Working mother: Miranda Otto

Miranda Otto talks about her role as a parent under stress in Blessed, and the way having a family of her own limits.

Miranda Otto plays a dysfunctional mother called Bianca in Blessed, a role that requires her to go off the rails while continually trying to keep her troubled teenager in check. Neither character is very responsible in the Australian director Anna Kokkinos's adaptation of the Melbourne Workers Theatre stage play Who's Afraid of the Working Class? Blessed has an interesting structure in which the first half is told from the perspective of the children and the second from that of their mothers. Given the behaviour of her character, it is a surprise to hear Otto say: "I didn't think of her as destructive. It was funny when I started to speak about the film to the press and people were calling my character a 'bad mother'; it was really confronting at first because I felt sympathy for all the characters, so I never approached it from that point of view."

The daughter of the actor Barry Otto says she never saw the original play: "I was out of the country and the play was in Melbourne and I'm Sydney-based, so I didn't know about it. The film is very different and the script was so beautiful and complete and moving that I didn't want to read the play. I felt it would confuse it. Plus, my character wasn't even in the play. Often when I work on things based on a book, I want to read it because there's extra stuff, but with this I felt like it was a very separate sort of thing. I'd be interested to see it some day."

The most famous book adaptations in which she has appeared were parts two and three of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In 1999, Otto, who had become a star in her homeland in the decade after graduating from Sydney's Institute of Dramatic Art in 1990, was cast to play Eowyn, niece to the king of Rohan and the slayer of the Lord of the Nazgul. The turn of the century found Otto in the US, where her first Hollywood role was that of a mysterious neighbour opposite Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer in the underrated suspense thriller What Lies Beneath.

Michel Gondry cast her in his debut film Human Nature, written by Charlie Kaufman, in which she plays a naturalist. She then did a BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now and the Australian mini-series The Lindy Chamberlain Story. Then came her biggest role yet, playing opposite Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds, a film that appeared at number eight in the recent Cahiers du Cinema list of best films of the decade. At first Otto, who is married to the actor Peter O'Brien (Shane in Neighbours), thought she might have to turn down the role after she found she was pregnant with their first child. However, the script was reworked to accommodate her and after the birth of her daughter, Darcey, Otto returned to work mainly in Australia.

Otto admits: "Sometimes it's hard because I have a child. I had committed to do a play before I fell pregnant and ended up having to do it when she was just six months old. I haven't committed to a play since because you have to commit to a play in Australia so long in advance." Australian theatre's loss has been American television's gain, as Otto recently appeared as an executive juggling the demands of work and motherhood in Cashmere Mafia.

One of the big curiosities of the 42-year-old actress's career has been the number of times she's worked with female directors. "At a certain stage in my career, when I was mainly working in Australia, more than 50 per cent of the films I worked on were with female directors," she says. "The culture of female directors and producers in Australia is very strong. Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion have been role models for many women to feel like they can direct. I was shocked when I went to the States - I think only once or twice I met with female directors. I think it's good to have a 50-50 view on things."

Her next project, Sound Solitary, will see Otto work with Shirley Barrett again. "I did a film with her a few years ago called Love Serenade. It's the first time I've worked with somebody again - it doesn't happen that often. It's exciting to work with someone you already have a shorthand with. My dad is in it also." One way or another, it seems family impinges on Otto's work a great deal these days.