Carey Mulligan on fame, feminism and Far From the Madding Crowd

The movie we talked about then was Shame, Steve McQueen's tale of unhappy sex in the city in which Mulligan played Sissy, an emotional china doll.

Three years on, and after a break from the business, Mulligan is back with Far From the Madding Crowd, an adaptation of Hardy's classic in which she plays Bathsheba Everdene, the heiress who dares to want a life, never mind a room, of her own.

In October, Mulligan will be seen in Suffragette, the story of how women won the war for votes. Different times bring different roles, and today a new look Mulligan.

Wearing a plain white shirt, trousers, cardie, and ballet pumps, in any sprint to the door she could give me and my Clarks comfiest a run for our money.

Set to turn 30 next month, Mulligan no longer gives the impression of being a self-assured woman. She is one. In those shoes she could get her own damn self out of a burning building.

The first thing the at ease Mulligan wants to make clear is the tack Far From the Madding Crowd takes.

"I read a press thing earlier that I completely disagreed with where it said it was about a woman choosing between three lovers. No, it's not, it's definitely not that. Of course there is a love story in there and that's beautiful, but it is not about her choosing, it's about her growing up, discovering who she is and making better decisions from her youth to her adulthood."

It has been almost half a century since Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, Peter Finch and Alan Bates wafted across cinema screens in John Schlesinger's adaptation.

But Hardy's novel is not a traditional bonnets and carriages affair, it is earthier, more sweeping. Or at least it is when Thomas Vinterberg is at the helm.

The Danish director of the Cannes-winning The Celebration and the Oscar-nominated The Hunt founded the avant garde filmmaking school of Dogme 95 with Lars von Trier of Dancer in the Dark and Nymphomaniac infamy.

Traditionalists should have no fear, however. Vinterberg's Madding Crowd is realist in style, but it is also sumptuously beautiful, making the Dorset countryside look like Eden.

It comes with added lambs, too, including the one son of toil Gabriel (played by Matthias Schoenaerts) gives Bathsheba as a gift.

"Oh, my gosh," says Mulligan, laughing, when I ask if she got to keep the lamb afterwards.

"My favourite day on the whole thing. So cute. It was so distracting it was ridiculous."

Mulligan, who lives in Devon with her husband, the musician Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons, had become a convert to the countryside long before Schoenaerts and Larry showed up.

"I like tasks. I want to dig a big hole or garden all day till I'm exhausted, I like that feeling."

It is hardly a startling revelation, but it is further than she ventured in a previous interview, this one with a London paper, when she clammed up, silent as a lamb, on being asked if she did the whole Good Life, pigs and chickens, bucolic thing. Mulligan is notoriously wary of speaking about her private life, for reasons we shall come to later.

First, there is the tale of how a dyed in cashmere wool city girl went from failing to get into drama school to becoming a Bafta-winning, Oscar-nominated actor starring opposite Michael Fassbender (Shame), Ryan Gosling (Drive), and Leonardo DiCaprio (The Great Gatsby).

Born in London in 1985, the first eight years of Mulligan's life were spent abroad because of her father's job as a hotelier. Her mother was a lecturer. Mulligan went to the International School in Dusseldorf, and on returning to England attended the private Woldingham School in Surrey.

Her parents were not keen on an actor's life for their daughter, fearing job insecurity.

"So many actors aren't lucky," she told me in 2012. "People train and try and they just don't get jobs. They were worried that was going to happen to me. Completely understandable but at the time I was outraged that they wouldn't support it."

Not to be deterred, and displaying her own Bathsheba streak, she asked Julian Fellowes, who had spoken at her school, for advice.

Long story short, the man who would one day create Downton Abbey encouraged her to audition for an upcoming adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Mulligan was on her way, and, a quick detour to Northanger Abbey notwithstanding, she would not return to the period drama land of long dresses and even longer sighs until Far from the Madding Crowd. "I didn't want to be pigeonholed."

She has kept her word on that. It took four years of stage and television work before she graduated to An Education, the adaptation of Lynn Barber's memoir that earned Mulligan an Oscar-nomination.

After that came Michael Mann's Public Enemies with Johnny Depp, Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and Never Let Me Go, the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel. Along the way she sang guest vocals on Belle and Sebastian's 2010 Write About Love album.

The band were in LA making a record, found out Mulligan, a lifelong fan, was there too, and asked. It is not Mulligan's only Glasgow connection. Her producer on Never Let Me Go and Madding Crowd is the Glasgow-born Andrew Macdonald.

Before Madding Crowd, Mulligan's last major movie was the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, where she played Jean, the exasperated, newly pregnant folk singer girlfriend of a failing musician.

Mulligan, you will have guessed by now, knows her music and, as she showed in a heart-rending solo of New York, New York in Shame, she is no mean singer. She also sings briefly in Madding Crowd.

"That was a pre-record whereas Inside Llewyn Davis and Shame were both live. And Inside LD was with professional musicians. So I wasn't nervous about this one in the way I was with the others." And ILD was in front of the Coen brothers.

"Exactly. Everything you do in front of the Coen brothers is terrifying."

She went straight from Sydney making The Great Gatsby, a film which exploded with colour but was a damp squib critically, to New York to start work with the Coens.

"Their direction is very light touch but so confident. They know exactly what they are doing. You finish work about four in the afternoon because they get everything done so quickly."

She would do another film with them in a New York minute.

