Gretchen Mol on The Notorious Bettie Page

The star of Rounders and Celebrity on bearing all to play 1950s America's favourite pinup

More famous for appearing on the cover of 'Vanity Fair' than for any of her film roles, actress Gretchen Mol has learned the hard way you can't build a career on hype alone. Eight years on from her breakthrough, she finally has a movie to justify her premature exposure: The Notorious Bettie Page, a biopic of the 1950s pin-up girl who became America's best-known fetish model. Directed by Mary Harron of American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol fame, it's the role of a lifetime for the 33-year-old star of Rounders, Celebrity and The Shape Of Things.

Who was Bettie Page?
Simply put, she was a 1950s pin-up, but she became famous in a very underground way for her bondage photography. Even in the 1950s not many people knew who she was, but in the 1980s she had a resurgence; people became interested in who she was and her role as a proto-feminist. Now you walk into Tower Records and there's a shrine to her; her image is on lunchboxes and matchbooks and little lighting fixtures. She's become this kitschy icon: she's in a leopard bathing suit with this curvaceous figure, standing with a whip and a huge smile on her face.

Next page • "I heard the real Bettie enjoyed my performance"