UFO Info Week-End

Yet when seated she peers past me nervously searching for the waitress to bring her a camomile tea

Yet, when seated, she peers past me nervously, searching for the waitress to bring her a camomile tea. Polite and alert (she recalls our previous encounter, 15 months ago), she can also be off-hand and vague.She is in town for the British premiere of There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble at the Edinburgh Film Festival. An urban football fable which also stars Robert Carlyle, McKee appears as the eponymous footie-mad teenager’s single mother. She was attracted to the film because it was about “the triumph of the underdog”, but she has played a succession of mothers in the past, most recently in Mike Figgis’s Loss of Sexual Innocence.”I’ve often thought about motherhood,” she muses, in a soft North-east accent “I don’t have children.

It’s kinda private, but any parenting is exceptionally difficult. If you thought about it too much, I don’t suppose you’d ever do it There are too many fears, and hopes I think it is very difficult. I admire people who give it a go.”It’s a surprisingly revealing moment McKee is a woman who gives nothing away. “I don’t talk about my family life, or my private life,” she warns, attempting to steer me off the subject. “I’ve always drawn that line.”I do know that she’s been married “for ages” to a man not in the industry.

“It’s hard, just to maintain basic domestic life when your job takes you to lots of different places,” she says. Has she found it difficult to maintain her relationship? “No, I’m managing alright, thanks,” she says, stiffly. “It takes a certain amount of management.”She grew up in Easington, a colliery village in County Durham, but she’s reluctant to say what her parents did for a living Suffice to say, they weren’t in the film business. “I suppose my upbringing means that I understand how to be grounded,” she concedes.