Cameron Diaz interview

This Angel has things pretty much sussed as she now enters her fourth decade…

Call it good karma but Cameron Diaz can seduce both men and women with equal ease. Her raucous sense of humour, her saucy tongue and, no doubt, those impossibly long legs, all help to label her a 'guy's girl.' Yet Diaz also emanates a quality that makes her equally successful as a 'girl's girl' - just ask her Charlie's Angels co-stars Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu. Or her latest femme partners in crime, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair, with whom she shares the screen in The Sweetest Thing.

Maybe it's just that she's funny. And gorgeous. And unapologetic.

'I think every third generation has an actress like Cameron Diaz - someone who is beautiful and is also incredibly gifted with comic timing,' says Sweetest Thing director Roger Kumble (Cruel Intentions), who compares Diaz to comic icon Goldie Hawn. 'Cameron is her heir apparent, and she's a pleasure to work with.'

'I've pretty much behaved like a knucklehead my entire life,' admits Diaz, who grew up in San Diego and travelled the world working as a model before the acting bug struck. 'It was probably more adorable when I was a child… as an adult I'm sure it's less attractive.'

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In recent films Charlie's Angels, Shrek and Something About Mary, Diaz has delighted audiences young and old, male and female, with her goofy sense of humour, becoming a bona fide blockbuster actress who was able to command a salary of $15 million plus for The Sweetest Thing.

'I've never done this for the money,' she says. 'I will always want to do whatever it is that my heart is in, and whether I get paid for it or not means nothing. It doesn't matter. I'll do it if it means something to me and I want to be a part of it.'

That attitude has led to an eclectic choice of films, including dramas such as Vanilla Sky (in which she brilliantly embodies the psychotically possessive girlfriend of Tom Cruise), Being John Malkovich (as a fantastically homely pet shop employee married to John Cusack's passionate puppeteer) and the epic Martin Scorsese period drama Gangs of New York (starring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio).

'If I have any goal at all it's just to work with great directors and great actors,' says Diaz. 'I've never planned anything - I can't make plans, I can't keep 'em, I'm so bad. But the one thing that has always been consistent, I think, with my choices is that it's always been about the people I get to work with… people I admire, who are creative and wonderful.'