If Alfred Hitchcock were still alive he would put in an urgent call to Deborah Kara Unger's agent. Unger, the Canadian star of Crash and The Game, would be perfectly cast as the glacial blonde lead in one of his beguiling thrillers.
That is why it's a surprise to see her playing an altruist in The Hurricane, a biopic charting the struggles of the Sixties' champion boxer Rubin Carter (Denzel Washington) to overturn his wrongful conviction for murder. At the centre of the film is Carter's stirring relationship with a black teenager and the three members of a Canadian commune who played an important role in securing his eventual release.
As a member of the commune, Unger embodies the type of saintly qualities seldom seen outside Hollywood movies, possibly because they don't exist. It's a 180-degree turn from her previous role as the duplicitous junkie wife of Mel Gibson in Payback.
But Unger has made her name playing ice-cool femmes after a quirky start to her career. She finished high school and inspired by antipodean cinema became the first Canadian to study at the Australian National Institute of Dramatic Art. On graduation she was taken on by Gibson's agent and found a steady flow of work in Australian television dramas and movies. In the early Nineties she moved to North America, starring in the little seen but favourably received psycho-sexual drama Whispers In The Dark (1992) and as Christopher Lambert's lover in the woeful Highlander III (1994). Then she won the role that made her famous and infamous.
In David Cronenberg's controversial Crash, which brought new meaning to back-seat car frolics, she began the movie with her naked breast pressed to an aeroplane. She proceeded to lick the paint, while her lover licked her. Then she went home and calmly swapped infidelity tales with husband, James Spader. It was, literally, the role of a lifetime.
She nearly didn't make it to Hollywood to make the movie. American immigration officials didn't believe her when she arrived in LA without a work permit.
They were unimpressed by the script proffered by the putative star and, after reading a particularly graphic section, they sent her back to the Canada claiming she was seeking entry to film a porn flick. The critically well-received Crash opened doors and Unger was inundated with sexy roles. But when director David Fincher was looking for a 'career waitress' type to star in his complex thriller The Game, he picked Unger to star opposite Michael Douglas after first considering Jodie Foster.
After auditions with Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Tom Cruise, Unger, 33, was shocked to get the female lead in The Game. She was equally happy to find a role that didn't require her to bare all again. 'It was terrific to be in a movie where I got an entire wardrobe,' she said.
Later this year she appears opposite Ralph Fiennes in the historical romance Sunshine and takes the sole leading role in the indie picture The History of Luminous Motion. Her future looks bright, too.
Five things you should know about Deborah Kara Unger
1 The American Screen Actors Guild asked her to change her name because another actress is called Deborah Unger.
2 She didn't have a showbiz background: her mother was a nuclear scientist and her father a gynaecologist.
3 She began her career performing in telethons.
4 Of Crash she says: 'I was terrified every day because of all the sex scenes.'
5She now lives in Los Angeles 'just east of the "D" in the Hollywood sign'.