Sweet Virginia

You also wore a prosthetic nose that made you almost unrecognizable. How'd you like the nose?
I loved it. Stephen [Daldry] thinks I look better with it.

And your children -- did they recognize you?
Yes, but they hated the nose...hated it. My son said, ''Oh, not that nose again!'' when he saw the poster.

Do you ever want to put on the nose and disappear into the public?
I would love to because I love to go to markets and that's the kind of thing that is difficult now. When I had [the nose] on, I wouldn't get recognized at all. The paparazzi would all be outside my trailer and I'd use a different name when I walked out. They had no idea it was me.

As for your roles, do you prefer the sublime or the over-the-top? ''The Hours'' or ''Moulin Rouge''?
A balance. I wouldn't want to do all of one. So much of me acts on instinct. I get drawn to things at different times, and sometimes against the advice of what I SHOULD be doing. In my gut it's what I want to do and if it doesn't work I'll take the rap for it. If it works, then great. I wouldn't want to make 10 ''Moulin Rouge'''s. I'd be dead. And I wouldn't want to play Virginia Woolf for 10 years either.

How about your next pics, ''Cold Mountain'' and ''The Stepford Wives''? Where do they fall?
I'm in the middle of ''Cold Mountain'' now, which is sort of an epic, tragic love story, and I went, ''I've got to do a comedy. I need to have some lightness.'' ''The Stepford Wives'' is going to be done as a comedy -- black comedy. I'm fortunate in the sense that the stuff I've been doing recently has been so diverse. The directors that I'm working with and the roles I'm working on are just glorious. Once [they're] not, I won't do it any more. It's that simple. I have children and a whole other life. I don't see myself as an actor for the rest of my life.

You could just walk away?
It's not even walking away. It's more that you go, ''Well, I went through a creative period and now it isn't there.'' When that goes, and when that dries up...then, yeah. Maybe I'd go back and do some theater. I think there's a time in your life when you don't even know why, but you just have to do these things -- they just come out of you. You can't even quite control it. You say, ''Let's see where it takes me.''