With a background as dark as some of her films, Rose McGowan was never going to be a typical Hollywood star. Yet, after years of B-movies and gothic brooding, she is stepping into the light with a new film, a new boyfriend and new hair. So what’s going on?

It’s raining in Hollywood, and everyone’s confused. Starlets drip from the lobby sofas of the legendary Chateau Marmont hotel. Except Rose McGowan, who is delighted both by the weather and the worry it inspires in her fellow Angelenos. The 25-year-old arrives wearing a yellow raincoat and black trousers, with patent leather spike-heeled boots the exact same shade of baby-pink as her cashmere sweater. Her raven hair is wet, plastered against her high, pale forehead.

Her outfit, like her beauty, relies on definition and contrast. Most starlets look like sketches. The ones melting into the sofas have eyes, a nose, maybe a mouth. Rose McGowan does not look slight or gamine or unthreatening. Her red lips make a glistening bow so blatantly Freudian that it’s almost comical. She has a superstructure of a body, one hundred pounds of sinew with prominent breasts, a shelf of a bottom, a tiny waist and legs as long as someone under five foot four is allowed.

There are some women so stunning – from Ava Gardner to Debbie Harry – that other women rather than feeling threatened when they walk into a room, want to stand up and cheer.

These women are dames. Rose McGowan is a dame, the girl, had she lived in another era, who would have been the one pulling Monty Clift’s teeth from his throat post-car crash, instead of Elizabeth Taylor. She peppers her speech with throwback phrases such as ‘sugar’ and ‘dollface’. Sometimes Amy Blue, the Nineties California teen she debuted as in Gregg Araki’s wilfully vulgar The Doom Generation, slips in, and she says ‘dipshit’. And then she looks momentarily ashamed.

“I’m the kind of girl who can talk dirty, but who can’t talk about talking dirty. I’ll do anything, but if you ever mention it after the fact, I’ll punch you.”

It was just such an attitude that first got McGowan noticed by the casting director for The Doom Generation. She was 19 years old, looking sulky outside an LA gym. She went to LA to follow a boyfriend, after years of sleeping on the streets, at friends’ houses, or in nightclubs in Portland, Oregon. She had ended up homeless after running away from drug rehab. She wasn’t on drugs (at least when she went in) but her parents, alarmed by their 13-year-old’s gothic clothes, were convinced that she was.

“Drug rehab is where you learn how to take drugs. It’s like those television specials about the dangers of Anorexia that show you how to be Anorexic.”

A fellow guest at a fashionable dinner party she recently attended kept insisting that they had been at boarding school together. McGowan had to bite her lip not to laugh.

“What boarding school was that? The Oregon Academy for Homeless Girls?”

If the guest wasn’t entirely sure where she knew Rose from, you couldn’t blame her. Although she co-starred in the hugely successful Scream, her films since then have been decidedly B-list. Phantoms? Jawbreaker? Ready To Rumble? She shudders at the mention of the last one, a wrestling comedy that her agents talked her into.

“Yep, I have made some bad films. But unlike Kate Hudson [daughter of Goldie Hawn] or Gwyneth Paltrow [daughter of film mogul Bruce Paltrow] I didn’t grow up in Hollywood, with stability and wealth and all my needs were catered to. I came here trying to survive. I couldn’t afford to make worthy, artistic movies for no money. I had to pay the rent.”

Like her heroines, Liz Taylor and Ava Gardner, she seems destined to be remembered more as an icon than an actress. It seems unlikely that she will ever receive the critical acclaim of a Paltrow. She is, instead a star of another firmament: of magazines, gossip and internet chat rooms. The gossip intensified when she found her Burton, her Sinatra, the one with whom she could fight and make up. She paired up with shock-rocker Marilyn Manson after meeting him in 1997 at a screening of the appropriately reviled film Gummo.

Manson, famed for his outlandish S&M stage costumes, garish make-up and professed Satanism, is a huge, huge star in America, where every rebellious kid across the heartland has a poster of him on their wall. But though he has enormous wealth and power, one could hardly argue that she was with him to enhance her career. It ended up doing nothing but harm.

