WHEN Nina Hoss enters the Starbucks at Cineworld in Edinburgh, the effect is akin to a mermaid swimming ashore for a soy latte and a bun.

No disrespect to the patrons of the ubiquitous coffee chain, but there is no missing a movie star - especially one as striking as Hoss - in their midst. Heads duly turn.

It is June, and she is slightly late due to serving on an Edinburgh International Film Festival jury. Hoss also stars in one of the festival's biggest movies, the spy thriller A Most Wanted Man, which goes on UK release next week. All apologies and breathlessness, she is at another disadvantage: I have just seen the finished edit of the film, and she has not. You're in a lot, I tell her.

"Yeah? Really? That's good," she beams, sounding surprised.

Good for her, great if it means the 39-year-old German star of Yella, Barbara and The Downfall Of Berlin: Anonyma finally receives the exposure she merits. Just as it took decades (and royal roles) for Judi Dench and Helen Mirren to become internationally renowned, so Hoss is long overdue her English language close-up.

A Most Wanted Man, being a thoroughly intercontinental affair, is a fitting vehicle. Adapted from the John le Carre novel, it is directed by Anton Corbijn, the Dutch-born photographer turned filmmaker (Control, The American). It is set in Hamburg, and tells the story of a mysterious young man who turns up in Germany and becomes a "person of interest" to the intelligence agencies. Just in case Scotland is feeling left out of the international party, Glasgow-born Andrea Calderwood is one of the film's producers.

It is the film's American star who is likely to bring most attention to the movie, for reasons no-one would wish. A Most Wanted Man was among the last of the films made by Philip Seymour Hoffman, the Oscar-winning star of Capote and The Master who was found dead from a drugs overdose at his home in New York in February this year. He was 46.

Corbijn says one of Seymour Hoffman's great strengths was his ability to totally immerse himself in a role, in this case playing Gunther Bachmann, the maverick, driven head of a special anti-terror unit. Hoss and Daniel Bruhl play his lieutenants.

"On and off set he would be very much like their mentor," recalls Corbijn. "He would be protective of them and available as an actor with advice or encouragement. On the other hand, he would not hang out with actors who played roles that he, as a character in the film, had no time for."

Hoss recalls her co-star as a "very warm" man who was indeed wrapped up in his role in set, but who could switch off afterwards. "When we had dinner or we went out all together he was very up, we always had big laughs. He was really excited about the next project he was going to do."

Hoss had known Corbijn for years through her boyfriend. Socially, she says, the director who learned his filmmaking trade in part from making music videos, is outgoing, funny and has lived in London for so long now his sense of humour is almost British. On set, however, he is a model director, all business, but still with time for actors.

"When you work with him he is very open, very interested, but also he knows what he is looking for. I like that combination. I had the feeling he loves what he is doing, he loves filming, he's really in love with that new profession of his." The admiration is mutual. "She is fabulous and often understated," says Corbijn.

Hoss was born in Stuttgart in 1975. Her father was a Green politician, her mother an actress. Hoss was 14 when she had her first stage role, and it is the theatre which has taken up most of her time since. During the making of A Most Wanted Man she was splitting her time between the set in Hamburg and a play in Berlin, where she lives.

She could only do that because Corbijn was so accommodating, she says. "Without him I wouldn't be in this project." She doesn't think a Hollywood production would have been the same. "American productions want [everything] so you need to be available for six months. I get bored," she laughs. That said, she has now changed theatre companies and has fewer performances in her schedule. "I have much more time now, so let's see what happens."

When Hoss has ventured into film, it has usually been with the German director Christian Petzold. The two brought Jerichow to Edinburgh in 2008, a visit Hoss recalls as a blur of airport, premiere (at the same Cineworld), Q&A, pub visit (the Beehive Inn on Grassmarket) and flying out again the next morning. Outwith Germany, their best known collaborations are the 2007 drama Yella, in which Hoss plays a woman trying to escape her past in the former East Germany. The East-West split was again the subject in the 2012 thriller, Barbara.

Hoss knew more than most about life in the other half of Germany. She had grown up in a "very political" household, with her father in particular keen to open her eyes to life elsewhere. But it was in the late 1990s, when she went to drama school in what had been East Berlin, that she had a real awakening. In talking to other students, and meeting their families, she could piece together what their lives had been like - knowledge she brought to bear in Barbara, the story of an East German doctor being watched by the Stasi lest she makes a break for the West.

"I learned a lot about what they were dealing with, where they come from, what the differences were, and we could get into discussions and influence each other. I learned to be very respectful and careful because they had lost, in a split second, everything they knew. Not that they loved it but it was something they could stick to."

Hoss is not afraid to tackle sensitive subjects, never more so than in 2008's The Downfall Of Berlin: Anonyma, which dealt with rape as a war crime, in this case when the Red Army took over the German capital. When the diaries on which the film is based, A Woman In Berlin, were published in the 1950s, says Hoss, Germans did not want to know about it, and it remains a difficult, controversial subject. That did not deter Hoss.

"I thought I had a responsibility to tell it [the story] in the right way but also truthfully," she says.

Her next film, Phoenix, finds her reunited with Petzold, in another drama set in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is, she admits, another "tricky story".

Interview over, she is off to resume her judging duties downstairs in the cinema. The Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature eventually goes to Joanna Coates's Hide And Seek, with Eddie Marsan winning the best performance prize for Still Life. Every contender is given a fair shake.

"I respect every work because I know how hard it is," says Hoss. "I don't take it for granted."

A Most Wanted Man opens on September 12.