She posed for men's magazines, yet is insecure about her body. She produced an angst-ridden and bestselling album only to fall into a yawning depression. Can her new film, Johnny English, keep Natalie Imbruglia laughing?

The cruellest review that Rowan Atkinson can ever have got came near the beginning of his career, when a critic asked if it was technically possible for a comedian to lack a sense of humour. The rubbery-faced Oxford graduate and HGV driver has been dividing audiences ever since, although most people find at least some things he does amusing: if not Mr Bean then Blackadder, or those credit-card ads in which he played an incompetent M15 officer. Fans of the last will enjoy Johnny English, a feature film based on the character. I laughed.

The sense-of-humour question can more sustainably be asked of his co-star. Natalie Imbruglia (the “g” is silent) has an affecting voice, a knack for turning melancholy into pop, and was a good-enough actress to sustain two years of popularity on Neighbours. But is this angsty 28-year-old diva, whose single Torn was 1997’s definition of a broken heart, a comedienne? The omens were not good. Oscar-winning Halle Berry may not have been too proud last year to do an Andress, but Imbruglia not long ago told an interviewer that while she wanted a film career she would never be “a Bond girl”. Yet here she is playing Interpol’s Lorna Campbell, Pussy Galore to Atkinson’s 007.

She is dressed demurely today for our interview at the Dorchester. An almost ankle-length gypsy skirt by Kenzo, a lacy Issey Miyake top. She is petite and dark, almost oriental, ethereally rather than carnally beautiful. It’s hard to believe she once posed in a bikini for Loaded.

It is hard to believe that Loaded expected her to. The magazine might as well have asked Arundhati Roy to wear a thong.

But Lorna Campbell, she points out, stays dressed. More’s the pity for her male fans, I say.

“Yes, I am sure they would have liked me to undress, but for me it was really important. If it had been that kind of a role, I would not have done it.”

Really? If there had been a bikini scene, she would have said no to the movie?

“No way. Maybe in time, if I grow as an actor, if there were a scene where I did not objectify myself as a woman, it might be something I would challenge myself to do. But I don’t think that at the start of my career I feel the need to get my clothes off.”

She notes the irony that Berry got her Oscar for the one movie in which she did strip bare. Yet the sex scenes in Monster’s Ball were, arguably, integral.

“I know. What I ask myself is whether, as an actor, I would ever be able to overcome my insecurities about my body and do that.”

So where does the insecurity come from? She is a performer. She is beautiful. She is from Australia, where no one covered up until the ozone layer disappeared. The culprit, she seriously believes, may have been Neighbours. In her audition she was asked to walk back and forth in a bikini, a test she passed with flying colours. Beth, her character, went on doing sexy beach walks for two years. Her “bikini days” on location, she now says, reduced her to tears.

“I was just not comfortable and there were times since when I was in situations where I thought I was going to do a fashion shoot and it was bikinis again. I didn’t want to walk out. But I never felt good afterwards.”

Yet she was brought up in the bikini paradise — and intellectual limbo — of Berkeley Vale, two hours north of Sydney. Her father, Eliot, a newsagent turned horticulturalist, was from a family of first-generation Italian settlers and his old-fashioned Catholicism sometimes showed.

“I think,” she says, “I might be a bit of a prude because I would come downstairs with a skirt down to here and he’d say ‘You’re not going out like that!’”

Equally, however, it may be that Imbruglia simply resents the loss of independence that stripping for a director entails. If this is the case, her need to be in control may have been inherited from her mother, Maxene, an assistant head teacher renowned for her self-discipline.

The second of their four daughters, Natalie was competitive. Early on she saw a future for herself in show business and took dancing lessons six days a week. She was “a kid in a hurry”. At 16, she won a scholarship to a performing-arts school in Sydney, but bailed out after six months — she was intimidated by the intensity of the work — but not before she had made enough contacts to find an agent. Soon she was appearing in TV commercials. The casting director at Neighbours later recalled a young woman coming to her audition with “a lot of charm and self-confidence and an inner determination”.

But Neighbours was a shock to Imbruglia: “I was being introduced to an adult working environment straight from school. I thought we would all sit down and discuss the characters and it would all be nice. Some harsh reality hit home. This was a job. People were being paid and there was a lot of money lost if you were filming past 7.30pm.”

Still in a hurry, she got out of the soap as early as she could, celebrating her liberation by cutting her long hair into a prototype of the look that would one day launch a million Imbruglia haircuts. Once more looking to speed things up, aged 20, she decamped to Britain.

Because Neighbours is shown here two years after Australia sees it, when she arrived here she was well known. She partied through her first, exceptionally hot, London summer. The truth was, however, that she had neither work permit nor work and her Neighbours money would not last for ever.

“I didn’t deal with my life very well. I went out and had fun, but the problems that were there I ignored because I didn’t know what to do. My dad would ring up and ask ‘Are you working?’ and I’d go ‘Aaargh!’ Eventually I had to change my lifestyle, and stopped buying clothes and really budgeted and just before the money ran out I thought maybe I should try the singing thing.”

A work permit, fortunately, is not needed to write songs. In a bar she met the sister of a friend who was in the music business. Anne Barrett read her angsty lyrics and matched her with professional songwriters.

She recorded a demo of Torn, still her most famous record, and RCA, looking for the next Alanis Morissette, signed her.

