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It is getting on for four years since Amy Adams leapt to the top of Hollywood’s alphabet. In Junebug, playing a heavily pregnant, fast-talking Southern belle, she stole the show and, in the process, gained a surprising nomination for an Oscar. But it was no more than the actress, who is invariably described as “incredibly sweet” and “unbelievably wholesome”, deserved. Nor has it proved a flash in the pan. Since then Adams’s career has flourished like a hothouse flower.

The past year, for example, has been phenomenal. In December 2007, she won the holiday-season laurels as Princess Giselle in Disney’s modern fairy tale, Enchanted, which took a staggering $340 million around the world. After that she played a sweet-natured secretary opposite Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War. Then came Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, in which she co-starred with Frances Dormand as a dippy actress. Then she appeared on Vanity Fair’s radar, which put her on an autumn cover as one of the year’s top 10 “newcomers”. Then, to cap it all, her role in her latest film, Doubt, has just been rewarded with a nomination for a Golden Globe, Adams’s second such accolade.

Little wonder, then, that she is so perky. As we enter a rather gloomy Los Angeles hotel suite, she requests that we sit by the window. “See, it’s much nicer,” she chirps, offering a sunbeam of a smile. “You get a view of the polluted skies and the construction cranes …”

Never mind the tongue-in-cheek, this is Adams personified: a glass-half-full girl who could be upbeat about a plane crash. That, at least, is the image projected by the resolutely positive characters she plays, and whether life imitates art or art imitates life, it’s an attitude that seems rooted in her flesh-and-blood personality. Not that you can blame her: at the age of 34 this petite, pale-skinned performer has become one of the most sought-after stars in Hollywood.

But if success has changed her, Adams doesn’t let on. Dressed in a black jacket, pink vest top, jeans and a pair of neat cream heels, there’s something very rooted about her. Take her idea of a spending spree. When she received her first big pay-cheque, she splurged on a set of matching towels. “I’d taken hand-me-down towels from friends and family for so long,” she sighs. Talking to her, you get the impression she’s eternally grateful for what Doubt director John Patrick Shanley calls her “suddenly fabulous career”. And no wonder: after scoring her first role in 1999′s beauty pageant comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, Adams knows she’s taken “the long road” to get here.

Doubt, though, represents more than just another step along that road. Moving away from the lightly comic roles she’s become known for, it’s a complex drama that pits her opposite two of the best actors of their respective generations: Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Based on Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the film casts Adams as Sister James, a typically good-hearted nun teaching in a Brooklyn Catholic school in 1964. Reluctantly believing she has spotted an impropriety between a pupil and Father Flynn (played by Hoffman), it leads ultimately to the priest being accused of sexual abuse by hatchet-faced Sister Aloysius (Streep). One unimpressed critic described it as an “elephantine fable”. Others, however, beg to differ. Of Adams’s contribution, Vanity Fair gave an unequivocal thumbs-up: “She shines.” Nor was Streep any less effusive. “She’s the real thing,” she says.

In a film concerned with questions of morality and the fickle nature of faith, Adams’s casting as a fresh-faced innocent is, on one level, in keeping with her recent roles. “I’ve always been attracted to characters who are positive,” she admits. “I think there’s a lot of room for discovery with them.”

Yet she refuses to think of Sister James as simply naïve. “I saw her as somebody who grew up in this time, and chose to be a nun pretty early on. To the world she might appear naïve, but I think she’s just trusting. I don’t think that was an uncommon thing at that time. It was a time of great change, in the church. I think, by the end, she’s definitely an older person sitting with Sister Aloysius.”

After working with both Streep and Hoffman (with whom she had briefly featured in Charlie Wilson’s War), the same could certainly be said for Adams. Understandably, she came “über-prepared”, as she puts it. “I was so like the girl who wanted to make a good impression on the first day of school. I knew all my lines and knew everything about the play. I even knew other people’s lines. I knew there was going to be no hiding and I’d better bring something to the table. With Philip and Meryl on the other side looking at you, they’re gonna know if you’re faking it. They’re gonna know. They’re just so honest and so good, there was no way to fake it.”

