Goodbye kiss of the temptress

Some actresses will forever be remembered for one scene. Just ask Neve Campbell. The 34-year-old was seared in the imagination of a generation of schoolboys after sharing a swimming-pool kiss with the equally voluptuous Denise Richards in the 1998 film Wild Things.

Flush with the film’s success as well as her starring role in the Scream horror film trilogy, Campbell celebrated by treating herself to a Porsche in which to roar around the party circuit of Los Angeles. But today, sitting in the shivering cold of Calgary, in her native Canada, she seems a world away from the sports-car-driving temptress of the 1990s. For a start, she has married John Light, the English actor, and moved away from LA to settle in London.

She has also swapped the steamy film roles for more worthy projects: she is in Canada filming a two-part thriller called Burn Up, to be shown by the BBC in July. Set in the worlds of oil, politics and global warming, it’s scripted by Simon Beaufoy, writer of The Full Monty.

She plays Holly, an environmentalist who works for a British oil giant’s renewable-energy division. Holly thinks she’s helping to change the company’s ways, unaware that she’s really employed simply to make it seem sincere about its desire to be green.

“Holly is deeply committed to making change and doing good. She wants to make a difference and she doesn’t realise she’s been hired as greenwash. Then she falls for her boss, which is quite unexpected as they have very different points of view,” says Campbell.

She says she has always been involved in environmental issues and helped host the British leg of Live Earth last year. Naturally, that meant the Porsche had to go. “I had it for seven years,” she says. “It was green, by colour, not CO2 output, and it was a fantastic car. I have a BMW now, but I’m seriously thinking of getting a Toyota Prius. It just makes sense, it’s better for the environment.” Campbell says she is also trying to keep a lower profile in London than she did in America, avoiding the usual celebrity haunts. “I feel very at home in London and it is refreshing to be more anonymous there,” she says. “I always find it odd when celebrities say it is so hard to stay away from the paparazzi, as it is really simply down to where you choose to go out to.”

Campbell was born in 1973 to immigrant parents (her mother is from Amsterdam and her father from Glasgow) and initially dreamt of making it as a dancer after winning a scholarship to Canada’s prestigious National Ballet School at the age of nine. At 14 she left to join the chorus of a production of The Phantom of the Opera in Toronto, where she performed 800 shows over two years. While on stage she was spotted by a television talent scout and subsequently cast in the hit US teen drama Party of Five.

However, it was her role in Scream in 1996 – a sleeper-hit that grossed more than $173m worldwide and spawned a whole genre of horror films – that made her an international star.

“I was unprepared for fame,” she says. “I’d expected to be a dancer, making very little money, and thought I’d probably live in a one-bedroom apartment until I was 35, dancing all day and dealing with injuries. Instead, I was working on Party of Five for nine months of the year, then during each hiatus I did a film, because that meant I would have a career beyond the show. I did that for seven years straight and it was exhausting.”

She moved to LA, but has mixed memories of the city. “I lived in LA for 13 years and I never felt at home there,” she admits. “It seemed very foreign to me, very one-track. It’s all about the film industry and I started to feel very uninspired because there was no real life to be inspired by.”

Driving in LA was a completely different experience from driving in Canada: “LA is a tough city. You can’t afford to have road rage. If someone cuts me up, I just let them do their thing. You can’t give someone the finger because they’ll just pull out their gun.”

My stuff...

On my CD player
I have a big mix of stuff on my iPod that I play through my car radio. Recently I’ve been listening to an album called Ainda by Madredeus, a Portuguese band

On my DVD player
I’ve just seen The Way We Were with Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, which I thought was fantastic

In my parking space
An ice-blue BMW

I will never throw away
My Apple iPod touch. It’s got my whole life on it: music, pictures, addresses, you name it