdication.”I was never a good ing?e It didn’t work for me because I was always too tall.

I didn’t in any way come into my looks, if there is such a thing, until my late thirties I wasn’t that sweet, pretty thing ever. So I think that’s why people say ‘Things seem to be going well for you at an age when it’s usually harder for women.’ But then my mum or Glenn Close, their film careers didn’t start until their late thirties… Going back to the ‘famous family’ thing, there’s always the idea that if you come from a theatre/film background then it’s easier for you, but in my twenties it was very, very difficult to find jobs.”Richardson is almost unrecognisable as Wallis. “I loved creating the look for her: the dark wig, white mask face, bright red lipstick. Quite a lot of the costumes were made for me because I don’t really fit the 1930s styles In many ways I’m not obvious casting at all,” she hoots. “I was like, ‘Who would think of me as Wallis Simpson?’ Maybe that was why I was so intrigued.”Wallis, a famous clothes horse, was 5ft 2in with choir-boy hips “something I couldn’t get round” says Richardson apologetically.