Project Natalie was born, its aim to make Imbruglia the acceptable face of grunge, which meant army trousers but a cute hairdo. The spectacular result was her 1997 album, Left of the Middle, which sold seven million copies worldwide. Torn became one of the most played songs on British radio. A massive poster of her little Bambi face looked down on Times Square.

Her only explanation for the success to this day is that the song’s sincerity spoke to people. “I was baring my soul in that video for Torn. I think people picked up on the sincerity of that. I think that is what happened. I was totally being myself. There was no image being created. It was who I was at that time. Those army pants — I still wear them. It is quite mad to me when people talk about that being an image.”

Yet she felt uneasy, feared that people were out to get her. Chris Evans, whose romantic overtures she had spurned, took revenge by playing the original Norwegian version of Torn on his breakfast show. The album’s cover notes said the song was written by others, but, sincerity being her thing, people had not noticed. Evans suggested that Torn be renamed “ripped off”. (“You know I didn’t write Torn,” she tells me. Everyone knows that, I want to say.)

Terrified by her success, the girl from the largest island nation in the world fled to a very small island called White Lilies in Windsor and a Spanish villa she moved into alone. For a year she did nothing, communed with nature and her dog and put off her follow-up album.

“In retrospect, I tucked myself away from everything and everyone. I isolated myself, which kind of perpetuated the second album syndrome. I also think that I had not got to really know myself. Being alone was a great thing for that.”

Perhaps she became addicted to solitariness?

“Yes, it was my safe haven, but it was my enemy also. I felt it was the right thing to do. I could concentrate on my album with no distractions, but I think, in turn, that perpetuated my depression. It was winter and with the lack of light I got seasonal depression and it became a very negative thing.”

She was “very unhappy”, though she is not sure why.

“I don’t feel I need to know. I am just happy it is over. I have had periods of therapy. I believe in therapy even if you are not depressed and I had a wonderful person. But I don’t feel I need to analyse that period. I just think ‘That was a weird time, but I got a good album out of it’.”

White Lilies Island was good, but as its title implies, very much the view from her window. Selling a million copies, it was not the phenomenon that Left of the Middle had been three years before. Musical fashions had moved on. “I just hadn’t been paying attention to what was being played on the radio,” she confesses.

The final song, Come September, was the most optimistic and written almost last. That she was at last getting a little distance on herself is suggested by her use of the third, rather than first, person.

“She’s made her mark/ But lost her spark/And what she’s pushing for/ She can’t remember,” the lyrics go, but then cheer themselves up: “She’s going to drink the sun/ Shining just for you/Instead of everyone.”

“It is about overcoming difficult times on your own,” she says. For a woman who has never gone short of dates — the Tory frontbencher Liam Fox was the oddest rumour — Imbruglia is used to being on her own. Her two longest relationships, with Lenny Kravitz, the American rocker, and David Schwimmer, the geeky palaeontologist in Friends, did not survive past nine months.

“That was worrying me. I really wanted to be with someone for longer than that. They would leave me or my feelings would switch off for that person, like overnight. Horrible for them. Horrible for me.”

For a while it looked as though her next serious boyfriend, Daniel Johns of the Australian band Silverchair, had fallen victim to the syndrome. After a year they parted.

“We split up because we lived in different countries and thought ‘This is silly. This is impossible. What are we doing? We should try and forget about it’, and, I guess, we both couldn’t. That was a shock to me, because I really thought that I would rebound. But no. He was the one. It was a very hard year because both of us tried to move on with our lives.”

She dated?

“One date. The whole year.”

Then she went to Australia for an awards show. “We had been talking on the phone, kidding that we were just friends, and decided to meet up. And that was that. It was obvious. The heart knows no geography. I know that for a fact. He’s just amazing. I’ve not met anyone else like him. He’s a beautiful, beautiful person.”

She believes in soulmates?

“Absolutely.”

Not long after they had got back together, however, Johns contracted reactive arthritis, a version of the crippling disease sparked by a virus.

“He was very ill. He has had a really hard time, poor guy. He is much better now. He is on tour in Australia and is fit and well and the show is going well. But he was really sick. Sometimes he was in the UK and could hardly walk. Sometimes he was in a wheelchair. Horrible. And that lasted for about 12 months. It hit him very hard. To see someone going through that is really horrible.

“He looks really buff now,” she adds. Diet and exercise turned out to be more use than conventional medicine, and he has been building up his body in the gym.

Still divided by careers based at opposite ends of the planet, they plan to marry, but not until next year. For once, she does not seem to be in a rush.

Before the wedding, she will have delivered her next album. The songs are flowing. There will be big choruses and a more commercial sound. She is listening to Missy Elliott, hip-hop, and Aqualung. “It is more edgy, but lyrically less introspective,” she promises.

I don’t know how you could leave an interview with Imbruglia not liking her, but on the darkest night you would not mistake her for a barrel of laughs. She thinks deeply, but not analytically, about herself.

She regards herself as a “spiritual” creature who knows what she is on the planet to do. This is not a comedy perspective.

Fortunately, it does not matter in Johnny English. She plays Campbell completely straight, which makes Atkinson all the funnier. It was imaginative casting. The director, Peter Howitt, could even have played up his leading lady’s earnestness even more. I am glad, though, that she found Atkinson funny.

“I didn’t expect to laugh so much,” she says.

I bet no one did.

Johnny English is released on Friday.