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When I arrived at the Tori Spelling photo shoot, there was a traffic-stopping scene. With just a little imagination, I could think what it must have been like to be on the set of Seven Year Itch, with that famous Marilyn Monroe wind-up-the-skirt scene. Here we have Tori, leaning out of a classic 1950s car and the wind is up her skimpy silk top. It rustles in the breeze. Her hair swings, mouth laughs, eyes shine. Everything moves, except, of course, her breasts, which stand perfect. Moving cars screech. Jaws gawk. Passers-by pass. but not without telling her they love her show.

She's really rather luminous, surprisingly more beautiful than as Donna in Beverly Hills, 90210 or as the character Katherine in her new movie, Trick. It's an independent film, which is low-budget, high camp, but very skilled. It's a gay love story which manages to be sweet without being sickly. Tori plays the comedic, always-there- when-she's-not-wanted best friend. She is an all-singing, all-dancing bad actress. The actress playing the bad actress when the actress is Tori Spelling is not without lashings of irony, and she is not without lashings of self-deprecation. It rolls off her tongue.

Her performance has been critically acclaimed. It's probably easier to give praise when she's far away from a daddy-type movie, and that could be where she's heading. The series Beverly Hills, 90210 will be her last, so Tori is at a crossroads.

We are in the Beauty Bar, a place in Hollywood where you can get manicures with your Martini. It's done out in kitschy 1950s poodles and hairdryers. Not that she goes out alone anymore. That was when she was young. Now she's almost 27, she doesn't do clubs, only Friday night dinner with friends. "I'm maturing", she says, with a half smile. "Actually, I just got bored with it all. You go to clubs and see the same people you saw ten years ago."

She first started in Beverly Hills, 90210 ten years ago. Her character has endured a full set of terrible traumas-abusive boyfriends, being held hostage by a stalker, her mom having an affair and her father having a stroke. She had so much drama in her life that drag queens like to do her. One wonders, is it Tori or Donna whose drama, pain and persona thrills them?

Spelling's own love life has been, although more frugal, nonetheless intense. Most of the real-life drama happened on the inside, after Tori-bashing became an international pastime. Headlines that called her the frog princess can't[sp] have been easy. Even worse were absolute lies, which talked about breast implants slipping, ribs being removed, anorexia raging and an unstoppable pelt of abuse about the was she acts and looks.

Her demeanour is that of a shy person forced out of her shell. It comes with a kind of weathered. So how do you deal with Tori-bashing? "There are two ways to look at it. At first, I was mortified. But I loved acting so much I was like, I'm not giving up. So I had to finally think, I can't be upset cause everything I read says some hateful thing. I developed an attitude of, I'm going to show them. Then, it will be like, screw them all."

Tori of course, was set up to be brought down. The poor little princess with daddy, Aaron Spelling, who was responsible for the like of Dynasty, as well as Beverly Hills, 90210. "It didn't matter if I was goofed or bad. People just wanted to be mean. But my dad gave me my start. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be on the show. But I see all these actors with famous mothers and fathers and they get parts and no one says anything. My brother [Randy] was on two of my dad's shows. I told him, "Be prepared, your going to get it." He never did."

Do you think there are so many ways in which a woman is more vulnerable? They can deliver your pain by destroying your body parts? "Yes it's disgusting. But that's not the least of the things I had to deal with., the way I look. I found it more hurtful that people would say I always got parts because of who my father was. The only thing I've done for my father was Beverly Hills, 90210. I've done a lot of TV movies, none of them for my dad."

Her relationship with her father could have gone many horrific ways. The ultimate daddy's girl could have done the ultimate rebellion. And for a while, she moved out of the 123-room Homby Hills mansion when she was nineteen to live with her boyfriend-a rather bad boy, Nick Savalas, Son of the Kojak star Telly Savalas-it seemed that might be the way she was going. But the bond with man who could never do enough for his daughter was too strong.

He is a real big-deal daddy. He screw up dirt-poor in Dallas to become filthy rich in Beverly Hills after showing us the worlds of not only Dynasty but also Charlie's Angels, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Melrose Place, Starsky And Hutch and, or course, hours and hours of Beverly Hills, 90210, where he watched his teenage daughter's life segue from reality to screen without missing a beat.

She insists, though, that she is not like Donna-not so naive, not addicted to drugs or beaten by boyfriends, and not determined to hang on to her virginity. "No" she says. "I didn't have the issues she had." Nonetheless, her psyche must have been fertile ground for many issues.

She grew up in extreme opulence, with the constant praise and closeness of a producer genius who could make anything happen. I asked her, Is it true that he shipped in snow one Christmas so that she could make a snowman in sunny California? "Yes, it is," she says, with a bit of a love glow. It was so true that he shipped in exotic shells so she could find them on the beach in Malibu, and that she was so ashamed of the limo that took her to school, she got out a few streets away. I read that her mother is such a giver, a whole room is dedicated to gift wrapping. When I asked Tori whether it was true that she had a computerised [sp] closet that lets you punch in any outfit and it swings into your hands, she laughs and says, "Are you crazy? That was in Clueless. No one really has one of those closets."

Although she is long moved out of the parental home, the bond with her father is steely strong. Do you still take his advice? "One hundred percent. My dad is my biggest fan and I go to him for everything," she says. "If I'm doing a movie, I show it to him and say, "What do you think?" Growing up in this business, you can get pretty out of hand. I've seen so many people turn into nightmares. My brother and I are both very humble and grounded. That came from my dad."

Do you mean he was poor and made all his own money and kept you aware of that? "No. He was never preachy." she insists. "We had so much surrounding us, but we never thought of it that way. In fact, I hated it all growing up. The limos and the house would embarrass me. I wanted to have nothing and be equal to other people."

