Rosamund Pike has baked me a cake! She is so nice. I don't actually like cake, but this is an exceptionally light, scrumptious rhubarb and orange confection, so I have no trouble at all eating it. She also offers tea in delicate antique china cups and invites me to look round her extremely pretty Kensington mews flat. There is a lovely wisteria outside, forming great swags of flowers around the window - it feels like being in a treetop bower. She moved into the flat last November and is only renting it, but already, she says, she thinks it's the best thing that ever happened to her. She was planning to buy somewhere but every deal fell through, "so then I just decided: actually my parents never bought anywhere so I'll probably end up like them, just being nomadic, moving when I can't afford it any more".
She is even prettier in the flesh than on film, wearing harem pants and a soft floral blouse that sometimes flops sideways to give glimpses of her breasts. The whole effect - the flat, the cake, the tea, the wisteria, this lovely porcelain girl - is utterly feminine and exquisite, and of course makes me feel like a great ugly toad. She reminds me a bit of Joanna Lumley (obviously without the gurkhas) and fills me with the same unease - can anyone really be this perfect?
But I met Pike once before, at a party of Nick Hornby's, and found her really good fun. Better still, I was knocked out by her performance in "my" film (actually Nick Hornby's film, but based on my memoir), An Education, in which she plays a girl called Helen who is on the one hand very beautiful but on the other very thick. Who knew that Rosamund Pike was such a great comedian? Nick Hornby was so impressed he said he wanted to write a whole comedy film for her. "Well, it would be great if he did. I love making people laugh. But only my close friends usually see it.
Naturally I was hoping to spend the whole morning talking about An Education, but Pike was keener to plug her next film, Fugitive Pieces, based on a best-selling Canadian novel by Anne Michaels which won the Orange Prize in 1996. It stars Stephen Dillane and is set in Canada, Greece and Poland, with some characters speaking in Yiddish or Greek. Pike plays Dillane's girlfriend and brings a much-needed breezy cheerfulness to an otherwise rather gloomy film. She is also in Freefall, the big BBC2 recession drama, playing a City broker who is having an affair with her boss - lots of bonking on desks - and is then dumped by him. Her scenes, though few, are absolutely electric, perhaps because they are improvised. And when I met her she was still acting with Judi Dench in Madame de Sade at the Donmar, and loving it. She always feels more at home in the theatre, she says, and has alternated films with theatre work, right from the start of her career when she came back from playing a Bond girl in Die Another Day to a West End run in Hitchcock Blonde. "It does teach you a helluva lot, being on stage," she says. Unfortunately, Madame de Sade got stinking reviews (though for the play, not the acting), but she claims not to have read them. "I don't read anything. You can rest assured I won't read this article. Because even if you read things that are nice, it's a bit disconcerting, really."
She says all this while tucking into her excellent cake. I am amazed that someone so slim can eat with such gusto but she says: "I love food - I'm a foodie." She recently had a lunch with Jeremy Langmead, editor of Esquire, that lasted 10 hours. He eventually had to retire sick, but she went on to an Indian restaurant with friends. She says she doesn't weigh herself; she doesn't even own any scales. She seems to be completely free of body hang-ups. Most actresses, even perfect beauties, can reel off a long list of things they'd like to change about their appearance, but she says: "I'm sort of OK. I'm OK with it." She once said that she would rather pose for an artist as a nude than as a face - her face somehow feels more exposed. And in fact she has done a lot of nudity in films, and also once on stage, in Hitchcock Blonde, though she says she probably wouldn't do that again. "It's funny: I kind of perversely put on weight when I had to be naked on stage, which now I look back on it I think is quite strange. I look at pictures of that time - because my mum saves stuff - and I think: Oh gosh, I actually gained weight, which is not what people would normally do if they knew they had to appear naked every night."
That reminds me: someone I met who knew her at Oxford told me she thought she'd had a nose job - did she? Rosamund goes into alarmingly loud peals of laughter: "What! That's the funniest thing I've ever heard! I'd be fascinated to know who said that. Go on, you've got to tell me. [No.] That's hilarious! For a start I wouldn't have the money to afford a nose job. I think I've been quite lucky with my nose. Now I feel like I'm protesting too much. I could show you pictures of me as a child... Or you can ring my mother; we can get her on the phone. Shall we ring her? Just to confirm that I haven't had a nose job?" She is reaching for the phone while I am shrieking: No! This is madness - I only asked the question out of idle curiosity - but she is reacting as if I accused her of murder. But she seriously hates and abhors any form of plastic surgery - "No way. No way. Not even Botox. You look at someone like Judi [Dench] and you just think she's the most beautiful woman. Because if you're a beautiful person then somehow all the lines fall into the right place."
