Robin Wright is making a new start by going back to where it all began. "I grew up in Los Angeles," says the 43-year-old actress and mother of two who has recently arrived back in the city. "And I spent most of my 20s right in this neighbourhood, just a few blocks away. I've only been here a month or two but it feels like home."

Home for Wright -- until recently Wright Penn -- is a shingled beach house within earshot of the Pacific, modest by Los Angeles standards but beautifully decorated with marble work-surfaces, dark wood floors and a disproportionate number of windows, the better to take in the view of the little canyon surrounding it. It's more than big enough for Wright and her two housemates, Peter Rabbit, a tiny blind and deaf Maltese dog, and her son, Hopper Penn -- both 16 -- one of whom has left a backpack and schoolbooks strewn about the family room. It's exactly the kind of place a location scout might choose for someone looking for a retreat, a place to hide out and regroup from a very public divorce.

Rightly or wrongly, Wright is as famous for her tumultuous 19-year relationship with the actor Sean Penn as she is for her fabulous films. Of the latter, she says, "Princess Bride is the one most people remember," referring to the 1988 comedy in which she played the straight-faced Princess Buttercup. "That, and Forrest Gump." Wright's character in Forrest Gump (1994), Jenny, is the love of Forrest's life, a sweet-faced beauty with a tormented soul, an abused child who becomes a drug addict and a wanderer, eventually dying of an unnamed disease that is never identified but seems to be Aids.

Wright has been back working with Robert Zemeckis, the director of Forrest Gump, Back to the Future (1985) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), among others, on a 3-D adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, opposite Jim Carrey.

Over the past two decades Wright has collaborated on at least half a dozen projects with her now ex-husband, including The Crossing Guard (1995), Hurlyburly (1998) and State of Grace (1990). Those who worked with the couple have alluded to rocky moments on set. At home things were worse. They have separated and reconciled several times over the past decade amid rumours of infidelity, with legal proceedings initiated and cancelled by both parties. The past two years have been particularly difficult to keep up with: the couple split in late 2007 but reconciled six months later. Then in April of this year Penn filed for divorce again, before changing his mind a few weeks down the line. But in August Wright herself filed for divorce. And this time, it seems, it's for real.

With her low, quiet voice and laid-back, contemplative demeanour, she seems an unlikely source of the heat in their famous arguments. She's talking about her daughter with Penn, Dylan, 18, who has just started college. "She couldn't wait to get out of the house," says Wright, curled up in a comfy chair with her dog, pausing on occasion to answer her iPhone, whose ring-tone (a Metallica guitar solo) intermittently punctures our conversation. "Of course, she lives just 10 blocks away and is always calling. 'Mom, do you want to work out? Want to get your nails done?' But for my son it's different. [The divorce] feels like the world's ending. That's OK to feel that way, but I needed to get out. It's just change, and that's always hard."

Change is a theme in Wright's professional life, too. In a departure from the roles she normally plays, which tend to be dark, serious, realistic character studies (think State of Play with Russell Crowe this year, or The Last Castle, starring Robert Redford, in 2001), her recent 3-D animated projects have been entirely different film-making experiences. In 2007 she made Beowulf, opposite Angelina Jolie, and her latest role is as Scrooge's neglected fiancee in yet another remake of A Christmas Carol.

"You have to wear a wet suit that is covered with Styrofoam balls, and have dots drawn all over your face for them to film the animation," says Wright. "But otherwise these movies are a breeze. The entire film is shot in 20 days. I was on set for eight of them. It's like doing theatre in the round," she explains. "You don't have to consider that the camera is over someone's shoulder, and that you have to position yourself a certain way for them to capture the movement. You can move as you normally would around a room and the 3-D cameras capture it all. Except I had to carry myself like I was wearing a corset and a heavy velvet dress instead of this wetsuit covered in balls. And I just loved working with Jim [Carrey]. That guy -- there's just an archive of characters inside of him. It's unbelievable."

Wright's own archive of characters includes Pippa Lee, her most recent lead role, in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, written and directed by Rebecca Miller (the daughter of Arthur and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis). Pippa is a troubled mother of two in her late 40s whose life is completely dissected over the course of the film. A bland, perfectionist wife, she is married to an influential but curmudgeonly book editor 30 years her senior, played by Alan Arkin. She is in complete denial about her past as the reckless party-girl child of an unstable amphetamine addict.

"This character has f-ed everyone," says Wright. "She's done every drug, has really been out there. But what I liked about her was that she wasn't jaded. She really made a choice to be another human being, or spiritually she would have croaked."

