Alex Kingston will bare her body - except on ER

By ANDREW GUMBEL

You can see immediately why Alex Kingston got to play an emergency-room doctor. Everything about her oozes poise, control and reassurance - the very best you could hope to glimpse as the ambulance workers rush your tube-stuffed body into the intensive care unit.

She sits with perfect posture on the edge of a long-backed armchair, smiles an impeccably welcoming smile, and measures every word or phrase as if it were a line from a poem being recorded for posterity.

We are not, of course, in a hospital, but the altogether calmer surroundings of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.

She is less rushed than Dr Elizabeth Corday, her on-screen persona in ER, and dolled up to look considerably more glamorous. But still she looks as though she wouldn't be panicked by a gas explosion in the next room.

As with an emergency-room doctor, this assurance is largely the result of training. In Alex Kingston's case, that means Rada, the discipline of the Royal Shakespeare Company and - less high-mindedly but equally crucially, given her tenure at one of America's hit prime-time drama series - three seasons' worth of practice at fielding questions from entertainment journalists in just this sort of hotel suite.

Her phrases sound just the right side of natural, if a little rehearsed (it is hard not to ascribe some of the stiffness to the fact that her mother is German, and German was her first spoken language).

She has, in her own way, mastered that elusive art of being a celebrity, although it still seems like an unlikely role for Kingston to fill.

After all, at 37 she is neither young enough or stick-thin shapely enough to fit the Hollywood stereotype of a hot new actress. And she doesn't possess the show-stopping bravura of a Meryl Streep.

What she does have is a knack to be in the right place at the right time. When the producers of ER were looking for a fresh face, they happened to catch her turn as the lead character in Moll Flanders, which, despite all the nudity, had just been sold to public television in the United States.

At first, they wanted to try Kingston out for a handful of episodes, but she negotiated to become a regular over a 22-episode season to make sure it was worth her while to drop other commitments and move to Los Angeles.

The rest came more or less by itself, thanks to the power of a hit television show. And she has thereby turned her fortunes around dramatically, certainly compared with five years ago, when her husband at the time, Ralph Fiennes, left her for Francesca Annis and her career hit something of a plateau.

She is now married a second time, to Florian Haertel, a German journalist based in Los Angeles. She has been lucky in other ways, too. Mike Hodges' existential puzzle-piece of a movie Croupier, in which she stars with Clive Owen, came out in the United States a few months ago after endless distribution delays and has been hailed as a minor masterpiece.

She finished the movie before she started her first season on ER, so the slow emergence of the film has worked in her favour.

A few weeks ago she was called up by Toni Basil, the choreographer and erstwhile pop chart-topper, who marvelled at the fact that she looked so natural in the film (she plays a mysterious South African gambler and, yes, she does get to take her clothes off) in contrast to the plastic bimbos of American movies.

The flip response to Basil's enthusiasm is that Kingston seems to take her clothes off an awful lot when she's not on ER - as though she had developed a peculiar niche as the woman to beat when the script calls for a thirtysomething actress to peel off her shirt.

She is seen naked again as a gangster's moll in Essex Boys, the latest in the seemingly endless line of Brit gangster flicks.

Kingston is not embarrassed by the trend. If anything, she is proud of the political message she believes she is sending about the objectification of women.

"I don't have the build of a Californian girl," she says. "I don't have that mythical figure. But I'm happy with who I am and as long as the nudity is justified by the drama of the situation, I will go ahead with it.

"It's wrong for women to be constantly shy and embarrassed about their bodies. There are so many images of unattainable beauty that are so destructive. It's important to show how your body really is."

Despite her good fortune, there are things that Kingston misses in her life in America. She has had to give up the theatre, partly because of her work schedule and partly because her visa permits her to work only in film and television.

She misses the theatrical style of intensive rehearsal and discussion about character and motivation. ER is all about rehearsing moves and camera angles, with a little medical consultation thrown in from the on-set physician, but involves little or no character analysis.

"That's what I miss, pulling a play apart, trying things out and trying to react to things in different ways to see what works and what doesn't. Without that process, you miss out on a whole level of depth."

But ER has some advantages - the professionalism of the production, an ensemble cast with no prima donnas, and an enduring popularity that guarantees Kingston work and prominence.

At her age, however, she is not starry-eyed about how long it, or her own fame, might last.

"I wouldn't stay in Hollywood in the hope of making it without some kind of concrete offer," she says. "The day ER ends, I can happily go back to England and carry on where I left off in the theatre. That would suit me just fine."

- HERALD CORESPONDENT

* ER is on TV2 at 8.30 tonight.