Right. Phew. I always forget how very dramatic actresses can be. To calm her down, I ask her about her childhood memories of growing up as a "backstage baby". She was an only child, but not a lonely one. Her parents, Caroline and Julian Pike, were opera singers (her father is now professor of vocal and operatic studies at the Birmingham Conservatoire) and she loved to watch them perform - "I spent quite a lot of time in rehearsal rooms or in the wings, looking at them being the stars. It was definitely what gave me the bug, seeing my mum playing the Merry Widow - it's a wonderful opera - and she had this boa and a big wig, and looked just gorgeous: like a film star, I thought. I was a bit of a frumpy child and she just looked incredibly glamorous and exciting." And hanging around rehearsals meant that she became observant and learned a lot of adult secrets: "I became quite watchful and curious. Interested in other people's emotional lives. From early on I understood about people having affairs."
She and her parents lived in a big rented flat in Earl's Court, but when she was 11 she went off to boarding school, Badminton in Bristol. She told everyone she was going to be an actress, and they believed her. "I was weirdly serious about it from very young, about 10 or something. And watching my parents, there was a real analytical interest in what made something believable and what made it not believable, or what made something moving or funny, or why these lines didn't ring true." In school plays she was usually given men's roles because she was tall, but when she was 17, between A-levels and going to Oxford to read English, she was cast as Juliet in the National Youth Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet.
"Doing a part like that - which you can fly with - is the most amazing experience, just totally liberating. But I remember someone saying rather cruelly: 'Oh, Rosamund could never play Juliet because she's never been in love' - and I remember, at 17, being so scared of that comment. Children can be so cruel. It was true I'd never been in love - but I could use my imagination. But you know, a lot of people believe that there's a direct opposition between intelligence and emotion, that if you're clever you can't feel. Which is complete nonsense - in fact I'm an incredibly, dangerously emotional person, I think - but I remember being deeply worried that because I got good A-levels I wouldn't be any good as Juliet."
Anyway, she was obviously so good as Juliet that an agent signed her on the spot and got her television work in her Oxford vacations. Halfway through Oxford, she thought she ought to go to drama school and applied to them all - but was turned down. So then she finished her degree and got a respectable 2:1. Almost immediately, she was cast as Miranda Frost, the Bond girl in Die Another Day. It was an extraordinary break - but instead of staying in Hollywood to capitalise on it, she went straight back to the theatre. Her next big film was Pride & Prejudice, playing Jane Bennet to Keira Knightley's Elizabeth, and it was on the set that she fell in love with the director Joe Wright.
Joe Wright is the great looming elephant in the room. She has said all along she won't talk about him, and when I mention his name she mimes zipping her lips. They were together four years, during which he directed Pride & Prejudice, Atonement and The Soloist, and in every interview and photograph they seemed madly in love. They got engaged early last year, on Lake Como, bought a house together in Spitalfields and said they were getting married in the summer. And then suddenly he called it off. It was the most public and humiliating jilting imaginable, especially when he was later reported to have been seen "cavorting" in a lapdancing club that same week. The story in the tabloids was that he was furious because she'd sent out wedding invitations featuring photos of them together in a hot tub without consulting him. It sounded unlikely - I wouldn't have thought Pike was the sort of girl to favour jokey wedding invitations. She flatly refuses to talk about it when I meet her, but later emails to say: "I still have no idea why Joe called off the wedding. He was never clear about it. Part of what makes it so confusing. Our Save the Date cards had been sent out; Save the Date cards which had a 1950s-style picture of the two of us in LA, taken by a friend at Christmas, done like an old-fashioned postcard with slightly unreal colours - we'd both designed it and the design was to make people laugh! Which it did! - but no invitations. My mother had to write to everyone to say that the wedding was no longer going to take place. I also think that the stories about Joe being seen in lapdancing clubs are false. It really doesn't sound like him."
But it was an incredibly public humiliation and still, she claims, a mystery to her as much as anyone. Perhaps she was always keener on getting married than he was. Perhaps he felt pressured. At all events she refuses to condemn him - "I still think he's an extraordinary man, I really do" - and says, wanly: "I don't think you ever get over something like that, do you?"
Her love life seems to have been unlucky. Her previous boyfriend, actor Simon Woods, whom she met at Oxford and went out with for two years, turned out to be gay - he is now with Christopher Bailey, the creative director of Burberry. It slightly suggests that she is not very good at "reading" men, perhaps because she is, as she admits, a great romantic. "I think it's one of the great enrichments of life, romance. I can read significance into tiny, tiny things. If I'd met someone 10 years ago and not seen them again and then I suddenly bumped into them, I'd feel that that was 'meant' or there's a fate, you know?"