Wright thought it was important that Pippa was not a judgmental character. "It was difficult for me because I totally am judgmental," she says, laughing.

"I'm terrible that way, like, 'Oh, she's a bitch,' or, 'Look at that ass!'"

Wright, who is stunning -- ageless in some ways, while gorgeously lined and weathered in others -- has her hair in a ponytail and wears worn jeans with Ugg boots, a tan corduroy Levi's jacket with faux-sheepskin lining and a cosy grey T-shirt. She has the kind of sunny blonde, blue-eyed beauty that makes one assume her own life must be wholesome and fresh-scrubbed, and nothing like the depressed, deeply conflicted characters she plays. But no-one who returns to that well of darkness time and time again can be entirely untroubled. Wright's parents -- her father was a pharmaceutical executive, her mother in cosmetics sales -- divorced when she was a young girl. Robin and her elder brother, Richie, grew up in Los Angeles with their mother. "My mom wanted me to do what I loved," says Wright. "She'd say, 'You can do anything you want. Anything you set your mind to.'" So when

Wright was a teenager and the opportunity to model in Asia and Europe came along, she was encouraged to go.

"I started modelling when I was 14," she begins. "And at that time my elder brother, who was 18 or 19, was living in Tokyo. He said, 'You should come over here to work. They love that all-American look here.' And so I moved to Tokyo.

"My mom thought my brother would take care of me, and we did live in the same apartment. But the next thing I knew I was 15, running with the wrong crowd, standing in the middle of Harajuku, and someone's giving me this tiny slip of paper telling me I should eat it. I was frying on acid in the middle of Tokyo, almost completely on my own at 15.

"And there were a lot of times that I found myself in a really, really tough situation. In Japan and in Europe, I remember that feeling like, not only are you trying to assess the situation, you think, 'What happened, how did I get here, where do I go now?' I would think, 'Someone's got to save me.' And then it occurred to me, at 15 or 16, that'd be me. I'm the one who's going to take care of me."

In an effort to protect her own kids from the hard realities of the world, she and Penn made the move from Los Angeles to Ross, a small, exclusive hamlet north of San Francisco. And the incident that prompted the move still haunts her. "I was car-jacked in our driveway in Santa Monica, and the kids were in their car seats in the back," says Wright, who still recalls the event in vivid detail after nearly 14 years. "I was at the Stride Rite, buying shoes for my two-year-old, and these guys spotted me and followed me back to my house. They were going after soccer moms. They wanted my car, a Toyota Land Cruiser.

"At the time that was the hot commodity. So one of the guys pretended to have a gun in his pocket and held me up, inside the gate on our property."

Though she had never had the strength to do so before, three-year-old Dylan undid her own seat belt and then her brother's and scrambled to the front seat. Wright threw the keys in the thug's face, and the three made it out unharmed. "I couldn't go back into that house," says Wright. "We were out of there the next week." And now she's back, to begin anew.

"I bought this house from people who'd torn down a smaller house on the lot and rebuilt from the ground up. They intended to live in it but had to sell, and it was on the market for all of six days before I found it. I love it because no one else has lived here. It doesn't have anyone else's energy in it. That's key for me. And it's a third of the size of my last house, which is 11,000 square feet," she says. "That was an albatross."

So how does it feel to be a newly single woman in her 40s? "I have no idea. It's been, like, 11 minutes. That's what it feels like. I just don't know yet, and that's OK. After 20-some years, to start over ... it's huge," she says, drifting off a bit. "But I have no regrets. We have two incredible kids. I've been raising kids for so long. I've got so much going on right now that there isn't time for anything else. I just moved. I'm trying to get settled. So I don't know. I've got to get back into the life and start over again." Wright became a mother at 25, and most of her 20s and early 30s were devoted to raising children. Now, with both of them grown, there's an opportunity to be a little more selfish. "Mentally, I feel younger now," she says. "But my knees aren't really with the programme."

One thing she knows for sure is that it may be time for her to lighten up a bit. "I want to do a really smart, witty romantic comedy. I've got to get out of those down-in-the-doldrums wife roles," she says with a laugh, perhaps referring to more than her on-screen stereotype.

"I can do it, I swear. I think people start to think of you a certain way and don't want you to do anything else. I've done it so much. I just want to break free."

A Christmas Carol is out now in cinemas. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is out now on DVD.

© Telegraph

- Christine Lennon

Sunday Independent