"My agent was always telling me to wear more make-up, wear higher

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Mar 16, 2008 | by ALAN MORRISON

WHEN you've been to bed with Leonardo DiCaprio, settling down on a sofa to talk to the Sunday Herald isn't likely to count among the most exciting things you have done in your life.

Of course, Laura Fraser was only acting when she slipped between the sheets with one of the world's most famous movie stars. That was back in 1997, when the Glasgow-born actress was credited as "Bedroom Beauty" for a scene in The Man In The Iron Mask. And here she is today, more than a decade on, 31 years old, a working mother who has decided to base herself in her home town again.

The former RSAMD student has, geographically speaking, come full circle. She sampled the big time alongside the late Heath Ledger in A Knight's Tale and appeared on the cast list beside Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky. She has done her bit for the Scottish film industry's sporadic bursts of activity, taking roles in Richard Jobson's directorial debut Sixteen Years Of Alcohol and Graeme Obree biopic The Flying Scotsman. She has also got comfy in a corset for BBC television dramas Casanova and Trollope adaptation He Knew He Was Right.

After the birth of her daughter Lila in 2006, however, Fraser was determined to take a year off in order to enjoy bringing up baby.

That plan went out the window after only five months. "I did two films when I was pregnant, " she says, referring to The Flying Scotsman and Nina's Heavenly Delights, "then, for the rest of the pregnancy, I was really suffering and in pain. I thought, 'Maybe I won't act any more, maybe when I have my baby I'll be happy being a full-time mum.' But after I finished breastfeeding, I got a little TV job that was only for a few days. I remember leaving Lila for the first time, and it was like, 'How can the world keep turning when I'm not with my baby?'" Lila was about nine months old when her mother took on four-part TV love-triangle drama Talk To Me with Max Beesley. "I eased into that because there was a part for Lila as my baby in it. I thought I could be with her and work. But it was a nightmare, really stressful and ultimately it was quite a selfish decision because I don't think Lila was happy in a hot room with loads of people around her. But I realised again that I really loved acting. It's so hard being a full-time mum: it can get so repetitive and thankless. But then you get these moments of utter fulfilment and joy as well. I found that I needed both work and being at home. In between jobs, I'm a full-time mum, and going to work is now a break." Fraser reckons she has been able to handle the twin demands of her current life because she has such a strong network of family and friends in Glasgow. This "community" was the main reason that she uprooted her husband, actor and screenwriter Karl Geary, from their New York base, and headed home. "I wanted to be around my family and friends, " she says, "and I wanted them to really know Lila, rather than a couple of trips a year here and there. Also I just missed Glasgow. I like being able to walk everywhere. I like the familiarity of having old memories of being a kid, and remembering when I climbed that wall or that tree or was shouted at by that man in that doorway. It's a really friendly place, the friendliest place that I've ever lived." The move home has, however, caused a few logistical career difficulties. It's not so bad for Fraser, who believes that, having had to cross the Atlantic from Brooklyn to London for auditions in the past, the up-and-down-in-a- day flight from Glasgow is a breeze. Geary, on the other hand, had been making a name in New York, writing and starring in 2003's Coney Island Baby, the movie on which he met his future wife. A naturalised US citizen who was born in Dublin but moved to America as a teenager, he was persuaded to come to Scotland only because Fraser softened the blow by having them move to a remote corner of Ireland first.

"That's what he says too, " Fraser admits, "that I was sneakily bringing him back to Glasgow. If I'd said, 'Let's move to Glasgow from New York', there's no way he would have done it. But because we randomly decided to live in West Cork for a while, it didn't seem that hard. And I was pregnant when I made the decision, so we had to do what I said, " she laughs. "He has found it really hard [to keep working] the same way I found it hard in New York, because none of the casting directors know him.

But he's a writer mainly, so you can write anywhere, although a lot of his contacts are in New York and it's hard to keep meetings alive with email. It is hard, but he's having to make sacrifices." Laura Fraser might not be a household name, but she is very much in demand as an actress. Perhaps it's because she doesn't look like a typical peelywally Scot or, despite the costume dramas, a blooming English rose, that she can be so versatile.

With her big, deep eyes and full lips, she seems more in the French league of Emmanuelle Beart or Juliette Binoche. In the past year, she has taken three contrasting jobs: the wife of Caiaphas, High Priest of Jerusalem, in BBC Easter serial The Passion; a paranoid medical research student in movie thriller Cuckoo, co- starring Richard E Grant; and a one-off BBC drama showing a different side to Crimean war nursing heroine Florence Nightingale.