“I didn’t want to read it,” confesses Okonedo, “because I knew I’d want to do it. The next thing I knew, I was off to Thailand for two months.”But first we’ll see her in Stormbreaker, based on the novel by Anthony Horowitz, about a reluctant teenage spy Okonedo plays the enigmatic Mrs Jones. The catalyst was the script for Aftermath, a film about a group of people devastated by the 2004 tsunami, written by Sex Traffic’s Abi Morgan. I’d love to say I wrote a novel in that time or read lots of books, but all I did was do the school run, make dinner and tidy the house.

But what was good was all the fuss around me died down a bit. I thought if I don’t go to any ‘dos’ or put myself out there, it will disappear.”This year the hunger to act returned. Everyone wanted to interview her; scripts and invitations piled up. “The whole thing was a whirlwind, I had to take a step back.” She did a few small jobs then took a year off “I called it my little sabbatical. The day before the Oscars’ news broke, she sent Okonedo a huge bouquet of flowers saying simply, “Congratulations”.At the Oscar ceremony Okonedo was pipped at the post by Cate Blanchett in The Aviator, but she looked radiant in a white Rochas dress Then life went mad. A Rada-trained actress in her mid-thirties, definitely not part of the luvvie establishment (despite acclaimed performances with the RSC and the Royal Court), Okonedo was the first black British actress to be nominated since Marianne Jean-Baptiste in 1996.
At the time Okonedo was in the middle of filming the sci-fi blockbuster ?n Flux, with Charlize Theron She was astonished by the nomination But Theron, now a close friend, was more savvy. In January 2005, Sophie Okonedo was wandering around London’s Kenwood House when her publicist phoned to say that she had been nominated as Best Supporting Actress for Hotel Rwanda.

Okonedo and her mother jumped in the air for joy, and were promptly asked to be quiet by a security guard. “I don’t give a fuck,” retorted her mother, “my daughter’s got an Oscar nomination.” They were escorted out of the gallery, but the other visitors burst into a spontaneous round of applause. “I’m curious about it, I saw the cowboy films over my young years, didn’t you?” he told a BBC interviewer this week.. This extensive property is owned by the conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz and it was here last summer that the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, and a number of his staff spent their now hugely controversial July weekend. Prescott accepted the invitation apparently to discuss aspects of the tycoon’s ownership of the Millennium Dome, but also to satisfy a curiosity about a western ranch that he had harboured since he was a young boy growing up in the cowboy-free frontier of South Yorkshire. The route bends to the south-east, following the course of the South Platte River, and then after another eight or so miles, there are sign-posts pointing to a road that leads to a ranch located in the river valley, out of sight from the highway The property is called Eagle’s Nest. There are several large animal lots, some with perhaps as many as 100,000 head of cattle.