When we watch actors on the screen we are aware they are acting, even those actors who have the skill, depth and range to make the process seem invisible. Actors, and the audience, use their imaginations. So we do not assume that Anthony Hopkins has any experience as a serial killer because he plays Hannibal Lecter with such a chilling conviction in The Silence Of The Lambs, or indeed, that he needed any such experience to play the role as effectively as he did. Nor do we assume that Jodie Foster actually suffered a brutal gangrape just because she played a rape victim with such emotional power in The Accused.
Nevertheless, there was hysteria in Hollywood this time last year when, days after being signed to play Harrison Ford's lover in the light romantic comedy, Six Days, Seven Nights, Anne Heche let it be known that she and Ellen DeGeneres were lovers. In a town wholly obsessed with making money and manufacturing images, one question was asked repeatedly: Would cinema audiences buy a lesbian in a heterosexual role?
The fact that, even if it really was necessary, Anne Heche could draw on the experience of the heterosexual relationship she had with actor and comedian Steve Martin, seemed immaterial. Her high-profile lesbian relationship with a popular television star seemed to overwhelm everything else - including the acting talent and versatility evident from Heche's performances in Donnie Brasco, Walking And Talking and If These Walls Could Talk.
For all its liberal posturing in public and all its sex and drugs excesses in private, Hollywood remains a deeply conservative town which lives in constant fear of the market. It continues to encourage double standards as actively as it did in those love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name days when Rock Hudson became one of America's biggest box-office attractions as an amorous heterosexual in a succession of popular romantic comedies. A collective blind eye was turned to Hudson's homosexual activity as long as it was kept out of the public gaze and Hudson perpetuated the pretence of having girlfriends to the point of engaging in a sham marriage. Plus ca change.
Now that Six Days, Seven Nights has opened successfully at the US box office, with Anne Heche earning the movie's best reviews for her radiant performance, there is a collective sigh in Hollywood. "Isn't that funny?," she said, her voice dripping with irony when we met at her suite at the Dorchester in London on Tuesday afternoon. "Money! They need that as proof, don't they? I'm not interested in how a movie does at the box office, but I am interested in how this one does. The better it does, the more it proves that it's OK to be a gay leading lady."
Anne Heche - pronounced "haitch", she says - proved as endearing and spirited a Hollywood personality as one could hope to meet, and most unusually candid. She immediately engages you with her bright blue eyes. More than once, she mentions how she and Ellen have been together happily for almost 15 months now.
"I hope in my lifetime that I will be able to legally marry her," she says. "I feel married to her already, and I have three wedding rings, and yet it's not legal." It is in Denmark, I point out. "Ah, so there's hope!" she replies.
She was one of more than 30 actresses chosen to read with Harrison Ford for the female lead in Six Days, Seven Nights, a formulaic but handsome and entertaining romantic comedy in which she plays an uptight New York magazine editor who is stranded on a deserted tropical island with a gruff cargo pilot played by Ford. As happens in movies like this, their initial antagonism eventually evaporates into love.
The film's director, Ivan Reitman, says "she really blew our socks off" when she came in to audition with Ford. "She had this fearlessness, this incredible way of getting under his skin." Anne Heche believes that several factors helped. "When I met Harrison Ford, if I hadn't walked in the door glowing and beaming because I had just fallen in love, who knows if I would have gotten the movie?"
"Harrison is quoted as saying I had a certain element of disdain for him, which I don't believe he said, and anyhow it's not true at all. I just think that I felt a little less intimidated by him than most people feel on meeting him for the first time, and I think that worked for the part. I was thrilled to meet him, but I had just come off a movie with two major stars, so I was more relaxed with myself." (She had just finished playing a US presidential aide opposite Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro in Wag The Dog.)
Six Days, Seven Nights is yet another of those recent movies in which a young woman falls in love with a man twice her age - after As Good As It Gets, Deconstructing Harry, The Horse Whisperer and Bulworth, in which the sexagenarians Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, respectively, get involved with the much-younger Helen Hunt, Elisabeth Shue, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Halle Berry.
