It's almost three decades since Kim Basinger launched her Hollywood career, but she can still gush like a starry-eyed debutante. "Love just flows through us all no matter who we are, culture, creed, religion, race," she says of her role in Mexican script-writer Guillermo Arriaga's directorial debut The Burning Plain. "I love putting us all out on the map."
You'd be hard pushed to square that with Arriaga's impressive film or Basinger's performance. She plays a New Mexican housewife, still recovering emotionally after a disfiguring breast cancer operation, who is racked with guilt about how an extramarital affair might affect her family. There's love, certainly, but it doesn't so much flow as curdle in a cycle of rejection and self-recrimination.
"We're all rejected at some point in our lives," says Basinger. "It was a universal theme for me. I thought, I'm going to take this a step further, because I know so many people in life who have been hurt by other people."
It's tempting to reflect on how Basinger's own relationship difficulties have prepared her for the role. In recent years her personal life, in particular an acrimonious custody dispute with former husband Alec Baldwin over teenage daughter Ireland, has threatened to upstage her acting fame. In 2007 a voicemail message was leaked to the media in which Baldwin issued a furious dressing-down to his then 11-year-old daughter, calling her a "rude, thoughtless pig". Questions about anything bar the film are supposed to be off-limits today but Basinger does issue a fleeting dig at Baldwin, apparently in response to his insinuation that she was responsible for the leak.
"I think my private life was made into this public display of God knows what. I chose to keep it as private as I could, especially so my daughter could have some privacy. Unfortunately that was not the case from the other half."
Basinger came to prominence in the mid-80s having previously worked as a model, and enjoyed a string of successes before downscaling her acting career 13 years ago - bar high-profile appearances in LA Confidential and Eminem biopic 8 Mile - to concentrate on motherhood.
Still, she's not the only 80s sex symbol to be returning to more prominent roles. She declares herself "so proud" of Mickey Rourke, the contents of whose fridge she became intimately acquainted with during one of her best-known scenes in mid-80s erotic drama 9½ Weeks. "His private life became more known to the public than his professional life," she says. "And then he appears in The Wrestler and just comes through, and we are introduced to the later Mickey. "
And the later Basinger? She is now 55, and her role in The Burning Plain alongside Charlize Theron and 18-year-old rising star Jennifer Lawrence seems to crystallise Basinger's current status; the glamorous elder stateswoman in a lineage of contemporary female stars. Is that how she sees herself now?
"I see some really interesting pieces coming along, and you do have to let some time go by in order to be able to fit into these types of roles. I want to be surprised by the next moves I make. I want to be surprised initially and then know in my heart that that's where it was I was going."