Catherine Keener takes the direct approach

One on one Catherine Keener may have taken the road less travelled to screen-queen fame, but she is just about the most consistently watchable female star in modern American cinema.

Catherine Keener in the director Michael Winterbottom's upcoming film <i>Genova</i>.

Catherine Keener may have taken the road less travelled to screen-queen fame, but she is just about the most consistently watchable female star in modern American cinema. A striking, tomboyish beauty with a flair for no-nonsense character roles, the 49-year-old has twice been nominated for Academy Awards. She has also acted opposite some of the biggest male stars on the planet, including Brad Pitt and Al Pacino, without ever appearing upstaged or outclassed.

No wonder America's most respected left-field directors, from Steven Soderbergh to Spike Jonze, have adopted Keener as their muse. She even emerged from lowbrow comedies such as Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old-Virgin with her cool-headed credibility intact. Constantly in demand, her long-term strategy of targeting smaller, more independent films seems to be paying dividends. "I enjoy those movies more," Keener says. "But that's not to say you can't have the same sort of feeling on so-called bigger movies, like working for Judd Apatow. I thought The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a really smart, well-made movie that just happened to do really well, so it can happen. It just depends who's in charge."

Keener turns 50 next year, disproving the unwritten Hollywood rule that puts female stars out to pasture once they hit 40. Last year alone she worked with Colin Firth in Michael Winterbottom's forthcoming Euro-drama Genova, with Steve Coogan in the knockabout comedy Hamlet 2, and with Robert De Niro in the movie-business satire What Just Happened? Not a bad score. Following the Winterbottom shoot, Keener worked with another British director, Joe Wright, of Atonement fame, on his forthcoming Hollywood debut The Soloist. But she is less interested in a film-maker's geographical origins than whether she shares a creative chemistry with them.

"A good director is a good director," Keener says. "They all have a mutual respect for the process. Michael works in a very different way to anybody I know, but they all want to give you encouraging pats and keep the momentum going. They are really there to help you, that's a pretty common trait, and they probably appreciate the same movies from the past that you do. That's important, like enjoying the same kind of music."

Born in Miami in 1959, Keener came to acting by a roundabout route. Her parents, Jim and Evelyn, sent her to Catholic school. Leaving Florida to study English and history at the exclusive Wheaton College near Boston, she dabbled in theatre acting but never harboured serious stage ambitions. Instead, she took a job with the casting agent Gail Eisenstadt, first in New York and then in Los Angeles. It was Eisenstadt who convinced her young protégée to try out for film and TV work. She toiled for years in bit parts before the New York director Tom DiCillo finally put Keener on the indie cinema map, casting her alongside a young Brad Pitt in his 1991 comedy Johnny Suede.

During her audition, Keener threw a shoe at Pitt, reportedly scarring his leg for life. "I just threw a lame ball, with a shoe," she laughs. "But no, he doesn't have a scar. Maybe psychologically he does. But I can dream, can't I?" Keener remains friends with Pitt despite the shoe incident, and despite co-starring in DiCillo's next film, Living in Oblivion, which featured a pompous movie hunk clearly modelled on the young star. But it was another fruitful creative partnership, with the director Jonze and the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, which brought her to mainstream attention in 1999's Being John Malkovich.

Casting Keener as a vampish man-eater, and Cameron Diaz as her dowdy love rival, was an inspired piece of counterintuitive thinking by Jonze. "I thought I'd never get that job," she says. "I was insecure about it; I didn't think he'd cast me right. But that's Spike, he flips things. It worked in that case because the whole movie was upside down." Keener recently reunited with Jonze on his latest film, Where The Wild Things Are, and also with Kaufman on his debut feature as a writer-director, the bizarre contemporary fairy tale Synecdoche, New York. Co-starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, this allegorical story of an obsessive theatre director building a gigantic scale model of Manhattan has left many US critics baffled. Some have even suggested that Kaufman has finally slipped across the border between genius and madness.

"Oh gosh!" Keener laughs. "Madman or genius? Neither. Charlie Kaufman is just such a singular voice. The main thing about Charlie and Spike and all these other people, they see things in their own way. That's very genuine, which I think matters a lot." It is a journalistic cliché to describe left-field actors as reluctant celebrities, but Keener has certainly avoided high-profile media scrutiny during a career spanning more than two decades. In 1999, she had a son with her then husband, the actor Dermot Mulroney, but the couple divorced last year. She now guards her private life closely, and laughs off recent rumours of a romance with the actor Benicio Del Toro. "What?" Keener splutters. "No, I don't want to tell you anything. Even if they are stupid lies."

Ironically, the less Keener plays the star game, the more her Hollywood brand value seems to increase. Big studio productions now hire her for the integrity and intelligence she brings to a project. Backing into the limelight like this was never a premeditated strategy, she claims, but she is relieved to have built a career without the fierce public exposure that surrounds her more famous friends, notably Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

"It wasn't some deliberate gimmick, but it's just better that way," Keener says. "I'd rather be an actress than a celebrity, if you could choose between them, but I think the limelight is hard for either one. I'd rather just be able to do good work."