She’s Discovered, Again : British actress Janet McTeer, known in England and on Broadway, finds admirers with ‘Tumbleweeds.’

If you’re British, you know Janet McTeer as a working actress. If you’re a New Yorker, you know McTeer as the star who lit up Broadway--and won a Tony--two years ago in “A Doll’s House.”

But if you’ve never heard of her and see her for the first time in the film “Tumbleweeds,” you assume she’s a thirtysomething actress from the Deep South who is finally getting her break in an independent film--though her acting is so monumental you’d wonder why she hasn’t been discovered sooner.

And with the release of “Tumbleweeds,” about a freewheeling mother and teenage daughter hitting the road for greener pastures, there’s even Oscar talk about McTeer. To which she reacts with typical British understatement.

“I take it all with a bucket of salt. I’m sure if it’s going to happen, it’ll happen,” the 38-year-old actress says quite casually (and equally casually volunteers her age) about a possible nomination. “And if it isn’t going to happen, it won’t.”

In England, McTeer is often viewed as the latest in a long line of legendary British actresses such as Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave--and in fact Dench and Redgrave were career markers for McTeer.

“When you’re a young English person who wants to be an actress and you have dreams, you dream of being Vanessa Redgrave or Judi Dench,” she says. “And since Judi Dench believes that she’s tall and willowy, I thought I could be Judi Dench.” (McTeer is 6 feet tall.)

For those who know McTeer only as the man-hungry Mary Jo, it’s almost startling to experience the black-clad, irreverently uncensored actress with a quite defined upper-crust English accent, having lunch at the Essex House in New York City, where she now lives. How irreverent? Question: “How’s the press junket going?” Answer: “I’ve gotten to meet people I’ve enjoyed talking to. Then you talk to people and you’re thinking, ‘I know you’re just listening for a sound bite, and you’re wasting my time, so go [expletive] off and let me go and have a cup of tea.’ ”

If not for the press hawking of “Tumbleweeds”--the film opened last month in Los Angeles and New York and was released in 15 more cities on Dec. 10, with a nationwide release set for January--her usual hangout is clearly not a white-linen-tableclothed restaurant overlooking Central Park. “The Lower East Side I actually like a lot. It’s still got an air of being young and funky and being not trendy,” she says.

Critics weren’t shy in heaping praise on McTeer’s performance in “Tumbleweeds”--this month she was named best actress by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures--nor is her manager, Mark Epstein, who represents a rarefied stable of only nine actors, among them Nicole Kidman and Rupert Everett. Epstein says he immediately wanted to sign her after seeing “A Doll’s House.”

“I think she’s a pure chameleon who can do anything, who can nail any dialect and look different, be utterly sexy and yet be characterly if needed,” says Epstein by phone from his mid-Wilshire office. “She walks into a room and everyone wants to know who she is and wants to work with her.”

He recounts bringing her together with producer-director Garry Marshall after her Tony win. “Garry called and said, ‘I want her, I want her.’ And that was way before ‘Tumbleweeds.’ ”

McTeer has that grounded British quality in dealing with celebrityhood, which for working actors in England is less a matter of fueling an enormous industry machine than just keeping the work going and perfecting your craft.

She says of the hoopla: “If it opens up one or even two nice projects in the next two years, that’s lovely.”

‘I Was Very Nervous About the Accent’

It’s the accent that gets everyone, the amazing transformation from proper Englishwoman to working-class Southerner.

“I was very nervous about the accent,” she admits. “I was very nervous about being an American. We screened the film for the first time in Sundance. Nobody had seen a print of the film. Nobody knew who I was. When I went up and was introduced afterward, and spoke, the audience gasped when they heard me talk and realized I wasn’t American. That was a huge, huge relief.”

Her commitment to a dialect is, like Meryl Streep, organic to the person’s spirit. “An accent is quite easy to learn. I think it’s quite hard to make it sound like a voice,” she explains.

“You try to not create a character and sit the accent on top, but try to get to the point where technically you can just be free, without thinking,” she says, switching to a languid drawl: “So, you sound ra-aht, you know what ah mean?”

“Tumbleweeds” is the latest in a string of mother-daughter road pictures, including the bigger-budget “Anywhere but Here,” which is also now playing in theaters. To a no-nonsense actress like McTeer, the sudden attention from the industry can give her what she wants most: not fame, but strong roles.

“People are calling a lot, sending scripts my way. Yes, it’s wonderful because, let’s face it, there aren’t many wonderful scripts for women over the age of 10,” McTeer says dryly, eyes wide in a moment of mugging, pausing for a sip of tea. “So it’s rather nice when they come along, especially if you’re horribly lucky and horribly selfish and you’re used to playing lovely, whacking great big leading roles and you’re not really interested in playing some teenage idol’s mother in the background, going, [in perfect Midwestern nasal twang]: ‘John, have you washed your shirt?’

“It’s not particularly interesting. It’s not worth leaving home for, you know what I mean?”

Going From Nora to Free, Wild Mary Jo

Mary Jo was definitely a role worth leaving home for, especially after suffering onstage in Ibsen. “Mary Jo is so free and wild, and such a completely different creation from Nora, such an antithesis of what I had been doing,” she says.

“And because she has such joie de vivre and I had been playing someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown for a year, the idea of playing someone not a victim, who was vibrant and expressive and all those things, felt creatively lovely. So it came along for me at the right time, because I needed that. I didn’t want to cry. I had been crying every [expletive] night for a year, you know? I said, ‘If I have to cry anymore, I’m just going to die.’ ”

Coming down the pike is a slew of films McTeer has filmed back to back. She co-stars with Billy Crudup in “Waking the Dead,” a USA Films thriller written and directed by Keith Gordon (“A Midnight Clear”). She has a small part, along with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bruce Davison, in “The King Is Alive,” a Scandinavian-influenced Dogme film directed by Kristian Levring. And she just finished shooting “Songcatcher,” directed by Maggie Greenwald, playing a turn-of-the-century Boston music professor who journeys to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“And I roll around in the hay with Aidan Quinn,” she adds.

Living a Quiet, Stable Home Life

McTeer’s life bears little comparison to the freewheeling environment of Mary Jo and her daughter Ava, played by Kimberly Brown. “My mother and father are still together after fortysomething years. I lived in one place till I was 6. I lived in another place from when I was 6 till I was 17,” she says.

And unlike the film, her household was not volatile. “Very British,” she remarks. “We didn’t really talk about a lot of stuff.”

As for her personal life, McTeer is single and lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m not married, I’ve never been married, never particularly wanted to be, never particularly wanted to have children. I kept thinking, ‘It’s gonna happen in a minute, in a minute I’ll want children. I’m 38, and I still haven’t felt that way. I have been a serial monogamist, the best way to be,” she says.

A hot-button issue with McTeer is the pressure on actresses to be “thin, pushy and sexy.” “And if you’re not, the roles aren’t there for you in Hollywood. Your sexuality is still for everyone else’s approval. It’s not for your own sense of pleasure, in a private way, and I think that what happens when you’re a woman, you go, ‘Oh, [expletive] off, I’m sorry, I’m too old for that.’

“I’m me, my sexuality is my own, if I choose to invest it in a character, then that’s because I think the character warrants. If I don’t, it’s because I don’t think the character needs it.”