I hate to tell a new man I'm on TV.. I want him to like me for who I

SHAUNA Macdonald walks into the room as if she's about to start a shift in a colliery with a silver metal handbag that looks like a miner's lamp. It's not as if she needs it to light her way to stardom...just 22 and only a year out of drama school, Shauna is being talked about by people who know as the new Kate Winslet - one of a handful of British actresses who could make it to the very top in Hollywood.

Her reputation has been built on a tiny number of films - the most important of which has yet to be released owing to the death of its director - and her performance as Sam Buxton in the hit BBC1 spy series, Spooks. Yet this beautiful strawberry-blonde from Scotland is already the hottest young actress in British showbusiness.

"I think she's going to be a huge star," says Mark Shorrock, producer of the shelved film Rocket Post. "Believe me, had movies like Rob Roy and Braveheart been made now, they wouldn't have looked any further than Shauna."

Slim and petite with skin so pale it almost shines, Shauna hardly seems capable of carrying the weight of expectation placed on her. But there is a toughness about her that's only apparent after a few hours in her company. She isn't one of those showbiz kids who tap- danced through childhood lisping The Good Ship Lollipop. In fact she had to be forced on to the stage by her mother, who threatened dire consequences if she refused.

"I would have been about four, playing a fairy in a kiddies' show," recalls Shauna. "Just before the curtain went up I got a severe attack of nerves. I was weeping and snivelling - I just wanted to get out of the place. My mum said, 'If you don't go on, I'll never speak to you again. Do you think I've sewn all those sequins on your dress for nothing?'

"It sounds cruel but it wasn't. She knew I was scared and she wasn't going to let me fail because I'd lost my nerve. It wasn't as if she was trying to live out her own showbusiness fantasies through me... she just wanted her daughter to find her courage. She was absolutely right."

So the dancing fairy went on, but the stage fright has remained. "When I do theatre I'm terrible," she admits. "I don't throw up, but I spend a hell of a lot of time in the toilet. Once I get on I'm OK...if the audience react to you, you float on a cloud of emotion and there's no other place I'd want to be."

Spooks is now a huge hit with an audience of more than seven million. But when Shauna was chosen to play young MI5 recruit Sam, she had to make the biggest decision of her life and move from Edinburgh to London. It was lonely at first but she now shares an East End flat with actor Simon Conlon, who she went to college with, and artist Gaby Leigh, who made her amazing cylindrical handbag - out of which, unnervingly, Shauna now produces a black bra and a white bra to wear underneath her clothes for the photo session.

Bras feature prominently in Shauna's career so far. The story of how an inflatable one helped her to win her role in Spooks is already a showbiz legend. She'd been knocked back for another part so went to the audition in a pneumatic bra - plus short skirt and knee-length boots - to raise her morale and confidence. She got the part.

"You men are always fascinated by bras," she says. "I'll put it as simply as I can. There are three sorts of bra to give you a bit of an advantage up top - air-filled, gel-filled and ones filled with chicken fillets. This one was air-filled - you inflated it with a little pump."

I tell her that she must be a bit careful, otherwise she'd go past the Jordan stage and end up floating away over the rooftops and being picked up by air traffic control. "Yeah, you've got to keep your wits about you," Shauna agreed. "You don't want to overdo it."

But it's what goes on in the mind that makes a character... and Shauna is a girl who likes to watch.

"I'm always people-watching on the Tube," she says. "I don't look at their faces much. I look at their hands and, in the summer, if they're wearing open-toed sandals, their feet as well. You can tell a lot about people from their hands - whether they're downtrodden or vain - by the way they look after their fingernails and cuticles."

DOES that mean her boyfriends have always had to have nice hands and feet? "Oh, definitely," Shauna says firmly. "I like a man with big hands."

She says there isn't anyone special in her life at present, nor anyone she's left behind in Scotland with a broken heart.

At parties she tends not to say what she does. "I don't exactly lie, but I don't bring it up either. People have these awful ideas of what actors are like and, anyway, I want them to like me for myself."

One thing you need for a date with Shauna is a strong constitution. "I'm one of those lucky people who can drink vodka all night and never have a hangover," she says. She is not totally sure whether it's better to have a boyfriend inside or outside showbusiness. "In one way it's good if you're both actors because you have an appreciation about what you're going through at any particular time. But then again, actors do tend to have egos in some size or shape. It's sometimes difficult if one of you is doing well and the other isn't. I don't have any firm rules though. If somebody fancies me and I fancy them...well, that's about it really."

Jealousy is often never far beneath the surface in her chosen profession, and Shauna's success at college must have ruffled a few feathers. Talent-spotted remarkably early, she appeared in no fewer than four films before graduating, playing everything from a temptress at a telephone call-centre to a Victorian prostitute.

She starred with comedian Billy Connolly in The Debt Collector. "I was only 17, but Billy was great. Very cheerful and chatty. But I got the impression that he feels under pressure to be funny all the time."

LATER she featured in a low-budget film called Daybreak which had so much bare flesh in it that it was nicknamed Date Rape.

"Not that my character was involved. She wore so much under a duffel coat it would have taken the entire film to get everything off."

Her own first sex scene is in the ill-fated film Rocket Post, whose release has been shelved for two years following the death of director Stephen Whittaker at the age of 53.

She plays the girlfriend of a German rocket scientist who came over to a Scots island before World War II to help the British government. The scene - opposite Danish co-star Ulrich Thomsen - was nerve-racking for Shauna. "I was nude from the waist up but I had it written into my contract that I kept my pants on," she says. "I remember being really embarrassed, but the thing that sticks in my mind now was how cold I felt. On that day of all days, they forgot to heat the studio."

You can tell she won't be one of those actresses who - as the showbiz joke puts it - will only keep her kit on if the part really demands it. But, embarrassment or not, Rocket Post is the film that everyone who saw the rushes was convinced would catapult Shauna to international stardom.

Now she will have to wait. But, one suspects, not for very long. The fan mail from her role in Spooks is beginning to flood in.

"I've not really had the face-to-face recognition thing yet," she says. " I'm beginning to notice I'm getting odd looks on the bus. The trouble is, in London you're never quite sure whether it's a fan or just another weirdo."

She doesn't find it strange that after being named as the new Kate Winslet she should still be travelling on the top deck of the No73? "I go on the bus everywhere. None of my mates have money. Actually I've started designing birthday cards as a second string in case things don't work out. I'm going to sell them on a market stall."

To keep her positive, I paint a picture of the future - Hollywood premieres, limos, mansions...but Shauna isn't having any. She knows the next big thing can quickly turn out to be the next big thing that wasn't.

She stuffs her bras into her miner's lamp handbag and goes home to sketch a few more birthday cards.

Copyright 2003 MGN LTD
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