'I found my spot'

Five minutes before I meet Catherine Keener, I get a text from a friend who once interviewed her. It seems I'm in for a good time: "She's delightful, really funny, kind of eccentric in the best way - and a little klutzy!"

Sure enough, five minutes into our interview, Keener takes three sachets of sugar, meant for her coffee, and tips them into her soup. "Oh my god, I just poured all my sugar into my lunch! Fuck! I am such a klutz!" She leans over to one side until her head is almost on the table, and laughs a rich, dirty laugh; her eyes narrow and there's that giant wraparound smile so familiar from her movies. The Keener laugh is a big sound in this echoing cafe in Venice Beach, Los Angeles; I later find that it has drowned out half the words - hers and mine - my tape recorder picks up.

"Oh look," she says, "if I eat around the sides it's sort of OK. Now I have to go get more sugar." I head off to get it myself, and when I come back she's bent over, muttering something into my recorder, a naughty look on her face. She doesn't realise I'm back. Then she looks up and her face dissolves in mock shock. "Oh god! You caught me!" she says, and there's that laugh again.

It's odd to recall that when she was starting out, Keener was your go-to girl for the great evil-bitch roles. There was her cold, calculating Maxine Lund in Being John Malkovich a decade ago, and her creepy Terri in Your Friends & Neighbours, by Neil LaBute. Since then we've become accustomed to thinking of Keener as a great intuitive actor, capable of holding her own against the best, with a well-established base camp in the indie world from which she has staged more and more expeditions into the Hollywood mainstream.

In 2005 she starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in the acclaimed The Ballad of Jack and Rose, about a father and daughter whose isolated life on an island comes under threat. The film was directed by Day-Lewis's wife, Rebecca Miller. "The first scene, day one, was a sex scene with the director's fucking husband!" Keener says. Meanwhile, a supporting role opposite Sean Penn in Sydney Pollack's The Interpreter led to a memorable part as a lovelorn vagabond in Penn's Into the Wild.

Keener grew up in Florida. She says she had the makings of a mildly rebellious punk-rock tearaway - she was kicked out of high school. She did a little acting, nothing too serious, at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. After graduating and working as an intern for a New York casting agency, she got a job in Los Angeles with the casting agent Gail Eisenstadt, who was diagnosed with cancer shortly after Keener started. "We became really close. I spent a lot of time with her while she was dying and it was a life-changing time. Towards the end, we had a long talk about, basically, what I was going to do with my life. We were in some hospital building somewhere and I told her my little secret, my hidden shame: that I had done some acting in college and that I felt this urge to be an actor. If a person's coming close to the end, everything finally comes down to the bottom line. The encouragement Gail gave me is pretty much what led me to where I am today."

It's a story that shows the serious side of Keener, the deeply empathetic actor who played Harper Lee in Capote (for which she was Oscar nominated), and whose on-screen naturalness lingered in the memory after Into the Wild. Her early CV is filled with the usual walk-on and bit parts: she was a waitress in LA Law, a waitress in About Last Night. "There's a Seinfeld," she says. "Oh my god, I was sooo bad in it! I replaced someone at the last minute. When I started out, I was more open to doing anything I could get, but there came a time when I was getting pretty good movies, so I liked that. I found my spot in the room - and it was a comfortable spot."

This week sees the release of her latest film, Genova, a smaller-scale, more intimate work by British director Michael Winterbottom. It's a story about an Anglo-American family: Colin Firth, a British academic working in the US, and his two daughters (played by The OC's bad girl Willa Holland and a stunningly persuasive 10-year-old newcomer named Perla Haney-Jardine). The family relocates from Chicago to Genova for a summer, to recover from the death of the girls' mother, played by Hope Davis, in a car crash the younger girl believes she caused. Keener plays an old flame of Firth's, who is now teaching at the same university. The film is a mood piece, a movie as much about a city and its light as it is a look at grief - a slow-burning journey through guilt, agony and rage towards acceptance and peace. It has a ghost in it, too.

As with a lot of Winterbottom's work, Genova appears to have been put together without any shooting permits, by a skeleton crew. "Michael works in a very personal way," Keener says of the Blackburn-born director, who will often guide his cameraman by tugging on his shirt from behind. "As for the crew, they were virtually invisible, except for a director of photography and a sound guy. They're just like sherpas, carrying their gear alone and sweating a lot. When I got the crew list, I turned the page over expecting more names, but that was it: 10 names. Spike Jonze works a little in the same way, so you never quite know what you're doing. It shows me you don't need the extra stuff. But it takes a lot of work, sensitivity and preparation - combined with luck. Michael would just pull in extras from the people walking around Genova. I don't think we had permits. We worked on locations and got whatever we could, mostly with available light."

Firth is probably the most reserved English actor in the business. Is he like that off screen? "He is a little. Is that particularly English? He's very honest, especially if you say something idiotic, which I do a lot. He'll just look at me like, 'Twerp.' I found him hysterically funny. I have the biggest crush on him, then I found out everyone else does, too, because of his Mr Darcy, which I'd never seen. I realised I didn't discover this new sex bomb at all. And his wife - she's even hotter than Colin!"

A few weeks before we met, Keener signed divorce-and-custody papers with her husband of 17 years, the actor Dermot Mulroney; they have a nine-year-old son, Clyde. If she's ruffled by it, it doesn't show - but then the two handled their divorce without using lawyers, something that is unheard of in Hollywood.

Keener may be best friends with superstars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie these days, but says she feels naturally like a supporting actor. Both her Academy nominations - for Being John Malkovich, and Capote - were in that category. She turned 50 this week: does she never yearn to play the lead? "Interesting characters are pretty rare if you really want to be the lead. That's the usual complaint of actresses my age, and they're not wrong. They depend on you being beautiful. Since I'm not cast for my physicality, I'm not that interested in those parts. I find that playing so many characters in so many films is a way to stay in the moment."

She says she feels sisterly towards other women actors her age, and would concur that Hollywood remains ageist and sexist, especially when it comes to big-budget material. Somehow, she has found a niche that avoids these traps. She despairs a bit of the new generation of women coming up: "Everyone seems so frigging young and naive. They had some survey of younger women and they asked them what they aspired to be. The most popular answer was to be the assistant to a movie star - not the movie star, but the assistant!"

Despite her recent forays into the mainstream, Keener is still loyal to the indie directors with whom she first found success. She has made four movies with Nicole Holofcener, including the upcoming Please Give, about life in a New York apartment building; then there's her three with Spike Jonze, including Where the Wild Things Are, out in the US later this year; Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich, recently cast her as a lead in Synecdoche, New York, released here in May. "Actually," she says, "I think it's them who are incredibly loyal - to me."

After a decade of combining indie movies with more mainstream work, she still remembers the terror of her first big-budget film. "First day on the set for [Steven Soderbergh's] Out of Sight, and all the studio bigwigs showed up to watch the kick-off shot. It was a scene with me, by myself. And there's me, all alone, with people screaming instructions and shit, so I just had to scream inside." She thinks for a moment and says: "Actually, I'm always like that".