She usually says in interviews that she has had two big love affairs (Simon Woods and Joe Wright), though actually, she told me, there was another one before that, when she was at the National Youth Theatre, someone "very clever, very kind, very wise". Still - just three boyfriends by the age of 30 - it's not many, I tell her. "I don't sleep around, if that's what you mean," she says stiffly. "Would you like some more cake? [The poor old cake gets a battering any time I ask a difficult question.] I'm not saying they're the only people I've been out with. But I take love quite seriously. I'm talking about the life-changing ones, the ones who somehow get inside you, who actually alter your chemical make-up, where you get butterflies and feel like your stomach's turning over - a whole physical world which you're not in control of at all. And I think one is lucky when one gets to feel this. Some people I don't think ever do."
She turned 30 in January this year, and it must have been hard, entering her 30s single when she had expected to be married. She didn't have a big party because she couldn't afford it - instead she went to Whitstable for the day with two girlfriends and ate whelks. (Her father told her she was mad for eating whelks when she could have been eating oysters.) She was more nervous approaching 30 than actually becoming it - "I just didn't want it to happen. But now I really think it's great. Life has taken a different turn, but I'd never have been here, I'd never have had my own space. I've never before lived on my own, and I think that's something everybody should do. I like it that I can do what I want. So if someone says: 'Let's go to a rave after the show on Saturday,' I can do that and there's no one asking what time I'll be home. Suddenly life is quite good, really."
And she's become braver in the last year. "I've thought: I've got nothing to lose, really. I'm not frightened of what people will think any more. Because, you know, when you're a teenager or in your early 20s, you're always frightened of what people will think. I used to get nervous just going to the stage door, seeing people waiting to talk to me. I was afraid of being caught out in some way or not being right. When you're young, you're trying on lots of selves, and then if you do something like the Bond film, it provides a kind of false self in a way, and you're trying to equate your real self to that person. And then suddenly at about 28 all the pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together comfortably."
If she had married, would she have had children straightaway and put her career on hold? "No, because my career is so important to me and there are so many things I want to do. But it's very hard. Probably in a couple of years ... I don't know. I definitely want to have children, there's no doubt about that, but it can wait a couple more years. I've just become a godmother and it's the first time I'd actually been into a mother and baby unit and seen a newborn, and it's pretty emotional, isn't it? All that love. To feel you're in the centre of a life-giving place is extraordinarily powerful."
But she has no boyfriend at present and if she goes round telling men she wants to have babies in the next two years ... "Oh God no, I would never say that, not at all. I'm not a needy person. Maybe I'll end up on my own - I just don't know. You just have to keep turning the pages, really, seeing what happens. But you have to have someone to fancy all the time, don't you? You have to always have a crush, I think. I do miss having someone to think about, to do lovely things for. I like doing surprising things, like filling the house with flowers or thinking of little jokes - you still think of things that would make someone laugh. And of course when the sun shines, you want to be out in the park rolling around in the grass with someone, don't you?"
She has always refused to be imprisoned by her own fame. She travels by tube - "only because I'm always running late and it's the fastest way to get anywhere" - and drove around Mississippi by herself when she was preparing the Tennessee Williams play Summer and Smoke. She goes 40s dancing at the 100 Club, where she claims no one recognises her, and chats to people at the stage door or even on the street. "The other day this American stopped me and said: 'OK, now I've seen you three times, it's obviously fate.' And I said: 'Well no, it could be just that we live near each other.' He said: 'No, no - you're one of my favourite actresses and I just know it's fate.' But what can you do? He's probably great but I can't just say: 'OK I'll go out with you.' If I were in America I probably would, because if you're not on home soil you think, what the hell."
Her next job after Madame de Sade is playing Bruce Willis's wife in a Disney sci-fi film called Surrogates. She also has a queue of films in the pipeline - Fugitive Pieces, Freefall, Burning Pond (which she describes as "a twisted black comedy") and finally the masterpiece, An Education, which comes out in October. It's an interesting list but seems a bit diffuse. But she says she just wants to keep working, and switching between films and theatre, with no particular career goals in mind. "I just sort of want to keep doing it. And to be able to look back and... I want to be respected, so that to have my name attached to a project means something. Obviously it would be great to do some wonderful enriching roles, but I want to just carry on doing it all my life. Because it just keeps you so young, it keeps you so fulfilled - it's the most fulfilling job in the world, really."