'I don't whip my clothes off all the time in the street,' Tara Fitzgerald avows almost apologetically, responding to a question that often plagues young actresses early in their careers. In Tara's case, the career only kicked off three years ago with her debut in Hear My Song, but although she can undoubtedly act, her second film, Sirens, will only add fuel to her growing infamy for onscreen divestment. It's just as well the actress has no qualms about nudity - Sirens is quite the juiciest piece of mainstream movie eroticism to hit the screen for some time, a blatant, celebratory fleshfest including full frontal male and female nudity, suggested lesbianism and onscreen male masturbation. In terms of the famed Fitzgerald form and her sexy screen image, however, Tara knows where fantasy ends and reality begins.

'The truth of it is if you're a young girl there's only so many ways people want to see you,' states Fitzgerald matter-of-factly. 'It's not unusual pitching things on a sex level, certainly for young women.'

Tara wants to play things differently today, however, and announces that she will not be taking her clothes off for the PREMIERE photo session, as a contorted hair stylist busily endeavours to create a complementary frame for for her classically sculptured cheekbones, full lips and dark, Italianate eyes. It's a photogenic combination which could almost have been borrowed directly from the young Sophia Loren, but Tara's mainly worried about her hair. 'It's the worst hair in the world,' she moans. 'It's been backcombed to death on this film I just did...It's fine and flyaway and sticky and...' 'A nightmare?' ventures the stylist. 'A nightmare,' echoes Tara forlornly.

As the photo session progresses, the petite actress is asked to strike more and more provocative poses. She remains for the most part unflustered: 'He's a really good photographer,' she confides, explaining her willingness to oblige. 'It's like directors: if I'm in safe hands, then I trust him. It's such a vital relationship.' She does however pull the plug when there is the suggestion of more overtly revealing shots.

'I'm trying to - not redefine myself, it's not that self-conscious - but I try to play against it a bit. I'm just bored. If I'm always seen in the same way it's boring.'

Problem hair and image boredom notwithstanding, Tara Fitzgerald, at the age of 26, has reason to be ecstatically happy. With only one previous feature film - 1991's Hear My Song - a handful of TV dramas (including Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and the steamy Camomile Lawn) and one West End play (Our Song, opposite Peter O'Toole) under her belt, she has nonetheless entered the ranks of that exclusive Brit pack of young actors on the cusp of greater things, an ascendancy for which meteoric actually does fit the bill. Sirens, a joint Australian-British production in which she co-stars alongside fellow British dream-boat and name-on-everybody's lips Hugh Grant, is her second film, and the brainchild of antipodean writer-director John Duigan, who made The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting.

A fictionalized account of the controversial events surrounding real-life Australian artist Norman Lindsay, Sirens looks set not only to fan the flames of success for Fitzgerald, but also to generate a sexual frisson among viewers expecting a run-of-the-mill period drama. As Estella Campion, demure wife of Grant's ostensibly progressive Anglican clergyman dispatched from England to set up a parish in Australia, Fitzgerald generates a hefty proportion of Sirens sexual sparks. Under the provocative influence of the risque Australian artist (played by Sam Neil), his wife, and the three young female models in residence - including the superbly statuesque Elle MacPherson in her screen debut - Tara's Estella begins to experience strange dreams and an eruption of emotion which culminates in a marriage-threatening sexual crisis. But isn't Fitzgerald worried that Sirens will be dismissed by the serious filmgoer as simply a lurid male fantasy film?

'Yes of course, because that's what it is to some extent,' she agrees. 'But it's not as voyeuristic as some stuff that you might see which is less overt. It is so unashamed in its appreciation of eroticism that for that reason it is not offensive. The whole point is that it is a celebration. It advocates the joy of sensuality. I think people have a problem when they feel something is unnecessary. I don't think it is unnecessary in this film because, of course, that's what it's all about.'

So what, in Tara's opinion, is the dividing line between tasteful, erotic art and exploitative rubbish?

'Oh God, I don't know,' she sighs. 'I think when it's unself-conscious. You know...a film like Betty Blue, for instance. That was seeped in eroticism and no-one that I spoke to was ever embarrassed by it, because it was so wholly done. It was embracing.'

On location in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales (they actually filmed the interiors in the real Lindsay house), Fitzgerald recalls how the British actors - i.e. she and Grant - experienced the gamut of disconcerting Australian fauna and wildlife, such as spiders, snakes, leaping insects and strange marsupial animals, including an unknown creature that came crashing through Tara's window late one night. Grant, Tara chuckles, was particularly put out by rat droppings on his bed clothes, although she professes - much like the rest of the planet at the moment - an adoration for the actor, particularly his sense of humour, 'as much at his own expense as at everybody else's'. Mention of Sam Neil, however, sends her into an altogether giddier mood; one almost gets the sense that the term crush wouldn't go amiss in this situation. 'He's lovely, really lovely,' she croons. 'Very gentle,quite quiet, and not at all patronising.'

For the duration of the Sirens shoot, Fitzgerald ended up spending a lot of time at Neil's hideaway, where his Japanese wife Noriko - also the film's make-up artist - would cook diner when everyone gathered together on the Sundays they had off from making the film.
'It was a real family vibe,' she giggles. 'It was kind of like The Brady Bunch at times.'
Despite the camaraderie, however, Fitzgerald was initially concerned that Sirens was a potential disaster in the making, what with a cast containing 'three novices' (MacPherson and two fellow Australian models) and Fitzgerald herself, 'not that much of an old hand,' she snickers. Consequently, she heaps lavish praise on director John Duigan for keeping things from spiralling out of control.

'He's good at making everyone feel relaxed and easy with themselves and the whole thing. He gave [the models] a lot of confidence and he gave me a lot of confidence too. Everyone always talks about "actor's directors", but John really is one.'

Tara was born the daughter of society photographer Sarah Fitzgerald and artist Michael Callaby; her parents split up when she was three and her father died when she was 11(though it was only many years later that Tara learnt he had committed suicide). Her mother remarried the actor Norman Rodway, to whom Tara feels she owes a lot for her upbringing, even though she doesn't see him anymore. Unfortunately, she now finds her past has become fair game for the tabloids.
'You know they're going to do it. They get a hook and that's it,' she booms. 'What did I read?...How destroyed I was by my father's death and how I would never recover. I never said anything like that, but of course they're going to headline it that way because it's a hook and a pitch. It's like the whole sex thing. You can talk quite honestly about sex, but you tell one person and it gets used again and again. Of course it will change as and when...I mean, you know...' She stares pointedly in my direction. 'Someone said you should always work out what you're going to say to journalists beforehand and make sure you know it by heart, but that would be so boring, wouldn't it?'

Tara sighs, and momentarily looks lost in reverie, perhaps wondering why she reveals so much of herself to members of the Fourth Estate.

'Do you ever have complete lapses where you just forget who you are or what you're doing?' she wonders, more to herself than anyone around her. It turns out that she often experiences this lack of direction immediately after completing a project (she has just wrapped on the comedy A Man of No Importance in Ireland, with Albert Finney and Rufus Sewell). At one time she 'just totally forgot what I was doing. I thought maybe I should go and get a temping job or something. I waitressed after I did The Camomile Lawn.' Strangely - as much to herself as to anyone else - the thought of her professional career suddenly drying up doesn't fill her with any sense of dread at all: 'It's funny, because I always wanted to be an actress as a kid.'