Ally McBeal is a fictional character who has turned Calista Flockhart into a cultural icon. The pair of them have prompted questioning of whether feminism is dead as McBeal's man-hunting obsession, despite a successful career as a Boston lawyer, dominates the plot lines. Flockhart's tiny frame, which belies normal eating habits, has been the subject of even more speculation. Her stock answer - ''You should have seen me as a child, big head, tiny body'' - was unable to stem the criticism. The taut frame, however, is also due to a part-time job teaching aerobics while she was breaking into theatre as a young actor in New York.

There lies Calista Flockhart's

dilemma. From a tilted waif-like face, her doe eyes peered beseechingly from every paper yesterday, announcing the demise of the American television series Ally McBeal. As the star of the show, she has found world-wide fame - and discovered the downside of public scrutiny whose all-seeing gaze fails to notice the boundary between public performance and private life, while from the other side of the fence the barbed wire spears every careless move and shreds serious intent.

Three years ago at the height of Ally McBeal's popularity, she quickly found herself defending both her decision to take on a TV role and the character she played. ''I was really tired of being poor. It's very difficult to make a living in the theatre and I was so sick to death of living hand to mouth. I thought, 'What do you have to lose?' There's this idea that if you're on television, you must not be a very good actress. That's a stigma that's going to take time to go away.'' For a serious actor, who claims that it took the entire cast of Three Sisters (she played Natasha in the Broadway production) a weekend of debate to decide that she should audition for the part, it was a calculated gamble.

To begin with, it paid off more handsomely than she could have dreamed. David Kelley, the creator of Ally McBeal, who has consistently praised her, said in 1998: ''She's just gifted. There's never a day when I'm writing when I ask myself, can Calista do this? It never gives me pause. There's nothing she can't do.'' Last autumn, however, she threw professional discretion to the winds and said publicly that she couldn't do Ally McBeal for much longer unless the scripts

moved away from a series of disastrous relationships. ''There could be so much more to Ally. It's a big world, but all

we do is dwell on boyfriends and dating and I find that tedious.''

Her disgruntlement has been goaded towards breaking-point by the fact that Calista Flockhart and Ally McBeal have been regarded as interchangeable by viewers and critics who dissect whether either or both are anorexic and why they both have such trouble forming a stable relationship. That was compounded during the last

series when, just as Ally seemed to be heading towards marriage with her on-screen boyfriend, Larry, the actor who played him, Robert Downey Jr, had to be hurriedly written out of

the script when he was arrested on drugs charges.

Back on the show, McBeal reverted to type as the eternal loser in the dating round, while Flockhart was reported to be involved with the actor Ben Stiller, then the producer Sam Mendes. and actor and comedian, Garry Shandling, although she consistently dismissed

the speculation, insisting they were all ''just good friends''. Since early this

year, however, she has reportedly been seeing Harrison Ford, with ''friends'' confiding that she has already chosen

a (pounds) 30,000 engagement ring. She was

previously - and briefly - married to the producer, Jeff Kramer.

In an apparent acceptance of her

single state, however, she adopted a baby son, Liam, immediately after his birth on January 1, 2001. At that time, although acknowledging: ''I certainly want love,'' she said the baby had brought a lot more than that into her life. ''Now that I have a baby, everything has changed. I'm a mum - and it's the best and most challenging thing I've ever done.''

She took the baby to the set every day, where half of her dressing room was turned into a nursery, while the dog, a terrier named Webster, famously in pre-baby days referred to as her child, was dropped off en-route at a dog-minder. Before the urge for motherhood overwhelmed her, she used to parry such inquiries by saying: ''I'm not particularly pre-occupied with the husband/baby thing. Besides, I have a dog.''

She was born November 1l, 1964, in Freeport, Illinois. The daughter of Ronald Flockhart, a former Kraft Foods business executive, and Kay, a teacher. Calista (which means ''most beautiful'' in Greek) showed early indications of an ambitious, perfectionist nature at high school, becoming both an executive on the student council and a member of the cheerleading squad, and learning to play the flute.

Calista went on to study fine arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. By the time she graduated in 1987 (majoring in theatre), she had already trained with an act-

ing coach and appeared in numerous student productions.

When she decided to pursue acting

as a career, she headed to New York to follow her dreams. She got a quick

start, with off-Broadway productions. Audiences were beginning to take

notice when she moved to television with bit parts in several soap operas. In 1992, she was cast in the lead role of a woman with an eating disorder in the segment The Secret Life of Mary-Margaret:

Portrait of a Bulimic, in the HBO series Lifestories: Families in Crisis. Her role, which required constantly denying

allegations that her thinness can be attributed to an eating disorder must

now seem fatefully ironic.

Despite all her present success with Ally McBeal, she still dreams of returning full-time to the theatre, which she feels is the truest test of an actor's ability, and she lived up to her own ideals with her award-winning role in The Glass Menagerie when she finally made it to Broadway. Feature film appearances in Quiz Show, a Robert Redford film which provided her with a small role,

but a huge learning experience, and The Loop led to a supporting role in the 1996 hit comedy, The Birdcage, with Robin Williams and Gene Hackman.

Kelley's intuition that Flockhart was the perfect actress to play the romantic, neurotic lawyer forever searching for Mr Right was initially spot-on. Audiences immediately took to the quirky show, which was receiving sky-high

ratings and critical praise. She continued to take part in other productions and co-starred with Michelle Pfeiffer, David E Kelley's wife, in the film adaptation of a A Midsummer Night's Dream. Despite the change of pace, she immediately found points of comparison between Helena and Ally. ''It is amazing to find similarities . . . that there is a woman on television in 1999 who is dealing with the same situations and problems. Helena is a character in turmoil from beginning to end, because she is in love, and she is being majorly rejected. That is a problem for me and everyone else,'' she said.

Over the past two years her physical appearance has become the subject of endless comment and speculation, making her the focal point of an epidemic Hollywood hacks call the new heroin, the ever-shrinking waist line of big-name actresses. The relentless public speculation over Flockhart's weight has prompted friends to speak out in her defence - not always with the happiest results. In August 1999, a former stage co-star, Melissa Joan Hart, said: ''She's getting torn apart for her body. I can show you pictures of her when she was my age and she was skinny-skinny then. The best thing I can think of, saying it in a nice way, is that she's neurotic.''

In fact, she has carved herself a place in the American mind as the symbol of the new women's liberation movement's more neurotic side, while the show itself has angered feminists for its portrayal of modern career women as flighty and essentially flawed.

The received wisdom on Ally McBeal is that either you love it or you hate it. The exception to this rule is Calista Flockhart. Refreshingly, she said two years ago: ''Really, the conclusion I've come to is that I don't care whether they like Ally McBeal or whether they hate Ally McBeal. Quite why they care so much is a mystery.''

With reports that many of the cast - including Flockhart - were in tears when they learned the show is to end, it seems that Calista herself will see it as a stepping stone away from being typecast as ''a funny, fragile character''. Whether she skips off into the unknown guided by the sleuthing skills of Indiana Jones, in the persona of rugged real-life hero Harrison Ford, or throws away the prop of waif-like ditsiness to stride out as a super-competent single mother will be subjected to the closest scrutiny. If she is as serious as she claims about her acting career, the Boston lawyer's last case could be her best career move since, well since 1997, when David Kelley offered her the part which won her a Golden Globe for the best performance by an actress in a TV series.