THE ashtray in front of Milla Jovovich is filling up with butts and ashes. It's already been a long morning for her. She's jetlagged and tired. She is also, however, a trouper.

So she lights up another American Spirit and smiles warmly. Between drags, her voice comes out as a languorous drawl, which might register a touch of publicity tour ennui were it not for her laid-back, easy living California take on everything.

Like, for example, her impending wedding. She and her filmmaker partner Paul WS Anderson decided to get hitched just a few weeks ago, and they have scheduled the wedding for the end of this month. Leaving Milla a matter of days to get everything ready. She's clearly not, then, your typical Bridezilla?

"Well, no. Definitely not," she agrees. "But you know, it's definitely overwhelming. All the little minutiae that you don't really think about. But it's been fun too because we're going to do it at home so I took the opportunity to make the house look nice.

"Me and my mom have been going to the nurseries and getting plants for the back yard. We've lived in the house for two and a half years, and it's hot now and the back yard just looked all wall and stone and heat. Now it's all palm trees and flowers, and it feels so much more homey, like a little jungle outside."

Meanwhile, she's in London to promote her latest blockbuster. A Perfect Getaway is a commercial, summer jaunt of a movie. A character-driven adventure with a killer twist. "Most of the movie we're just walking and talking. But it's tense and it's scary because you don't know what's happening and you are trying to figure each other out. And it's all like, do one thing but mean another," she explains.

Things are currently pretty hectic for Mila. "There's been months where there's been nothing happening except kind of, spinning your own wheels --+ like keep yourself, not bored with yourself," she says dryly. "And then suddenly it's like a million things happening at the same time." A description which better describes her schedule leading up to her marriage to Paul, whom she met when she was cast in the first Resident Evil film. Having got together on the shooting of the first film, they have effectively turned the Resident Evil computer-game-to- cinema-screen adaptation brand into a family business.

"It's been great because we've built this franchise together and that's incredible, as a couple, to have something that big that we share together that has really given us the opportunity to have a great life. It's a big part of our lives," she says.

Milla and Paul have been together for eight years now. But this will be her third marriage. Her first, at the age of 16 to Shawn Andrews, her co-star in Dazed and Confused, was annulled a couple of months later. At 22, she married the director Luc Besson (then 39) after he cast her in her break-out role in The Fifth Element. By comparison to her description of the dynamic she shares with Paul, it sounds like a classic coming-of-age sort of relationship.

In matters personal, however, Milla seems lately to have achieved a happier equilibrium. "We're definitely in a partnership in that sense," she says of the way she and Paul interact about work. "We love talking and sharing ideas. And that's why we fell in love. We had a great rapport, related to each other and especially when it comes to the scripts and reading and writing them and bouncing things off each other. It's kind of fun. With the Resident Evil thing in particular, but in general definitely. I talk to him about every script that I do. And if he's doing something he's interested in he'll always show me stuff and ask for my input. We respect each other's opinions, that's for sure."

There has always seemed to be something refreshingly pragmatic and un-precious about Milla. Perhaps this is because as the daughter of Ukranian immigrants, who queued every day for food rations when she was a small child, she feels at less of a remove from the harsh realities of life than many of her Hollywood-dwelling contemporaries. On her website, she joyfully posts pictures of her baby girl and family together. In person, affable charm comes naturally to her. But even more than that, she seems to regard it as a professional duty. She's unguarded, chatting easily and naturally about domestic detail, like the light sleep training she and Paul have been putting into practice with Ever, in a bid to encourage her to sleep through the night.

"She started doing this thing at night, where she'll pretend to cry," she says, doing an impression of her daughter, who apparently draws on the acting gene in a bid for attention. "'Mweeh, Mweeeh. Mama.' And I was like, all right. You are not in any distress at all. You are just wanting mom to come and like just show you she's there. No. Sleep time. You gotta sleep."

Of her frank enthusiasm for her new role as a parent, she says: "By the time I had my daughter, we had collected three dogs. So we had sort of reached critical mass of living things that were not human. So we decided that at this point it was going to be the time to start thinking about having a baby if we were going to do it."

Did motherhood come naturally to her? "Yeah, definitely. But I mean, I read a lot of books, I did a lot of research. We have a lot of fun together. And she loves her mama. And I'm absolutely in awe of her. We have a great relationship, that's for sure. I'm sure she hates my guts sometimes when I'm trying to give her medicine or to tell her not to touch something or jump down the stairs. But we have a lot of fun together."

Later this year, Mila and Paul will start shooting the fourth Resident Evil instalment. She also has a couple of grittier movies coming out, including Stone, the John Curran-directed thriller in which she appears alongside Robert De Niro and Edward Norton.

"It's almost as if now I understand my place in the industry," she says. "When you start as young as I did, you just did what you did, that was your job. But it's only now that there is an ease about things for me, since I had the baby. And she's the priority so suddenly work becomes more fun. It's something that you do because you enjoy it and you want to have fun in your life and you want to do creative, interesting things. Not just because you have to do it because that's your career. It's like, Must Succeed. Now it's like, I've succeeded I have a very successful life. I've a beautiful child that is the most important thing. The rest of it is just fun really.

"It doesn't really matter," she goes on, picking up the theme later on. "Things that would worry me before. Like, good reviews, bad reviews. Did they think I looked good in that dress? Did they think I looked bad? Am I as good as this person? Am I as good as that? Am I taken seriously? It's like, whatever. I have a great life. I've a great husband-to-be, an amazing child. We have a beautiful, blessed life, so anything after this is just icing on the cake."

A Perfect Getaway is now showing

- Julia Molony