Considered response - Gina McKee

Gina McKee is not an 'in-your-face' actor, but she is an extremely good one. You'll never catch her acting on impulse, but her performances stay with you long after the closing credits or curtain-down

Considerate. That's the word that best fits Gina McKee. Only I feel uncomfortable using it because it sounds a little insipid, like calling someone nice. She is nice too, as it happens – warm and friendly, quick to laugh and engagingly intelligent. But there's no escaping it, as we sit in a London hotel to talk about Fiona's Story, the new BBC drama in which she stars alongside Jeremy Northam, and the career that's brought her to this point, she drinks peppermint tea and is, time and again, considerate.

McKee is a very fine actor in an unshowy way. Although you can't quite put your finger on why, it's often her character that lodges in your mind at the end of a film or one of the landmark TV series she's made a habit of appearing in: the recent remake of The Forsyte Saga, Stephen Poliakoff's The Lost Prince, Jimmy McGovern's The Street.

Of course, there was the Bafta award-winning performance as Mary Cox in Our Friends in the North, and in Mike Hodges' Croupier and Mike Leigh's Naked. And that's only the start of it. McKee is a busy actor.

"I'll sometimes have a couple of months when it's really quiet," she says, in a Geordie accent with the edges knocked off. "You might be reading scripts but it's not the same. Usually I can go for three or four weeks and then I start to bake cakes or make jewellery and I think, 'hang on a minute, I'm obviously bored rigid. I need to get back out there'."

McKee got her first professional acting job at the age of 14. It's what she always wanted to do. Playing at making up and acting out stories on Friday afternoons at primary school in County Durham started it. Then there was a local drama group, followed by the part in a Tyne Tees children's drama called Quest of Eagles. It didn't all go to plan though. At 17, she tried out for three drama schools but was rejected by all of them. "At the time, I think they were probably right that I wasn't ready to settle down for three years, but of course, I worried that I wouldn't learn some big secret so I used to go off to classes to learn techniques for using my voice, juggling, tap dancing, all sorts of stupid, diverse things. I kind of found my route but it took me a long time to realise that the way I did it was just as valuable."

McKee is smart, funny, intense – all the attributes she brings to the characters she's played. Even in Hollywood popcorn fare such as Notting Hill, McKee brings an integrity and unmatched quality as Bella, Hugh Grant's disabled friend.

There's something absorbing and honest about the way she acts. She inhabits the characters she plays. It's to do with the way she looks too. Those huge eyes, that long, pale face which can look so sad but that crinkles into life when she smiles.

Today she's wearing a black dress and a cardigan around her shoulders. Her chestnut hair is pulled back into a ponytail which provides a focus for her fidgeting fingers.

To get back to considerate, I mention it only because it seems relevant, not just to the way she is today, but the way that she acts – telling a character's story with real care, capturing their complexities, their fallibilities. It's a skill that's put to good use in Fiona's Story.

Shot in Glasgow and directed by Adrian Shergold, the main draw for McKee, Fiona's Story is a drama that tackles that most difficult of topics: paedophilia. McKee plays Fiona Mortimer, wife of Simon and mother of three daughters, Alice, ten, Edith, eight, and Sally, four. The Mortimers' world is shattered when Simon is arrested for downloading images of child sexual abuse. The drama is built around Fiona's response to this most horrifying revelation about her husband and the consequences for her marriage and her family. It's perfect McKee territory – complex, serious, demanding. She hasn't watched a final edit of the drama, but she's pleased with what she's seen.

"It's really hard to be objective, but as objective as I can be, I think it's a very strong story and strong thing to watch, but it's rewarding. I don't think of it as harrowing. It's difficult territory to negotiate but that in a way is the interesting element to watch and to take part in."

Acting is, for McKee, a way to explore other people's lives, to learn new things, to be someone else. She's known for her meticulous research, but she says that she's just nosy. There's more than a little irony in the fact that an actor who is reluctant to talk about her private life is so interested in the lives of others.

McKee responds carefully to my questions – taking her time, reacting when I'm only half-way through (sometimes a smile, sometimes a frown and on the odd occasion a proper, full-on grimace). She's precise – making sure that I get the right answers. And she's got more reason than most to be concerned with the right answers. Such is her reticence to talk about the life she lives away from her work, several journalists have chosen to make up significant biographical details for her. One of these fabrications is that she has two children. She doesn't. Another is that she was born in 1961. She wasn't, she was born in 1964.

"I've had two instances when I've met journalists face to face and we've had good interviews and I've said we don't have children by the way, and then they've written it. I'm not sure what that's about. As misleading facts go it's not a terrible one but it isn't true – we don't have kids."

