Laura Linney acts brilliantly and you’ll love her

She is one of the best - and most beautiful - of Hollywood actresses … and you probably find it difficult to figure out what she looks like.

Such seems to be the fate of Laura Linney, the actress people claim never to have heard of.

She stars alongside Kevin Spacey and Kate Winslet in director Alan Parker's latest examination of the American underbelly: The Life of David Gale ... and she turns in another quality performance. You'll love her, and then you'll probably forget her.

It's something the 38-year-old New Yorker has got used to. And it doesn't bother her much, anyway. She's one of the busiest actresses in the business, one of the most highly regarded - by those who know when they're watching a class act - and that's all that matters.

Linney, whose father was a famed playwright, says: "I'm well aware that I have the sort of career that has provided me with some really terrific roles and some outstanding films and I'm pleased when people say I've done a good job. I can live with the fact that as soon as most people leave the theatre they find it tough remembering what I look like ... I have given up trying to figure out why this is."

In The Life of David Gale, Kevin Spacey plays a respected professor and a devoted father who has always been a fierce opponent of the death penalty. A twist of fate throws him into a life-and-death nightmare when he's wrongly sent to Death Row for the rape and murder of a fellow anti-death penalty campaigner Constance Hallaway (Linney).

With time running out before his execution, he agrees to an exclusive interview with ambitious reporter Bitsey Bloom (Winslet) who realises that his life rests on what she does next. It's a race-against-time dilemma for the journalist as she tries to piece together the events surrounding Hallaway's death.

Linney was first choice for the role of the victim as far as Parker was concerned: "It's her strong theatre background that gives her the edge. She also has the ability to give her all to the character she's playing, to the film itself, while at the same time giving her full support to her fellow-actors ... but she usually manages to steal the film from everyone around her. She acts brilliantly; it's as simple as that."

She in turn has always been a big fan of Parker's films - "Shoot the Moon is one of my favourites of all time" - and even though the subject-matter is harrowing, Linney reports that she loved every minute of the making of David Gale: "I grew up at the time of Bugsy Malone and I have seen The Commitments half-a-dozen times. So, when Alan offered me the part of Constance I didn't have to think twice."

Linney has built up an army of enthusiastic fans, and one of them is Liam Neeson, with whom she shared a Broadway stage in a six-month run of The Crucible, for which she got a Tony Award nomination to go alongside her Oscar nomination for You Can Count on Me and her Emmy Award for the television film, Wild Iris.

She has been in such screen hits as Lorenzo's Oil, Primal Fear, Absolute Power and, one of her most outstanding performances, The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey. She will also be seen in Bill Condon's bio of the Kinsey husband-and-wife sex couple ... and in it, she'll team up again with Neeson, who told her he wouldn't do it if she wasn't in it.

For the enigmatic Spacey, David Gale marks another milestone in a career packed with success - he's got two Academy Awards, as Best Supporting Actor in the l995 The Usual Suspects and as Best Actor in American Beauty in 2000 and also a Tony Award in l991 for Lost in Yonkers - though he'd rather we didn't talk about it ... or even about him, at all.

He keeps his private life very, very, very private: "It's got nothing to do with me wanting to create some kind of mysterious bullshit; it's just that the less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen. It allows the audience to go into a theatre and believe that I am that character."

For all that, the industry holds him in high esteem ... he's been listed in the 25 Best Actors poll, ranked 56th in the Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time list, voted Greatest Actor of the Decade (the l990s), been twice named in the 10 Greatest Villains of All Time list ... he even made the 2000 Best-Dressed list!

One talent you probably don't know about is his brilliance as a mimic. He 'auditioned' for Star Wars as Christopher Walken, Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon and on a Michael Parkinson chat show he did impressions of Bill Clinton, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Peter O'Toole, Al Pacino, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart ... and Lemmon. Indeed, Spacey, recently appointed Artistic Director of the Old Vic Theatre in London, is such a fan of the late Lemmon that he dedicated his American Beauty Oscar to him.