DON'T YOU MEAN TIARA FITZGERALD?

If the pun was predictable, at least she has earned the right to be crowned as one of Britain's princesses of screen and stage. At 29, Fitzgerald has won a steady stream of accolades since she shot to fame straight out of drama school, as Nancy in the film Hear My Song.

REIGN TO DATE

She stars this week in the 3 million pound BBC adaptation of Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a bleak tale about a woman who, with her young son, runs away from a murky past to lodge in Wildfell Hall and becomes the object of much speculation. She made her TV debut as promiscuous Polly in Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn, and played another offbeat Wesley heroine in the recently screened The Vacillations of Poppy Carew. On the big screen, she has played clergyman Hugh Grant's wife Estella in Sirens, and Grant's squeeze in The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill and Came Down A Mountain.

BARE NECESSITIES

Never too coy about stripping for the camera, she seems to do it all the time. "I'm not doing it as any kind of political thing. It's what I believe, for me. But I respect that other actors don't have that feeling because it's a delicate area," she says. "I would never whip my clothes off willy-nilly, but I'm not about to close down, either...It's quite liberating really. When you're nude on a set, and you're working, you're not thinking about it, so it's probably one of the only times in your life that you can be nude and not be self-conscious, weirdly enough".

HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD?

"I don't want to live there and I doubt I ever will," she says. "As a child, I had such a naive and idealistic view of Hollywood-it was very much the Golden Gates and Gene Kelly dream-and when I went out there it was the antithesis of that. I was so shocked by the superficiality...If you're prepared to go for the facelifts and all that, fine, but I don't see how anyone can be happy there."

SO BRITISH IS BEST?

"Americans think what we do is quaint and they love our costume drama and heritage, so I'm quite happy to stay here and be quaint. I really love this country and if I can work here I'm happy. People make some of the best films in the world here: the problem is that we haven't got the money. But so long as we embrace what we have and don't try to emulate Hollywood-we're not about slick action dramas-I really believe we can't be bettered. People work here because they love it, not because of an extra dollar on the highest-paid actor list."