Tori was a shy child who hid under her mother's skirts at parties and then suddenly snapped into a Shirley Temple song. In her early teens, she wrote sad poetry and a play called Footsteps on the Sand, about a teenage girl who commits suicide. Her father believes she wrote it because she felt so happy. In a similar way, he produced stories about divorces and break-ups in Dynasty and Melrose Place because his own marriage was so solid and happy. "I was always a daddy's girl," she says with casual pride. "We used to play house and I would play the wife and he'd play the boy and my mom would play the wicked witch. We'd be Hansel and Gretel. Growing up, I was in love with my father. His opinion always mattered. He was very encouraging. He would always tell me, "You're beautiful.""

If daddy's girls always look for daddy, how could she ever find such a man? "I don't know. People say that you want someone like your dad, but if that were true, I would pick great guys," she says. "My dad is the best guy, and she's so in love with my mum. It would be hard to find men like that. They want you to worship them. It seems as generations progress, men become less respectful of woman. Just because woman progressed in different ways, it doesn't mean they don't need to be taken care of."

Until now, Tori has definitely been taken care of. The aforementioned relationship with Nick Savalas was pretty much a disaster. I've read stories about how he turned up for an audition with Tori's dad 45 minutes late with no lines learned. "We were young. We lived together at nineteen," explains Tori. "The show was starting for me. He wasn't working. I stayed in it for two and a half years. That's why I say I'll never move in with a guy until I'm engaged. I don't want to wait till we're married, because what if we can't stand living together? But I always say once I have a ring on my finger, I'll move in."

You can see that despite her hypersensitivity, there's an unexpected strength and tendency to like things straight, black and white. Now she lives with some room-mates-a pup dog and three cats. "Growing up, I never liked cats," she says. "Then I went out with a guy who had a cat. When we broke up, I bought two." Do you miss the cat more than him? "I don't know. But they say that animals are the best thing for a break-up."

Do you have a boyfriend right now? "Yes. It's a fairly new thing. We were friends for a long time and now we're officially dating now." she says. "He's an actor. But I don't want to say who in case it breaks up. It seems to be the downfall of all relationships when actors announce who they are with. I love reading about other people, but I hate it happening to me."

Where did you meet him? "Through work." Is he on the show? "He might be... Look, we started to hang out together, but we didn't want to take that step, because you cant go back to being friends," she notes. "Finally it was his decision, because girls are always ready. They're always, right, let's fall in love. Guys are always pragmatic. So, after two and a half years, we took the step."

Was that because the show was finishing? "No." She fiddles slightly with her redsetter hair, but her eyes avoid mine. Is he different to the other boys you've dated, I ask, knowing that the others have been bad boys, pretty but careless. "He has his own money, he can support me," she says. "That's a nice feeling. I've been taken advantage of so much in the past. It's hard when you make more money than a guy. They never feel right about it. It makes them feel insecure, and they take it out on you in other ways. Also I never knew if they wanted to be with me or they wanted my father to give them a job. When we met, he already had a job, so he didn't need me for anything, which feels good. My parents like him too."

She says it is hard for her to pick the bad-boy type and often she prefers to be alone, because she's tired of bad boys, but doesn't fancy the nice guys. "It's all about the chase. If I meet a guy and he is very into me, I'm not into him. I want to have to work for something. I'm sure a therapist would explain why women do that, but I look at those nice guys and think they are so boring."

A therapist might say she's a typical high achiever with a low opinion of herself, but I would probably say she wants to be excited more than bored, and she's learned to thrive on insecurity. That said, she thinks she might have truly broken the pattern. She is very secure about the marriage thing, and for about half a second, you are convinced that that is all she wants. But she's got to much to prove. With a long-running show about to end, It's a huge turning point to leave people she has worked with for years who have become her closest friends. She says she is particularly close to Brian Austin Green, who plays David on the show. "I feel a tight connection with Brian, probably because we've playing boyfriend and girlfriend on and off over the years. We have so much chemistry. But he's not my boyfriend."

She is working on her own sitcom and hopes to do more films. She is going to do a play in New York called the Vagina Monologues. She says it has taken her this long to understand the process and gain confidence. Have you ever been confident about the way you looked? "No. When I was in my teens, I was really insecure," she recalls. "I still have moments when I freak out. It's hard when there a million beautiful girls out there. Everyone's putting on their make-up and you start to panic."

She has rubbed off most of the make-up from the shoot. Either way, I tell her that she more beautiful in the flesh than she is on screen. She looks sad but laughs: "I swear to God, everyone says that. I take it as a compliment, but I think, do I look like hell on TV? I guess our lighting people must really suck." Is there any part of your body that your still insecure about? "I like my body a lot. I used to hate my nose when I was younger." Did you have that adjusted? "Yeah. Everyone has one thing they're obsessed about, although I read on the internet that I've had problems with everything."

The nose procedure has been documented, but so have several others, so I ask her, did you ever get anything else adjusted? "I had acrylics [false nails] once. But the best one I've read about me is that the reason I'm skinny is because I had six ribs removed. The whole thing leaves me wondering." she says, a little tense.

She suddenly comes over more fragile than steely, but says more hopefully that she thinks the business of everything depending on how you look might be changing. "I think it's starting to matter less and less. And that's got to do with independent films, with character's that might not be the greatest looking or have the best body, but they are getting acclaim and great roles."

It's not so much a quiet rebellion against her father, it's to do with striking out, which against all odds, she has. She's not only prettier than you'd expect, she's smarter and funnier. And with an easy-to-be-with self-deprecating manner, Tori is kind of wise, even though she can play dumb brilliantly. When we're finished, she sweeps me into her limo, no longer embarrassed by it, and drops me off at my home.