‘Love is different from romance’

Once one of the most bankable actresses in Hollywood, the 63-year-old queen of the rom-com stepped out of the spotlight in recent years. We get a rare audience with Meg Ryan.

- Hadley Freeman

IS that Meg Ryan walking towards me in the dining room of the Carlyle Hotel in New York? Yes! Yes! Oh my God! Yes! As my brain explodes into an orgasm that rivals Meg’s famous one from When Harry Met Sally, the woman herself takes my hand and expresses amazement that I've flown ‘all the way from England’ just to meet her, even though she has flown in all the way from her home in southern California. ‘I’m a total Anglophile and have this little London dream of living there one day. My daughter, she’s doing English literature at college here, but she’s hoping to study in Bath one day,’ she says, taking a seat on the banquette next to me. I nod but my brain is now screaming: ‘Do not call her Sally; do not talk to her as if she were the character she played four decades ago!’ Unfortunately, my mouth does not get the message.

So your daughter's studying English, but you studied journalism, just like how Sally in When Harry Met Sally wanted to be a journalist, I burble — and then apologise for seeing her through the prism of her films. ‘But how can you not? I get it,’ she says, shrugging.

Seriously, how can we not? Of all the leading actresses who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s — Julia Roberts, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock — Meg had the most clearly defined image, the most recognisable persona: She was America’s sweetheart, a little bit daffy, a lot romantic, the fantasy best friend with whom you could go for lunch in Central Park (as she did with Carrie Fisher in When Harry Met Sally) or sit on the sofa in pyjamas and weep over An Affair to Remember (as she did with Rosie O'Donnell in Sleepless in Seattle). That image came from the rom-coms she made with Nora Ephron, who wrote When Harry Met Sally, and wrote and directed Sleepless and