So, again: can the same thing be said about Adams – that maybe she really is as sweet as her roles suggest? The only tenuous evidence of her naughty side is a brief tenure as hostess at Hooters, the infamous US restaurant chain that requires its waitresses to show off as much cleavage as possible. “The waitress story has been completely blown out of proportion!” Adams retorts. “First off, it’s the oldest story on the blocks. It’s been floating around for 10 years and people are still surprised and putting it in headlines. I’m like, I guess I’m doing pretty good if all you can find on me is that I worked for three months as a Hooters waitress 17 years ago!’”

One of seven children, Adams was brought up a Mormon. Born in Vicenza, Italy, where her US-serviceman father was stationed at the time, she maintains that being in a military family was not too jarring. “We were moved around some, but it wasn’t too much because when he went overseas, we stayed back.” When the family settled in Castle Rock in Colorado, Adams initially concentrated on her ambition of becoming a ballerina. But after she left school, she found work at a dinner theatre company, where she stayed for eight years before moving to Los Angeles. Bit parts in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The West Wing and Smallville followed before her small role in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can caught the eye.

For all her sweetness and light, Adams refuses to sentimentalise the business. “For me, it’s always been a profession. It’s not just a dream or a fantasy – it was how I paid my bills. I didn’t really have the option of losing a dream. It was like, This is how I’ve decided I’m going to earn a living’. As well as having aspirations of art and doing great things, you always have to balance your emotional, artistic side with your practical side. That’s what I think kept it alive. I’m a very practical person. I never planned when I moved out to LA that this is where I would be. I’m grateful and happy to be here, but this wasn’t the masterplan – … and then I’m going to work with Meryl Streep for two films’. That’s a huge gift and surprise to me.”

Her second film with Streep is the forthcoming Julie & Julia, which is due out in September, and which has been written and directed by Nora Ephron. Adams plays Julie Powell, a disillusioned government employee approaching her 30th birthday, who decides to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s classic cookbook Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. How, one wonders, did Adams fare when she turned 30 herself? “It was interesting,” she says. “You really start to take inventory of what you’ve done. You can’t really pretend to be a kid any more. You don’t really have the same excuses. You have to be accountable now. So whatever damage your parents did, or whatever damage you did, it’s now time to own it all and get on with it.”

Adams is certainly doing just that. She’s engaged to actor Darren Le Gallo, whom she met in 2001 in an acting class, though she refuses to divulge any details about their prospective wedding plans. “I promise I’m not being cagey,” she says. “We just bought a house, so we prioritised that. And so we’re thinking about it. It will probably be abroad.”

Putting their nuptials on the back-burner might seem a sensible move, given how busy Adams has been for the past two years. “I enjoy the work, so that’s been really good, but I miss my friends and my family,” she sighs. “So I look forward to a time when I can have more balance.”

This aside, while her personal life seems on the straight and narrow, you might think her career is at something of a crossroads. With a second Oscar nomination potentially on the cards for Doubt, it will be interesting to see whether Adams follows this by pursuing more dramatic roles in the near future. Certainly Julie & Julia doesn’t point to any desire to be taken as a heavyweight, and neither does her other new film, Night At The Museum 2 (out summer 2009). In the sequel to the hit comedy starring Ben Stiller and Robin Williams, Adams plays Amelia Earhart – or at least a waxwork of the pilot that comes to life.

Effervescent to the end, Adams refuses to belittle such comic experiences. “The actors and actresses that I admire the most are not defined by genre,” she states. “Like Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon these were women who were a great positive influence on me and my choices.”

Having starred with all three – she worked with Sarandon on Enchanted – she has evidently been fortunate enough to come into contact with a trio of women who understand what it takes to maintain a Hollywood career. If she follows their lead, Amy Adams could be around for a long time yet.

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