When Anamaria Marinca stepped off the plane in Romania to meet Cristian Mungiu, the director of the film 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, his heart sank. He had just spent a large chunk of his small budget flying her over from her home in London and as soon as he saw her, he didn't think she was right for the lead character, Otilia. Marinca laughs about it now. "Then we did the reading - it was strange because I felt [the character] was already in me and I didn't think there was a strong change between me and me playing Otilia." For Mungiu, though, the transformation was incredible. "My character was talking through Anamaria's mouth, as if she was possessed," he later recalled. They started filming a week later.
It's hard to imagine anyone else who could have played her. Set during the dying years of the communist regime in Romania, Otilia, played by Marinca, helps arrange an abortion for her college room mate Gabita - under Nicolae Ceausescu, terminations were banned, and an estimated 500,000 women died as a result of backstreet abortionists. The three meet in a hotel room where the cold, sinister abortionist, on finding out that Gabita's pregnancy is more advanced than he was told, demands sex of the young women before he begins the crude, dangerous termination. The Romanian film won the Palme D'Or at Cannes and has just been nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign film.
On screen, you can barely take your eyes off Marinca. On her smooth, broad face, you can see emotions building from a flicker to a rage. "You are creating a reality when you are playing, everything happens for real and you feel it," she says. "You make yourself go through those feelings, and it shows if you're acting or not." She worries, absentmindedly, at a scarf in her hands. "I think acting is about being much more real than in real life. It's about forgetting about the mask that we constantly put on to go out and face the world. I'm much more real when I'm playing a character, I'm more vulnerable, and you can see me more than maybe meeting me on the street." She never looks like she's acting. I thought that before, when I saw her in the Channel 4 drama Sex Traffic two years ago. It was her first role in front of a camera, playing a young woman trafficked to the UK. It won her a Bafta for best actress.
Mungiu's long, single-shot scenes suit Marinca perfectly. In one claustrophobic, eight-minute episode, Otilia is at a family dinner at her boyfriend's house after she has left Gabita alone in the hotel room. Everything in Marinca's face - the guilt, the trauma, the worry, the humiliation, the anger - is rendered quietly but perfectly. I can't think of another young actress quite like her at the moment. She is hard to pin down. Sometimes she seems really vulnerable, other times fearless. She is 29 and can look 10 years older or 10 years younger. She can talk earnestly about her art, then when I ask her if she is seeing anyone (she is), she says something dreamy about always being in love with something, even if she's not in love with anyone.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the subject matter, the reception to the film hasn't been universally good, especially in Italy. "You could feel the religious background there," says Marinca, who has travelled all over the world promoting the film. "The Vatican newspaper was in a hurry to have an opinion about the movie. They didn't even bother to watch it. It isn't a film that is pro-abortion, neither is it against it; it's not as easy as that." In Mexico, where abortion was banned in the majority of cases until last year (it is now only legal up until 12 weeks), she says the audience reacted to it very strongly. "It was their story, they related to it in a much more direct way than someone from the west who hasn't known this [illegal abortion] situation. In Romania, we were overwhelmed. We didn't realise the size of it. When people come up to you after a screening and feel the need to tell you what happened to them, these are buried secrets they had never told anyone - you feel you should have an answer and you don't."
Marinca grew up in Iasi in north-eastern Romania. Her mother was a violinist with the Romanian Philharmonic Orchestra, and Marinca and her brother had occasional glimpses into the world outside communist Romania in the sweets, toys, books and videos their mother would bring back from tours abroad. Her father was an actor and lecturer at a dramatic arts college, which Marinca attended.
From a young age, she loved watching Russian films on television - the only alternative to the Romanian state television. Marinca was 11 when the regime was overthrown and communism collapsed; she was nine in 1987, the year 4,3,2 is set, too young to understand what women, some of them just a few years older than she was, were going through. "If I had been 10 years older ..." she says, aware that this could easily have been her story. "I remember stories when I was a kid, but it was very unclear because I wasn't sure how a child was born. I heard of babies found in rubbish bins and people whispering about it. I knew it was frightening and a terrible thing, but I didn't understand how they got there, why they didn't find their mothers."
What does she remember about the communist regime? "As a kid, you learned that you weren't allowed to say certain things in school or with your playmates because your parents could be taken to prison the next day. By the time I went to school, I already knew that you can't make jokes about this, you can't say that. Your phone is listened to. Imagine parents training their kids to try to avoid the system when you're five or six. It's absurd. The only weapons they had were art, religion and humour, I think. Everything that was subversive they claimed."
Ceausescu banned abortion and restricted contraception in the 1960s to swell the population. It has been said that during that time, even abortion became an act of subversion, of rebellion. "Yes, definitely. But also you had to solve a problem, basically. [Visiting an abortionist] was one of the options, others were to produce a shock to your body. Jumping from a wardrobe was a well-known thing, or jumping in very cold water to provoke ..." She trails off. "How do you accept these things? I don't have the answers. It was very hard not to have a judgment, just to try and be a character and not to have too many feelings about what I am doing.
After the Bafta, Marinca appeared in the Shakespeare play Measure for Measure at the National Theatre, and took small TV roles. Then the work stopped, or at least the interesting offers did. "I had all these existential questions at that time and I felt I needed to do something in Romanian," she says. "Living here, and being a Romanian, you don't know who you are any more. I was playing the immigrant, whereas back home, I would be able to play Shakespeare or whatever. I was coming to an age when I started thinking about what is really important for me, what I want to say and how I want to continue - 4,3,2 came at a time when I really needed it."
Over the past year, the work has been steady. Marinca appears in a forthcoming BBC drama, The Last Enemy, and has a small part in Francis Coppola's film Youth Without Youth. She says she has never been interested in going to Hollywood for the sake of it. "I wouldn't say no, just because it is Hollywood, even though my choices are a bit different from the main subjects they approach. Then I can only play certain types, with a history, because I come from somewhere else. It's very clear that I'm not English or American."
Hollywood may have to wait. In what has been described as the Romanian new wave, a group of young film-makers such as Mungiu, Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr Lazarescu), Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest) and Radu Muntean (The Paper Will Be Blue) have been making some of the most interesting and successful films shown on the international festival circuit. "There are lots of young and very talented people," says Marinca. "I think there is this urge to tell stories that have been there for a while and haven't been told and now we have the freedom. It took so long for the mentality to start to change, so the people who were young when the revolution took place are now grown up and they have a voice. There is this need to understand the past and this constant question: 'Why?' What made people bear it?"
· 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is released today