NEW YORK -- Sienna Miller drags herself into the hotel room looking worse for wear, despite the designer togs that mark her cutting-edge fashion sense.

The soon-to-be-24-year-old English actress' long blond hair is now bobbed short in a crude, choppy cut. Her face is wan, her eyes tired, her voice gravelly. You start to make assumptions that her version of Queen Elizabeth's infamous "annus horribilis" has overtaken Miller's life.

This is, after all, "the victim" in an ongoing, real-life soap opera. In July, Miller's celebrity boyfriend and fiance, the unreliable rapscallion Jude Law, confessed to an affair with a nanny named Daisy Wright. She had been caring for his children from an earlier marriage to another actress, Sadie Frost, a relationship that also ended with his philandering.

A firestorm of gossip mongering ensued -- and still endures because the Miller-Law union has been on-off-on-off ever since. At last word, it was on again with a grinning Law showing up on the red carpet to lend support when Miller's new movie -- the silly farce Casanova, co-starring Heath Ledger in the title role -- made its Los Angeles premiere.

But assumptions can be wrong. It turns out that Miller looks ragged because of a raging flu/cold. "Sorry," she says after a bout of coughing and sniffles, "I'm all snotty!"

It also turns out the hair chop is for a role in another movie now shooting in New York. Miller is playing Edie Sedgwick, the infamous 1960s drug addict and flame-out who became Andy Warhol's muse before she died tragically at 28.

And Miller's temperament today -- even with the snotty sniffles -- is pretty upbeat for someone whose private life has been made a mockery in the tabloids and turned into a song-and-dance routine in the mainstream media.

"I feel that I have overcome a lot and I feel more powerful," Miller offers when the subject of the unwanted attention is on the table. "You know, that's an element of my life that I'm not completely content with but I can't whinge about it any more than I have, otherwise people will shoot me."

Her survival technique has not changed since the July fiasco. She lives in her cocoon in London, England, where she was raised (Miller was born in New York when her mother, acting teacher Jo Miller, went into labour during a performance of The Nutcracker Suite, but she is thoroughly English).

"I just surround myself with friends and family," Miller says. "I have the same group of friends that I have had since I was three. I do very normal things. I have dogs (Porgy and Bess, after the American jazz-blues opera). I cook. I don't lead a particularly exciting life away from work. I don't go to celebrity parties. I don't really court that, except that it's a part of my life. I hope (in the future) it will be less prevalent than it has been this year. But, you know, I feel content. I'm happy. So I'm strong."

In Casanova, Miller plays a content, happy and extremely strong Venetian woman. It is a fictional character named Francesca, a clever artistic type who writes feminist tracts under a pseudonym, cross-dresses to pass as a man and openly despises the legend of Casanova because he is a womanizer. Naturally, because this is a movie farce, Casanova falls in love with her and the chase is on through a series of disguises, misidentifications and general shenanigans.

"I think as a young actress," Miller says, "it is very rare where you read something where you're not either The Girl or there to serve some romantic purpose in a male-dominated cast. I was 21 when I read it and saw this heroine who was intelligent, feminist, cross-dressing and swashbuckling -- just generally a fantastic role. So I begged for it."

Miller's career is just getting into gear, so she did have to beg, cajole and convince Swedish-American director Lasse Hallstrom that she could pull it off, opposite Ledger.

Now she seems to have her act together better than he does. Without any public explanation, leading man Ledger cancelled this day of interviews for Casanova, leaving Miller to speak for him.

"It was fantastic," Miller says of the experience working with Ledger. "I think a lot of male actors would have come in playing 'the greatest lover of all time' and have an enormous ego and pouted and puffed their way through it. Heath, being the man that he is and the actor that he is, really sat back and allowed it to be an ensemble piece, which I think is really rare."

In addition to the leads, Oliver Platt, Lena Olin (Hallstrom's actress-wife) and Jeremy Irons, in an absurd, self-parodying role as a prude, are part of that ensemble.

Miller has more to say on Ledger, who is heading to the Oscars soon -- just not for Casanova (his best actor nomination will come for Brokeback Mountain): "He was great. He really took care of me. He is like my big brother. We had a right giggle on set. We both don't take life too seriously and he's just generous and kind and he knew that I was nervous, that it was my first big role in a huge film and he kind of really helped me out."

Part of the film, perhaps unfortunately, concerns the nature of fidelity vs. philandering. It is difficult not to think of Law's indiscretions when you are watching Miller and Ledger argue over Casanova's womanizing in the movie. So the subject of the ideal man comes up in conversation with Miller off-screen.

"I know what I like and I know what I don't like," she says of men, perhaps evasively. "I like someone who will make me laugh, someone who is enthusiastic and interested in things. Other than that, I can let go of all the rest."

Another thing Miller has to let go is her resentment over accusations that her troubles with Jude Law have made her famous and actually helped her career.

"I don't read it so I don't really know," she says of the effect of most of the gossip. "I think there was a bit of press saying this has done wonders for my career. But, to be perfectly honest with you, people said that about my relationship with Jude from the start (they met on the set of Alfie, the 2004 release in which she played Nikki).

"But I got Alfie on my own. I got this part independently." And she was not dumped and then rehired for her role as Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl after the gossip firestorm hit, Miller says. She did drop out of the project but she says it was because the timing of the shoot was uncertain and she left to star for five months as Celia in Shakespeare's As You Like It at the Wyndham Theatre in London's West End. Then Factory Girl got back on track and she was recast.

"I don't know if it (the gossip) has helped my career," Miller continues. "(If it has) then I would rather it had not happened and my career go on gradually. But everything happens for a reason. If this is the way my life is supposed to go, then I just have to go with it, I guess."

The spy who loved her ...

Sienna Miller says she was not surprised when her good friend and former lover, Daniel Craig, was chosen as the next 007 and first blond James Bond.

"I think he is a brilliant actor, a very strong, powerful actor," she said. "And I think it's exciting that they will be taking Bond back to being more of a misogynist. (It will make Bond) more interesting than he has become. And I think Daniel has a kind of gritty realism that will be really interesting in that role."

Miller, who turns 24 on Dec. 28, will not be asking Craig to tout her as a Bond Girl when the next 007 goes before the cameras early next year.

"I don't think it's the right time for me to be a Bond Girl," Miller says. "I think it may undo the hard work that I have been doing this year.

"And I don't know if Daniel Craig would talk to the producers about me being a Bond Girl, either."