“Studio executives thought I stayed at home killing puppy dogs, when really I stay at home taking care of them [she has to Boston terriers]. And they seem to be personally offended that I fell in love with a man who flies in the face of what is considered attractive.”

The couple became engaged in 1999, but separated in February this year. Although she refuses to address the issue, he is rumoured to have developed a monstrous Cocaine addiction. All she will say is, “I love him. But I need eight hours sleep a night.”

McGowan has had little luck in love. The boyfriend she followed to LA was murdered the night before she got there. It is one of many sick short stories that litter her past. The day she was feted for The Doom Generation at the Sundance Film Festival, her best friend committed suicide. On McGowan’s 21st birthday she rank too much Champagne and was rushed to Hospital with alcohol poisoning. She came to wearing a satin gown and realised she has mistakenly been placed in a paediatric AIDS ward.

“That’s my life.” she shrugs. “I find myself to be a very calamitous person. I’m not a drama queen. I do experience those horrible highs and lows but I tend to find stability within the up and down.

Nevertheless, I’d be a fool not to expect more rocks to roll in front of me, because so many already have.”

Arranging herself in such a way that she can, should she get the urge, admire the heels on her boots, she orders English breakfast tea, apples and peanut butter. She slices the shiny green apple and holds it to her mouth, looking like Snow White about to be poisoned, but poisoned elegantly. Her childhood itself was a kind of coma: she was born into the Children of God, the same cult to which the Phoenix family belonged. Her first memories are of a commune in Italy. She recalls nice things about it, such as rolling farmlands, climbing fig trees with her brother and keeping a lamb as a pet. She doesn’t quite remember the Children of God ideology. “Even they weren’t clear on that. But they were big into child education. So I learned to read aged three.”

She also remembers darker things about the cult, which was started in the late Sixties. There was the usual corruption, including followers handing over all their money to the founder, David Berg. McGowan, even as a four-year-old, was the only one who voiced her dissent.

“I always had a great bullshit detector that made people nervous. I could see that the cult’s actions were not corresponding with their ideas. I spoke my mind on that, which, coming from someone who was two feet tall, must have been kind of disturbing.”

But when devotees (including Rose’s parents) began to leave in the Eighties, they told stranger tales, such as the practice of ‘flirty fishing’, whereby female members were told to sleep with men in order to bring them into the fold. Free love was not encouraged but enforced. There were many reports of child abuse in the US press. McGowan doesn’t recall molestation so much as feeling prematurely sexually aware. “I only see that in retrospect. you can always tell the ones who were sexualised too soon. We carry ourselves differently. I was at this restaurant the other night and a guy said ‘Rose, why do you always sit like that with your arms crossed in front of you? What are you being defensive about?’ I just wanted to tell him, ‘I’m hiding my breasts because I don’t feel like honouring you with them right now.’”

She concedes, however, that her curves now serve her well. I tell her they make her stand out from the pack of up-and-comers, who look like dead, anorexic choirboys. She raises an eyebrow. “At the end of the day, that’s what Anorexia is,” she says. “You want to be bone. What does it mean to be bone? It means to be dead.”

I ask if she is speaking from experience. “Yes. Earlier. Before acting. Mostly out of having an obsessive nature, doing everything well.”

She has not, as yet, done as well as she would like in acting. Though she first appeared on the screen in 1995, she only recently decided on it as a career. She says she really wanted to be Dorothy Parker, writing witty little poems for the New Yorker. She wanted to be the one criticising actresses, not the one being criticised. That being the case, why did she access such a precarious, neurosis-nurturing profession?

“Good question. That tripped me up for a long time. After The Doom Generation, I couldn’t figure out where to go, so I went back to Seattle. So much of my life had been about surviving that I couldn’t work out why I wanted to make survival even harder. I had no armour. I had nothing protecting me. And I was getting nailed. But once I made the choice to act, instead of it being chosen by someone else, I had a lot more emotional distance on it.”