Does this trend represent a Hollywood middle-aged male fantasy? "Oh, sure," says Anne Heche. "I don't think that's too hard to figure out. Especially Deconstructing Harry. Isn't that Woody Allen? He pretty much just proves it, doesn't he? Go for the younger girls! Anyway, let's not talk about that!
"Men are in charge of the Hollywood studios and men who are fearful will hire the young chicks they want to sleep with. Until we get women as heads of the studios, and women who see women as equal to the men, only then will they allow in women who are older and sexy and beautiful - hello, Susan Sarandon! - of which there are so many. Until that changes, you'll have men who are 60 thinking, `Gee, she still likes me, wink, wink'."
At least Six Days, Seven Nights deals directly with the age difference between its protagonists, she says. "It kind of supported a notion which I was promoting in my real life, which is that form doesn't matter," she says. "OK, so he's an old man and yes, I fall in love with him. It's the same as, OK, she's a woman and yes, I fall in love with her, and who cares? I still fell in love with her heart and her soul.
"It's no mistake that when I fell in love and got super-happy, that I started doing comedy. I had a lot of stuff to dredge out of myself, which might explain why I spent 10 years doing heavy dramas."
That "stuff" to which she refers involved growing up in a dysfunctional family. She was born in Aurora, Ohio in 1970, and her family moved home regularly. Her father, Donald, was a church organist who died of an AIDS-related illness when she was 13 and they were living in New Jersey. She discovered he had been leading a double life and was secretly gay, and she believes that when he married at the age of 19, it was out of fear and ignorance of his sexuality. Three months after her father died, her 18-year-old brother, Nathan, was killed in a car crash.
Her mother, Nancy, was shocked when Anne and Ellen came out as a lesbian couple last year, but earlier this month she had come to terms with it sufficiently to attend the Los Angeles premiere of Six Days, Seven Nights with the couple and Ellen's mother, Betty.
Anne Heche met Ellen DeGeneres at another Hollywood party, the post-Oscars bash hosted by Vanity Fair at the end of March last year, and it was love at first sight for both of them. A few weeks later they went public with their relationship when Anne brought Ellen as her guest to the US premiere of Volcano, the lava drama in which Heche starred with Tommy Lee Jones.
"The people who managed me told me not to do it, not to be open about it, or I'd lose the role in Six Days," she recalls. "So I said, let's see. Then I got the movie and then I fired them - and then nobody else called for a year. Now the movie's out and people are calling me again. At last it's over. I went through a lot of sh*t for doing what I did.
"Some people stepped back from me, but they are probably people I don't want to work with anyway," she says. "We're just actors. It's as simple as that. I'm not a seismologist, even though I played one in Volcano. I wasn't a mother of three, either, even though I was one in Donnie Brasco. What really frustrated me was that, prior to this, nobody ever questioned any role I played.
"Even when I played a lesbian in Wildside, nobody said, `But you're straight! Can you really have a sex scene with Joan Chen?' Everyone just turned it on as quickly as they could and just curled up the sheets. It's all such a contradiction, but I hope I took up the burden and threw it out into the universe, and I hope it's over now and nobody ever has to go through what I went through."
I wondered if her experience might help actors who are hiding behind phoney marriages and relationships to come out of the closet. She crosses her fingers on both hands. "I hope, I hope," she says. "It would be easier for everybody. Unfortunately, stardom is something that can change people's minds about things. Which is why we have a responsibility to tell the truth, and people who don't tell the truth really get on my nerves. They're all pretending that everything is so perfect.
"I don't know if it's because they're afraid they'll be punished if they tell the truth. Of course, there's a lot of stuff I don't tell either. But I'm honest about my relationship because I believe we're like a normal couple. We do know that Tom and Nicole are married. I say I'm married and people think they know my private life. I just enjoy being honest. Oh, we could go on for hours!" We could.
Six Days, Seven Nights goes on nationwide release in Ireland on Friday