Felicity Huffman - man, she's good

Felicity Huffman has had to adjust to perpetual scrutiny aimed at one of TV's hottest shows.

Felicity Huffman is not a man, has never had a sex-change and is not used to peeing standing up. Yet for her Oscar-nominated turn in the low-budget film Transamerica, you wouldn't know it.

This week it opens in New Zealand, giving Desperate Housewives fans the chance to see her as never before: a bloke named Stanley who turns into a bird named Bree.

It's a comedy road trip as well as an emotional one. A week before Stanley's life-altering surgery he and the son he didn't know he had embark on a journey across the country.

So how does a woman play a man who is really a woman, in a role that could have just as easily gone to a man? Huffman, who is looking particularly feminine in blue satin heels, explains it was more than just the physical.

"I understand the pain of waking up in your own skin and going, 'Aaarrgh. What does it mean to become who you really are?' "

It's odd to hear this from someone who very much seems to know who she is. For the past year (Desperate Housewives is in its second season here) we've come to love her as Lynette, Wisteria Lane's most clued-up housewife, who stands up for herself and those around her at every opportunity.

In real life she is hitched to William H. Macy, one of Hollywood's most clued-up actors (his role as executive producer on Transamerica means Huffman "gets paid for kissing").

In person, she seems the coolest, most down-to-earth of the Housewives cast, and the most likely to laugh at herself.

She still can't believe she was invited to the Oscars, let alone a nomination for Best Actress. The only way she could possibly top the experience of Transamerica, she quips, would be to play a black man.

"I mean, it was an actor's dream. It's also an actor's nightmare because you can screw it up in so many ways. It felt like Everest, like, 'I have no idea how to do this'."

She started by doing what any heterosexual actress in her position would do: painstaking research, studying every biography and autobiography by a transsexual she could find. She met women who had been through the process to pick their brains: "What's the surgery like? How did your parents react? How did you feel when you walked out the door as a woman for the first time?"

She went through four vocal coaches to help her get the deep voice right, and re-learned how to walk in heels "because it would be like someone going, 'All right, well, starting tomorrow, put on a dress and go'."

The result, say critics, is amazing.

"I had no idea to tell you the truth because my usual buoys, my landmarks of going, yeah I think the scene is working, were just nowhere in sight. So I didn't know if what I was doing was a travesty and a joke or not."

With all the research in the world, Huffman couldn't have truly got under the character's skin without mining her own insecurities.

Though she doesn't specifically acknowledge her past battle with bulimia, she isn't going to lie and say it hasn't been hard under the perpetual scrutiny aimed at one of TV's hottest shows.

"You know, I'm working with these world-class beauties so I can't say that there aren't times when I go, 'Wow. God. Marcia [Cross who plays Bree Van De Kamp].' She is just so beautiful, you want to go dink-dink," she says, gesturing as if to gouge her co-star's eyes.

Standing on the red carpet in New York shortly before Desperate Housewives went to air was gruelling. Huffman lined up next to Teri Hatcher and Nicollette Sheridan who were posing for photographers, and waited for the flashes to go off for her. They didn't.

"For the first hour I was like, 'This is so funny. Nobody wants to take a picture of me. But don't feel sorry for me, I'm in a good place'. Then the second hour, my nose was out of joint and my ego was like, [expletive] this. This sucks'. And by the third hour I was like, 'I hate this'. I called my husband from the limo, crying. And he went, 'What?' I went, 'I am the oldest and ugliest one here'. And he said, which I love him for, 'Aw, baby, I'm always the oldest and ugliest one on the set. And it is only going to get worse'."

She laughs about it now because she's since learned to see the bright side - she doesn't have paparazzi rifling through her rubbish bins like some of her more glamorous co-stars. She's made peace with fame and its unrealistic expectations.

"There is a small band and when you have to fit inside that band I think it causes great pain and struggling. Whether you're trying to be a size six or whether you are gay or transgender, all you experience is 'I don't fit in' and 'What I'm doing isn't working' and 'I am below par'."

Whether she fits in or not, Huffman has never been a more wanted woman. Before Transamerica it was a small role in a Tim Allen movie, Christmas with the Kranks (2004); the other day she got an "exciting" offer she can't divulge.

Huffman knows she has Desperate Housewives to thank for her burgeoning big-screen career, that until now included a role in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999).

"I think Transamerica must have done something really good in its last leg to ride the publicity of Desperate Housewives. It can only help. The fact that there was an opening here in LA and all my pals from Desperate Housewives came and so suddenly people wanted to photograph it."

So there's a chance some of her other films, pre-Housewives could feature Oscar-winning performances?

"Well," she says, leaning in to deliver the punchline. "My four days with Tim Allen really were good."

LOWDOWN

WHO: Felicity Huffman, desperate housewife and transgender parent
BORN: December 9, 1962
FILMS: Magnolia (1999), Christmas with the Kranks (2004), Raising Helen, (2004), Transamerica (2005)
TV: Lynette on Desperate Housewives, Sports Night (sitcom) plus appearances in Frasier, The West Wing, Law & Order, Chicago Hope, The X-Files
WHAT: Nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role in Transamerica but lost to Reese Witherspoon