McGowan now accepts that acting might be a longer phase than she previously thought, mainly because she’s started to get roles she finds interesting. She recently made Attica (The Killing Yard), a true-story prison-drama with Euzhan Palcy, the director of A Dry White Season, starring as a lawyer who freed seven Attica prison inmates falsely accused of murder. Also pending release is Rat in the Can (Strange Hearts), in which she stars as a low-grade Hollywood grifter. In a few weeks, she flies to Romania to begin filming Vacuums (Stealing Bess), directed by the creators of Stomp. She plays a worker in a vacuum cleaner factory. As was the case with Stomp, there are various dance sequences using industrial objects – such as steam pistons and the clanging of machinery – as music.

The dark comedy Monkeybone, which opens next week, is, she feels, important because she gets to be the good girl; her interpretation of a good girl being a curvaceous kitty who saves Brendan Fraser’s life by slashing the throat of a prison guard outside his cell.

“Yes,” McGowan states matter-of-factly, “but that was only because I loved him.”

She says that although they are no longer together, she would still defend Manson if need be. It is clear that the couple were two square pegs in Hollywood round holes. She felt her was very much her intellectual match.

“All my boyfriends have been Jewish and Manson was like an honorary Jew: very, very smart, but quite neurotic.”

She is now dating his physical opposite, the blond, blue-eyed up-and-comer, Kip Pardue, a clean-cut former footballer who debuted last year in Remember the Titans, and with whom she will star in Vacuums. She is considering what to wear to dinner with the film’s producer the next morning when she invites me to breakfast at her mint-green house. Her wardrobe contains, among other things, a photo of her kissing Peter O’Toole on the set of Phantoms, a gold Lurex dress Betsey Johnson invited her to take from her archives, and Marlene Dietrich’s Courrèges travel suit.

She also boasts an extensive library of film biographies. One of her favourites, the life of Twenties sex symbol Clara Bow, will be made into a film in which McGowan will star. It is a source of tremendous pride that Bow’s son has approved her to play his mother, since he has spent the past few decades turning down offers right, left and centre. The second he laid eyes on McGowan, he chose her to portray the tragic actress. Dogged by rumours that she slept with an entire football team, Bow retired from the screen at 25 and moved out to Vegas with her cowboy husband, where she started having schizophrenic episodes.

“She was sent to a mental institute, which she loved strangely enough, because life had been so awful: her dad molested her, her mother tried to stab her to death. As sexualised as she was, she was also very innocent.” Like Bow, McGowan has found that having lips not for kissing but for looking at takes dedication and can be lonely. Unlike Bow, she will not go over the rainbow. She cares about Manson, but does not pine for him. She is even in touch with her family now, thanks to e-mail.

“I loathe the telephone, and with e-mail you have the opportunity to consider your response or not to respond at all.”

Their relationship was was already doomed when toddler Rose realised that the Children of God was a laughable facade, long before her parents accepted her assertion. “My mother works for Microsoft now. A whole other cult!”

She says that although she has come to accept her parent for who and what they have to offer, she has always regarded her siblings (two brothers and two sisters) as her true source of “balance and wisdom and love”.

McGowan is unhappy talking about her parents in any detail. Indeed, it appears that there is some event too awful even to keep in her own mind, let alone speak out loud.

“There’s a reason,” she sighs “that people wait until those they know and love are dead before they write their autobiographies.”

She is interrupted by one of her Boston terriers, who playfully boxes me in the nose with a short sharp jab then turns away as though nothing has happened. I notice his toenails have been painted red. The puncher is named Fester, after Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. Looking at McGowan, sitting in her mint-green house, wearing a hot-pink shell-suit, clutching a red-toed terrier. I am reminded of an Addams Family drawing from the New Yorker. It depicts Uncle Fester, front-row-centre in a crowded movie theatre, laughing as everyone around him is sobbing. I ask her if she knows it. Since Rose hasn’t drawn her eyebrows on yet, her dogs cock their faces at me instead. Yes, she knows that drawing.

A few weeks later, she e-mails me with news that she is making her first official appearance as Kip’s date. It is the premier of his latest film, Driven, and her hair, dyed jet-black for so many years, is a marvellous carroty-blond. “Ann-Margret colour!” she gushes. McGowan was in the beauty parlour for 10 hours while they tried to lift all the black dye. “There’s been so much dark for so long,” she types, “it took a long time to get it light.”