As she is 6 feet tall, with arresting brown eyes and frizzy hair allowed to fall where it may, the spindly former model who was discovered at 15 in London's Covent Garden certainly makes an impression when she walks into a room. But Saffron Burrows is no vain beauty hungering for stardom.

Well-versed in social justice and human rights, she serves as vice president of the United Kingdom's National Civil Rights Movement and is also a correspondent and a stage performer, preferring subjects that provoke and question the status quo. A regular in Mike Figgis films during the mid-1990s, she seems to almost delight in the fact that her recent roles in movies about vampires, monster sharks and a suit made of lipstick kisses (Perfect Creature, Deep Blue Sea, Terrible Kisses) have not exactly made her a Hollywood legend.

The admitted fan of Al Gore, modern art and literature was recently in the Czech Republic to promote British film (including her own stylish noir with Malcolm McDowell, Gangster No. 1).

The Prague Post: You have five films coming out this year. Not bad for an actress known mainly for arthouse films, is it?

Saffron Burrows: Kind of a amazing, but kind of very like me. I seem to be very drawn to filmmakers that do a festival circuit and the thing finally reaches, oh, the Havana Film Festival in three years' time. That seems to happen.

I got the golden touch. I don't mind, I quite like it. I do seem to embrace obscurity. But rather that than make an éclat and burn yourself out at 21 — this is my theory. I don't want to saturate the market.

TPP: Unfortunately one of those that hasn't had much visibility, in this market at least, is Klimt, the film you've just done with John Malkovich on the Austrian avant-garde painter.

SB: It had a big, wonderful opening at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in February, and it was opened in Vienna. The whole cast showed up. So it's had these wonderful launches in Europe. And it's a truly European film in my opinion, in the most eccentric, best sense of the word, you know. But it's not reached England yet. And the British must be kicking themselves, whoever the distributors are, because, of course, the sale has just been made of the Adele Bloch-Bauer [The record-breaking 1907 portrait of Klimt's sponsor, for which cosmetics heir Ron Lauder paid $135 million in June].

Of course, now should be the time when people are going to find out about his life. He's now superseded Picasso, hasn't he, as the biggest-selling artist ever. Strangely, I saw the painting 18 months ago in Vienna when we were filming there.

TPP: And the film of his life captures some of the duality of living in Victorian times but painting groundbreaking nudes in an abstract style, I understand. What new sides to Klimt do we see?

SB: He was very drawn to Jewish women and fathered many children. There was something like 45 paternity suits upon his death.

Isn't that fantastic? And he lived a very cozy life. Strangely, he lived with his mother and sister all his life and had a dinner at 6 of a boiled egg and went to bed at 9 every night. And I think his lovemaking must have occurred during the daytime in his studio. Or on a lunch break. Because he had a terribly strong rhythm to his life.

TPP: Maybe that explains why his work output was so steady. But you've done 33 films since you shifted your career from modeling to acting in 1993. Does that also get routine?

SB: Hah, I'm just gathering my routine now. When I'm not shooting, I write, you know, stuff, and so I give myself hours of the day and a set venue to do it in. Mainly journalism, funnily enough. I do book reviews for The Times and The Guardian, The Independent. I'm doing one next week for the New Statesman and an article for The Spectator. I guess there are a few publications in England that have had a shakeup recently and, I guess, want to get different outlooks on life. There are certain subjects in our culture that I feel very strongly about. We have a new education bill that I think is very retrograde so I'll maybe write about that.

TPP: And you spend about half your time on the stage and half in film these days?

SB: The last couple of years that's been the case. Theater's trickier in that I probably like it even more, but in the planning: Now I know I want to do another play soon, but, probably, the way theaters go, it won't be till next year. It's so very impressively planned. And I don't just want to do a play. There's only quite specific stuff I'm interested in.

TPP: You're not exactly a welterweight — don't you find the physical demands of theater exhausting?

SB: Yes, I'm hopeless at it! Because I love it but I'm not very muscular and it makes me wish my family were more athletic. Because I think there is an element of athleticism that's required. So, when I do it, I have to drink protein shakes and eat meat, eat steak. It's ridiculous really. But you realize the stamina is required.

TPP: And you're now developing a play adapted from a novel about the French Resistance to be performed with Hugh Dancy, with some interesting parallels to Iraq, right? Do you think it's easier for theater to be socially relevant than it is for film to be?

SB: I think [theater] directors can interpret more easily for the modern-day audience. I just saw a production of Fidelio, the opera, and I'd not seen Fidelio before. And it was in modern dress — a kind of an undefined but modern dress. And of course you watch it and you think of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. There was no message pummeled to the audience, but it was terribly present in everyone's minds, I'm sure. I think probably, when the production values are high, your mind is allowed to do that without it being too on-the-know.

Someone asked about political films, why I did not want to make one. And I think, you know, stories have to be intimate, I think, and then they work. It doesn't really matter what the arena is. Also, it's tricky — the same probably applies to writing. Suggestion is more powerful than statement. Illustration is perhaps more powerful than rhetoric. And it's very difficult to summon that up in a story correctly.

TPP: But popular films can be quite political, can't they? Miss Julie, from August Strindberg's play about class hypocrisy, was quite a polemic in its day, wasn't it? How did you go about getting yourself imbued in that material?

SB: I love the way that Strindberg — other playwrights from that time, or even the modern day, who believe they understand women – you know, he just got inside her head so brilliantly. And the language is so modern. To me it's just like something that could have occurred six months ago in a claustrophobic relationship.

TPP: And Fay Grim, a new Hal Hartley film, is coming out soon for you. He has a reputation for being fairly demanding and very specific in instructing actors. Did you find that?

SB: I love Hal. He is specific. And I was just discussing in a bar at 3 a.m. with Michael Caton-Jones our love of specificity. I can't bear vague direction. I don't mind someone telling me they don't know. That's fantastic, but mediocrity can occur so easily on a film set and I've certainly been involved in sequences that were mediocre because of lack of precise detail. And so Hal's very good at detail and body language. I like him so much. He asked me to do this, so I nip in and out. I'm a Russian spy. I have a gun — I have several guns, actually. And Jeff Goldblum's a CIA guy, and Parker Posey's being brilliant. You know it's the sequel to Henry Fool. We're telling a mainly New York–Parisian story. It's quite anarchic. And bonkers. And probably there's a sort of, I'd say, Russian humor to it.

TPP: Speaking of underground characters, there's a story circulating that you learned how to punch from Reggie Kray, the British mafia guy who's been the subject of films himself — is that just Internet nonsense?

SB: No that one's true! I met him while he was in jail.

TPP: Remind me not to get you angry. So, what's the preferred gangland technique then?

SB: You've gotta twist. And, obviously, keep the thumb outside the fist so you don't break it.

TPP: And what are you aiming for?