The "we" McKee is talking about is her and husband Kez Cary, whom she married in 1989. They used to live in north London but moved three years ago to a village in East Sussex, about a mile from the sea. Her work demands that McKee still spends about half of her time in London, but when she can, she goes home to the country. From what I can gather, as we talk about favourite books and films and what Gina McKee does when she's not acting, their life is ordinary and happy. Yesterday they had a tree surgeon cut down one of the trees in their garden, last night they were listening to some Miles Davis. So why is she so reluctant to talk about it?

"I think if you can handle that side of business and you're happy to let people into your personal world, you're happy with that and the people in your life are happy with that, then great," she says, with all of the practised eloquence of someone who's been asked this before. "It takes a certain amount of skill and negotiation to handle it and handle it well. I'm not sure I have that skill so I tend not to go there. I don't feel comfortable talking about my private life and some people in my private life don't feel comfortable about me talking about it. So I don't."

It's fair enough, really, but without crossing boundaries, there are a few more things to say about McKee's background. The first is that there's no precedent for acting in her family. McKee's father was a miner. She grew up in the shadow of Easington colliery and although their daughter's interest in performing was a first, McKee's parents never stood in her way. "I was given the best gift really. I was told, 'try it, you have nothing to lose'. I never had any pressure to achieve anything beyond what I was comfortable with."

It so happened that McKee was pretty comfortable pushing herself. She still is.

"The first time I came to London on my own I was 15. I was absolutely oblivious to so many things. I had no expectations, no fears. I just came to do a National Youth Theatre season one summer. It was just brilliant."

McKee has lived in or around London for 23 years. She still loves all of the things that she loved when she was 18 – the diversity, the choice, the feeling of possibility that you get in a big city. But she readily admits that her formative years in the north-east have shaped who she is. "Growing up in an area like the north-east – and I think there are definite parallels with Scotland too – you have a strong identity. It will always be with me. There are many positive things about growing up there which have given me a brilliant foundation."

What kind of things?

"A sense of community, a sense of family, a way of communicating with people. But I moved out of that region when I was 18 and in a way I was desperate to move out because I needed a bigger city in order to do what I wanted to do."

There's a thoughtfulness about McKee which makes her a pleasure to be around. It also creates the feeling that no matter how engaged, how open (caveats allowed of course), she remains ever so slightly out of reach. There are glimpses – flashes of a bright smile, a hearty laugh, an expletive – but she's not giving it all away. I suspect that it's this that has driven interviewers to complain about her apparent coldness. Journalists can be a petty lot, feeling cheated that they're not getting the whole person – a kind of instant friendship with all the intimacies and confidences released immediately. But that's just not McKee's style.

Self-promotion doesn't come easily to her. She says she'd rather go to the dentist than have her photograph taken. (Ironic, given that once our interview's over, she's got to have her picture taken and then she really is going to the dentist.) She used to struggle at auditions because she couldn't describe what qualities she had in relation to getting a particular job. "It's better now because you say 'take a look at this tape', I've been around, I can use my previous experience to help," she says. "But it took me ages to be able to go into an audition. I could do a scene for them, that'd be fine, but to actually verbally sell myself I was useless at it, absolutely hopeless. I don't think that was necessarily a bad thing, I think it just means that my route was slower," she adds, laughing.

The same thing that attracted McKee to acting – that need to find a home for her creative energy – is still the thing that drives her. But she's happy to acknowledge that acting is a funny old business, as much about who you know and how you sell yourself as how good you are in front of the camera or on the stage. "There's a whole big side of it that's about finding the work, getting the work, dealing with all that stuff. It takes a certain attitude to keep bouncing back, to keep jumping through hoops, to keep enough vulnerability to be open to things."

It sounds like an impossible mixture: brimming with self-confidence and yet vulnerable? It seems perverse.

"It is. You need to be open, vulnerable, receptive. You need to put yourself on learning curves all of the time, to indulge other people's learning curves. But at the same time you have to know yourself, know your strengths and your weaknesses and know how to protect and shelter yourself. You need to know when to put up a barrier. It's a delicate balance, I think.

"In its purest sense the thing I enjoy is the creativity – the thing that got me hooked. It's like extended playtime in simple terms. You know when you're making up a story with your friends and you're all on a roll and you're enjoying it."

McKee is now in the middle of rehearsing a West End production of Chekhov's Ivanov. She's also dabbling in production. What you won't see her trying is directing. "I think I need to act more before I feel I could be generous enough to stand back to facilitate actors," she says. "I still want to be there. If it comes, it comes but at the moment I wouldn't be a very healthy director really, because I'd be jealous of the actors."

• Fiona's Story screens tomorrow on BBC1 at 9pm.