Latest video: Superstar next door

By Ewan McDonald

Forget your Gwyneths, your Nicoles, your Demis, even your little brat-packers Reese and Calista. Probably the most successful female movie star around today (two best-actress Oscar nominations in the past three years, five movies to come in the next year) isn't one of Tinseltown's nipped, tucked, augmented, lifted, toned or hyped types.

She does have those double initials so beloved of the starmakers behind Marilyn Monroe, Claudia Cardinale and Bridget Bardot, but somehow you figure even they wouldn't have come up with a tag like "Brenda Blethyn."

Two of Blethyn's recent successes come out on video this week - the British tragi-comedy Little Voice, for which she was nominated earlier this year, and the wonderfully spooky Aussie drama In the Winter Dark, which is still playing in our cinemas. So is a third Blethyn triumph, Girls' Night with Julie Waters, which is not far off video release.

The 53-year-old Blethyn has specialised in playing mousey, downtrodden characters. But in Little Voice she took on the role of a crass, vulgar and unattractive widow.

Little Voice is the fable-like story of a desperately shy girl (Jane Horrocks, best known as scatterbrained secretary Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous) who has a talent for impersonating showbiz divas such as Bassey, Garland, Holiday, Dietrich and Julie Andrews in the secrecy of her attic bedroom.

Blethyn plays the girl's motor-mouth mother, Mari. "Mari brags about her figure, which is fading, and she thinks she's the life and soul of the party," says Blethyn. "She's very jealous of her daughter, whom she terrorises. But if you dig down deep enough - and you might have to dig down to Australia - you'll find a heart."

However, trouble is lurking in the forms of Mari's new love interest, sleazy, flashy, on-the-skids talent agent Ray Say (Michael Caine), and telephone repairman Bill (Ewan McGregor), who fancies "LV."

Ray hears her voice and sees dollar signs. Bill hears her squeaky speaking voice and sees love. Things come unstuck when Say persuades LV to take her talents to the big stage.

On the other side of the world, you never know what's lurking behind the trees or in the grass. Something is killing animals in the secluded valley where Maurice and Ida Stubbs (Ray Barrett and Blethyn) have farmed for decades.

The valley's two townies - a loner (Richard Roxburgh) who obsessively plays Welcome To My World, and a pregnant Goth (Miranda Otto), whose boyfriend has just run out on her - are spooked and ready to do whatever the gun-toting, just-about-to-blow Maurice tells them.

* Women are the headliners in several other major releases this week. Practical Magic has four of 'em: Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock, Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing, with the minor parts going to Aidan Quinn and Goran Visnjic.

It's a lightweight comedy about a family of modern-day white witches. The Owens sisters, Sally (Bullock) and Gillian (Kidman), have always known they were different. Raised by their aunts (Wiest and Channing) since their parents' death, the sisters grew up in a household that was anything but typical - their aunts fed them chocolate brownies for breakfast and taught them the practical uses of magic.

But their magical powers carry a price - the men they fall in love with die off rather too quickly - so along comes Quinn as the investigating cop.

And Meryl Streep adds an Irish accent to her repertoire for a movie version of the hit play Dancing at Lughnasa, about the lives of five unmarried sisters in a village during the 30s.

* Adam Sandler's follow-up to There's Something About Mary, the similarly dumbed-down The Waterboy, sees him as a socially inept 31-year-old from the swamps of Louisiana with an over-protective Mama (the marvellously over-the-top Kathy Bates). His only contact with the world is as waterboy for a college football team; one day he's forced to go out on his own and, yep, you guessed it, he becomes a football star ...

Another offering from the Universal Soldier franchise, the third is called Unfinished Business, which unfortunately indicates there may be a fourth ...

Flea doesn't give up the day job, continues to develop his acting career outside the night work with Red Hot Chilli Peppers by co-starring with Richard Tyson in Liar's Poker, a well-reviewed and awarded thriller about a pair of killers, a man who is framed for a killing and a fourth man who sets them all up ...

If Only has been described as a Scottish Sliding Doors, a piece of low-budget whimsy with Douglas Henshall as struggling actor Victor, dumped by his longtime girlfriend Sylvia (Lena Headey) after admitting an affair. Two mysterious dustmen give him the opportunity to go back in time and put things right.

* Also out: Dogwatch with Sam Elliott; The Tiger Woods Story with Keith David and Khalil Kain; Beau Bridges and Martha Plimpton in Defenders: Choice of Evils; Dirty Little Secret, His Bodyguard, Meteorites and something that rejoices in the month's most punctuated title, Rescuers - Stories of Courage: Two Couples, with Dana Delany and Linda Hamilton.