DAVID BEHRENS talks to a Hollywood star who is convinced there is too much sex on our cinema screens

Meg Ryan is on a one-woman crusade to bring romance back to the screen.

Cinema today, she says, has too much sex, too much frankness and not enough sentiment.

Do audiences want to constantly watch writhing bodies and listen to soundtracks of panting and moaning? Miss Ryan thinks not.

"Get the romance right and the sex will follow," she insists. "But we've seen so much sex at the cinema in recent years that I wonder how much further we can go."

The 36-year-old actress has become the queen of big-screen romance - but never by stripping off for the camera.

Her appearances in movies like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and her latest release, City of Angels, have proved that old-fashioned romantic comedies can still pull in the crowds.

Yet she says she is not herself a romantic.

According to her step-father Pat Jordan: "There is an element to Meg that is quite shocking. It's all steel and determination and ruthlessness. Nothing cute or romantic about any of it - she's become a machine."

Ryan acknowledges that her screen image is well wide of the mark.

"Personally, I'm not gooey or mushy," she says. "To tell you the truth, I actually feel like I'm kind of unsentimental."

It even seems it was actor husband Dennis Quaid who did most of the romantic pursuit leading up to their marriage in 1991. They now have a seven-year-old son, Jack.

The price Quaid had to pay for this domesticity was facing up to his alcoholism and giving up a fearsome cocaine habit, with its accompanying late-night freestyle lifestyle.

"Dennis actually is the romantic," she says. "I'm not even big on Valentine's Day. He's from Texas - he's expansive. He likes a feeling of space. I'm from New England, with little hills, valleys and towns, where things are condensed and defined."

But she certainly loves City of Angels. "I thought it was a great love story, because of the obstacles that keep the two main characters apart," she says. (She plays a sceptical heart surgeon who encounters an angel played by Nicolas Cage.)

"The film has a wonderful yearning quality, but then movies are so good at romance. Love is a great part of all our lives and the lack of love is felt deeply by everyone.

"What's fun to do in romantic comedies is all that great hate-and-love antagonism, where people have strong opposite opinions."

In researching the role, Ryan had a close look at the work of real-life heart surgeons.

"I went to a number of open-heart surgeries - it was such a huge experience. There I was, standing in an operating room looking at a human heart beating, and then not beating."

She recalls that the first operation she watched was the hardest.

"I thought it would be nauseating, but when you get the courage to look, you find it's an incredible, beautiful thing. You realise there's this room of people who do this three or four times a day.

"Seeing the surgeries made the film worth doing," says Ryan. "My character in it is a woman who has a great deal of faith, and doesn't know it."

Ryan will next appear in a movie which sees her again team up with Sleepless in Seattle's star Tom Hanks and its director Nora Ephron.

You've Got Mail is another romantic comedy, a re-working of the 1940 hit The Shop Around the Corner, which starred James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan.

"It's about two people who don't get along day to day, but are in love on the Internet," Ryan says.

"It's an adorable script - a very clever updating of the original movie. Nora, Tom and I have a wonderful emotional shorthand. We laugh at the same things."

Given the career of Ryan and her husband, she admits that her biggest worry is the influence of the celebrity status of his parents on little Jack.

Her worries would appear to have substance - when Jack was only six weeks old, the couple had to hire an armed guard to protect him. Ryan and Quaid had received letters from an individual who was threatening to kill their baby.

"So far, he's a happy boy, but it's going to be hard," she says. "We're concerned that maybe we can't relate to what he's going through. We weren't the children of celebrities, but he is. We don't know what it's going to be like to be in his shoes later on."

As for the success of her marriage to another jobbing actor, Ryan says it's just a question of facing up to everything that life delivers which, in her case, has certainly not been all hearts and flowers - no matter what her fans may believe.

For all her steely resolve, though, Ryan isn't moving too far from her pedestal of the Queen of Love.

"Love is not a decision your brain makes," she says. "It's a feeling you know somewhere else and your brain catches up. Love challenges you in areas you need to be challenged in. It rests somewhere in not knowing what's going to happen."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.