"When you work with people like that you think, gosh, there is no reason for anyone to ever really get stressed about making a film. Because if you don't, like they don't, or at least they don't show their stress, then you are going to make a million brilliant films."

She does not elaborate on stressful film making experiences she has known, but one suspects 2010's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was such a picture.

Some of that was to do with the anticipation surrounding the sequel to one of the biggest hits of the Eighties, the rest stemmed from the press interest in Mulligan and her then boyfriend, Shia LaBeouf.

Filming in New York, they were papped at every turn. "If they weren't carrying cameras it would be so illegal what they do," she told me.

There are two reasons she doesn't like talking about her private life. First, her job as an actor is easier if the audience doesn't come to film or play knowing a lot about her.

"Then there is just basic invasion. That part of my life isn't to do with my work. Lawyers don't have to go into the office and talk about having children, or how they met their husbands, and there is no reason why you should as an actor. And if you give a little bit people will dig way further. So if you are photographed together you are inviting people to write about you."

One thing she and her husband have done together is raise funds for War Child, the charity which works with traumatised victims of conflict across the globe, from Iraq and Syria to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the UK. She learned about the organisation from her brother, Owain, a former British army captain who raised money to reopen a girls' school in Afghanistan that had been closed by the Taliban.

Mulligan is now an ambassador for War Child. She is also a supporter of the Alzheimer's Society, helping to raise awareness of the condition which befell her grandmother in 2004.

She must have had many approaches to do charity work, so I wonder what it is about War Child that struck home.

"You do get offered lots of things but then I think sometimes if you don't really know what you are talking about, or you don't feel a connection to the charity, often whatever you do can become more about you as an actor than the charity you are talking about. So I wanted it to be things I knew a lot about. The two things I feel most strongly about are care for the elderly and child protection."

She took a year to familiarise herself with War Child's work and went out to the DRC to see it in action. "The projects that they do are really smart and sustainable. The need is so great, so to be able to do anything remotely useful with the platform I'm given at the moment is nice to do."

The last remark is telling and suggests there is rather more to Mulligan than first gawp suggests. Yes, she is another successful English actor in the Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch mould, one of that generation of actors who have enjoyed a privileged start in life.

The kind of actor, in short, who would have no need of a James McAvoy scholarship. Yet she is also someone who reached the top and took time out to get married, travel, and generally live a little.

"When I'm working I'm really not fun. I kind of disappear off the face of the Earth. I go through months where I don't do anything and don't see anyone, so when I'm not I like to see everyone and spend lots of time with my family."

Wasn't she frightened that if she stepped off the merry-go-round she would not get back on? "I did when I was younger but I didn't that time."

Madding Crowd and Suffragette brought her back into the acting fold. It is no coincidence they are both feminist pieces.

In Suffragette, in which she stars alongside Anne-Marie Duff and Meryl Streep, Mulligan plays Maud, a Cockney laundry worker who starts off hostile to the cause only to take up the good fight. The film should be an eye opener for younger generations. It was for Mulligan.

"I pretty much thought I knew about women's suffrage. I knew about Emmeline Pankhurst and I knew about the King's Derby, I had an understanding but until I did this film I had no idea of what really happened, the lengths that women went to, what they had to endure, and the strength of the women. There was a suffragette who was force fed 246 times when she was in prison."

Though she has no hesitation in calling herself a feminist, we agree that for some women it has unaccountably become a taboo word, something they are nervous about applying to themselves.

"Or," she adds, "they use it probably as a veil or an excuse for bad behaviour". But it is about more than equal rights between men and women, she says, adhering to the Hillary Clinton argument that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights.

That said, we are talking about a movie here, not a run at the American presidency. How much can movies change minds? A bit, reckons Mulligan.

Audiences need escapism, they need love stories, tales of strong women, but the industry also needs to make more films that aim higher, reach out wider. "We just tell stories constantly about things that don't matter and it would be great to have a few more films about things that do. You don't have to educate people but just enlighten them. Start conversations."

Mulligan is currently to be found on Broadway appearing with Bill Nighy in Skylight, the David Hare play about past loves and current obsessions.

"Two of the most expert stage performances you're likely to see for many seasons," said The New York Times.

Mulligan, who plays a school teacher who was once in love with Nighy's rich restaurateur, not only acts her cotton socks off, she cooks on stage too (as newyorkcitytheatre.com puts it: "If you're wondering what that lovely smell wafting through the auditorium during the performance is, it's Carey cooking a meal of spaghetti live on the stage in character as Kyra, right in front of you!").

Skylight runs on Broadway till June, then comes Suffragette in the autumn. As befits someone confident enough in her own ballet pumps to take time off, Mulligan has nothing obvious on the horizon, career-wise, after this.

One suspects that a future as a superhero character, or another period drama, are not for her. Like Bathsheba, she seems to have taken to the notion of becoming a woman of substance, a person who, in Hardy's words, "feels herself sufficient to herself".

"I love my job, and it's a great job, but there's bigger stuff in life. The negatives of my job are a bit of invasion and a bit of people caring what you wear and how much weight you've gained or lost and all that bollocks.

"But the positives of being able to get people to donate money to an incredibly worthy cause, or raise awareness, or get into Downing Street or Parliament and talk about issues that need to be talked about, far outweighs all of that stuff. For a while I was shy of it and now I'm not really."

Far from the Madding Crowd opens in cinemas on May 1