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“Sure, I’m upbeat. I’m a Tigger. But lightness doesn’t exist without darkness. And I do believe you can have an artistic life without suffering.”

Amy Adams is looking out of her hotel window at a grey, wet, foul London afternoon. Down below, the huddled masses are braving the lashings of wind and rain. “What a beautiful day!” she declares. Adams isn’t being ironic; she is just being herself. With her all-American smile and that upbeat bounce in her voice, she sounds just like Giselle, the unworldly fairy-tale princess who finds her true prince in current-day Manhattan, in Walt Disney’s hit comedy Enchanted. When I groan and grumble about the weather, she turns on me and says, “Oh, you’re such an Eeyore!”

“And who are you?” I grunt, “Tigger?”

“But of course!” she says, and right on cue she breaks into song: “The wonderful things ’bout Tiggers is, that Tiggers are wonderful things!”

You can see why Adams has gained a reputation for being Hollywood’s goody-goody golden girl. She has cornered the market in cheerful, wholesome American innocents who would rather look on the bright side than walk on the wild side. But maybe we have her all wrong? Maybe, beneath her Tigger persona, there’s a tiger waiting to pounce. Might she be one of those good girls — like Britney and Whitney — just waiting to break free and go bad?

Adams has good reason to be cheerful. When we met, she had just received a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress for her role as Sister James in director/writer John Patrick Shanley’s film Doubt. She didn’t win, in the event; and she was pipped to the same award at the Baftas last weekend by the redoubtable Penelope Cruz. But next weekend she is up for the big one, an Academy Award, for the same role. It’s classic Adams territory: mapping out with artful precision the moral core of a good-hearted woman who wants to see the good in others. Sister James is a teacher at a Catholic school in New York’s Bronx in 1964. She starts having doubts about the relationship between the school’s priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and one of his pupils. So she tells the principal, Sister

Aloysius (Meryl Streep), of her concerns and thus sparks a battle between the kind-hearted Flynn and the avenging principal, who is out to destroy him.

Acting between two heavyweight talents such as Streep and Hoffman poses a special challenge to any young actress: how do you not get eclipsed? But Adams holds her own, making herself an essential player in what could have become a Streep-Hoffman standoff.

I ask her if acting with these two legends was an intimidating experience?

“Yes, it was,” she admits. “Not them personally — it was their reputation for excellence that was intimidating. Usually, I prepare a part in private, but we rehearsed the film like it was a play. So I would have to do my lines in front of Meryl and Philip, and that felt scary, at first.”

In the flesh, Adams looks far younger than her 34 years. She has perfect pale skin, and along one side of her pretty face flows a mermaid’s tail of red hair. She exudes an old-fashioned, well-groomed Hollywood glamour, the look of a bygone era. I suspect she’s a Doris Day trapped in the body of a Rita Hayworth. Her journey from being just another struggling actress in LA to working with the A list of the

acting profession has been long and arduous. As a child growing up in a Mormon family of seven in Colorado, she first acquired the acting bug from her father, Richard Adams — a professional singer — who wrote theatrical skits for the family to perform at home. Her acting career proper began doing dinner theatre in Minnesota: “I started out as an all singing, tap-dancing pig!”

From there she moved to LA and landed work in films such as Drop Dead Gorgeous, as well as roles in television series such as The West Wing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her first break was playing Nurse Brenda Strong, the love interest to Leonardo DiCaprio’s charismatic conman in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002). It wasn’t the career breakthrough she’d been hoping for, but it gave her another kind of payoff: “Steven Spielberg’s faith in me was a huge confidence-booster. I thought if I could work with the likes of him, I could work with anybody.”

The step-shift came in 2005, when Adams played Ashley, the innocent young pregnant wife of a prickly redneck, in a small independent film called Junebug. The critics raved at her delicately etched, poignant turn, and Adams was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress. But Junebug was an indie hit, not a box-office smash, and it wasn’t until her role in the live action/animated film Enchanted, in 2007, that she became a star. She showed she could dance and sing, and that she could hold a film. Once again she received a raft of nominations and awards.

Her immediate choices after Enchanted were curious. Instead of high-profile roles, she accepted a small part in the film Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks. “I did it because I wanted to work with the director, Mike Nichols,” she says. Then she made another small indie film called Sunshine Cleaning — alongside a good friend, the British actress Emily Blunt.

Adams reads about eight scripts a month. What is it that makes her choose a certain role? “It’s lots of things, but mostly I have to feel a connection with the character.” Her choices have led to the accusation that she’s always playing the same wide-eyed innocents. But it’s an accusation she rejects, while carefully avoiding any hint of irritation: “I wish people would see what’s different about my characters. When I first went out to LA, I was always playing the naughty girl — I was a real bitch in Psycho Beach Party, and nobody could call my character in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day naive or innocent.” (She played a scheming, sexy actress.)

Adams believes there’s a double standard at work: “Nobody ever says to actors who always play long-suffering, intellectual types of characters — you’re always playing such deep, dark people, why don’t you do a nice sweet character for a change?” A fair point. “The thing is,” she continues, “nobody comes to me with stories about serial killers.”

But would she play such a role?

She pauses and says, none too convincingly: “If it were the right thing.”

Somehow I doubt if we’re going to see Adams doing dark and disturbed; it’s just not her style. She admits she’s not the kind of actress who can dig deep within and use her personal pain for a performance: “When I get sad, I just shut down. I become cold. I could cry for joy, but not sadness, not in front of other people.” We should be relieved to hear that. Whenever the “sweet” ones such as Julie Andrews — remember the furore when she showed her breasts in SOB? — or Meg Ryan — who exposed a part of herself in In the Cut one would have wished unexposed — try to go wild, it’s always embarrassing. And besides, says Adams, “I enjoy playing upbeat women characters. They’re complex and have made this choice to be joyful. I can relate to their sense of hope.”

So how much is she like the sunny women she portrays?

“Sure, I’m upbeat. I’m a Tigger. But lightness doesn’t exist without darkness. And I do believe you can have an artistic life without suffering.”

There’s something agreeably sensible and down to earth about Amy Adams. You’re never going to read about her going into rehab or see pictures of her staggering out of a nightclub, smashed out of her brains. What keeps her grounded is that her success has come relatively late in life.

“I spent 10 years working before I got success, she says. “I’ve gone through my I-need-therapy phase in private.”

Adams belongs to that school of reluctant stars (Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway and Gwyneth Paltrow among them) who really want to act and regard the whole business of celebrity as the price they have to pay for that aim. However, none of them, despite their protestations, are that publicity-shy or anti-fame when it comes to appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair. As Adams points out: “You chose this life. Nobody put a gun to your head, and if you don’t like it, you can always stop.” See? Eminently sensible.

But can Adams the actress and Adams the star happily coexist? Doesn’t the success and fame make it harder? “It’s easier and harder,” she says. “I have more choices now, and that makes it harder to know what to do. Once, I could just rely on my own voice, but now I have everyone telling me what I should do.”

Adams lives in Los Angeles with her fiancé, the actor Darren Le Gallo, and, despite their forthcoming plans for marriage, she has no intention of cutting back on her work.

“I spent 10 years in LA trying to get where I am now, so I don’t want to spend time at home knitting,” she says. “For me, being an actress is all growth — artistic and personal. I hope in 10 years’ time you find me a very different kind of actress.” Who knows, maybe by then we will have discovered the dark side of Amy Adams.

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