She is sipping a coffee and looking out the window of the coffee shop where she has arranged to meet her interviewer, who has been delayed, and who finally arrives full of apologies. But Fitzgerald brushes them off with a smile.

'Actually, I was appreciating the break,' says Fitzgerald. 'They've been few and far between lately.'

She is speaking not just of her week, which has been devoted to chatting up her latest film, A Man of No Importance, in which she co-stars with Albert Finney, and which is opening locally Friday. She is also referring to the last four years, which have seen her working almost non-stop in a series of well-received plays, television dramas and films.

'I went right from this film to a play and then to another film with Hugh (The Englishman WhoWent Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain), which we just finished (in September, 1994),'Fitzgerald says. 'Its all been fairly frenetic.'

'Hugh' is Hugh Grant, with whom Fitzgerald co-starred in last years surprise hit Sirens. In that, Fitzgerald played the proper wife to Hugh's repressed clergyman, a woman who has her erotic core belatedly ignited by a trip to a liberated artist's colony. Despite a scene in which she appeared starkers and another that had her being groped by three women, she went almost unnoticed, since the film also featured uber-model Elle MacPherson in her birthday suit.

Fitzgerald didn't mind; she was already set to segue from Sirens to the more substantial A Man of No Importance, in which she plays a newcomer to 1960's Dublin who serves as a muse to bus driver Finney, an amateur theater director who is inspired to cast her as Salome in a production of Oscar Wilde's play of the same name.

'I had almost met him (Finney) a couple of times before, but fate intervened until the time was right for me, I think, she says. 'He is so full of the joy of life, and he's incredibly generous. It was just lovely to be with him, to watch him.'

Fitzgerald's first 'big' professional experience upon her graduation from London's Drama Centre in1990 was in a long running hit play called Our Song, co-starring with another aging bad boy of the British theatre, Peter O'Toole, whom she discovered to be a veritable Lion in Winter.

'He was absolutely wonderful to me, ' says Fitzgerald. 'It being my "debut" and all, I was like this, you know (she makes a fist), terribly scared. And he conned me to a great extent, because he gave me the confidence I needed to just go and do it. He convinced me I was fine.'

Perhaps, it is suggested, she has a calming effect on her leading men. Certainly she is performing this function for her harried interviewer. 

'Well, perhaps I do,' says Fitzgerald, mildly flattered. 'There would be worse attributes, I suppose.'

According to those who have worked with her, Fitzgerald's attributes extend beyond her becalming manner. Suri Krishnamma, the first-time director of A Man of No Importance, does not hesitate to call her 'one of the most exciting stars to come out of England in years,' and Grant, who could be considered a member of that group as well, calls her 'incredibly versatile, and fearless, I think. She'll try anything.'

Fitzgerald disputes that, saying she's basically 'frightened of everything, but lucky for me, I'm up for the challenge as well. It is how you grow, I think.'

The question for her now is, 'in what direction?' After making her film debut in 1991's Hear My Song, a whimsical Irish romance, she found herself being wooed by Hollywood, and made the requisite rounds of casting agents and interested producers. She says while the experience was instructive, she found it 'depleting, somehow.'

'It seemed to mostly consist of wandering down corridors with a piece of paper in my hand,' she says. 'I'm actually happy to be making films in England at this time, when there is a bit of resurgence of the business; if it was like it was just a few years ago, I don't know. I do like to work.

'That's the other thing about coming to L.A.: I'm just too restless. I couldn't stand that lounging around the pool, waiting for something to come up, or do the networking or whatever they call it, instead of real working. In England, at least, there's always a good bit of BBC television you can do,or if you're lucky, a play.