Lucy, the reluctant warrior 12 October 2003 A kickboxing former Mrs New Zealand who cleans her teeth with baking soda, Lucy Lawless was the star of the cult television series 'Xena: Warrior Princess'. Now, she tells Sabine Durrant, she's presenting a programme about real heroines. `They came to him now, these forgotten counter-examples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children." Lucy Lawless, the actress who played the lead in the television series Xena: Warrior Princess, closes her copy of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and puts it back in her bag. She sits down (she has stood up for the reading). Her voice when it comes again is croaky. "Family, his children," she says, "you see - that's what matters to the old man in the end." There are tears in her eyes. Here in the library of a discreet London hotel is the new Lucy Lawless. Not the kickboxing, chakram-wielding Sapphic superhero who became a cult, who spawned a hundred websites and a thousand Xena wannabes, who at the height of her fame got to dine with President Clinton. Not Mrs New Zealand, the former beauty queen, a legend in her own country. No, this is the quiet, considered Lucy Lawless, 34, who abruptly reaches into her bag to read you a passage from a book that has moved her, the actress who has turned presenter of a new series of television documentaries for the Discovery Channel. They might be about "warrior women" - Joan of Arc, Grace O'Malley, Boadicea - and contain the sort of "re-enactment" that involves a lot of menfalling off horses and girls wading barefoot through surf (not a million miles, it is true, from an average episode of Xena), but Lawless herself remains strictly in a narrating role. She gets to say lines such as, "These are much lighter and shorter than other swords that I've used" - which not many narrators can - but otherwise she has put her own warrior days behind her. "Oh yis. Thank God. No more. No more. I'll happily leave that to others," she says in her cool, refined New Zealand accent, curling in her chair at the notion. She is simply and expensively dressed in Marc Jacobs jeans, a striped T-shirt and a cashmere cardigan tight over her ample bosom. On her feet are apair of high two-toned trainers like spats, which tip her 5ft 10in height over 6ft. You notice how tall she is even before she stands up, because she sits like a tall person, her shoulders back, her arms and legs out. She says she's "not a hair person", but she flicks her long chestnut locks a lot. Her small teeth are white, white, white. "Ah thanks," she says. "I rub baking soda on them. I always have. But I thought they were looking a bit grotty this morning. I didn't brush my teeth last night after a cup of tea." Lawless's career has been a series of accidents. She grew up, a good Roman Catholic girl, one of seven children, in Mount Albert, "middle child, middle class, middle of Auckland." Her father was the town mayor: "I kind of thought we were royalty." She was unconventional at school - wore tracksuit pants and cheap men's moccasins "to piss people off"; was going to study opera at university but dropped out and went travelling around Europe with her boyfriend, Garth Lawless, instead. She looks back at that six-year run now with some ambivalence. It wasn't just the black eyes and the broken pelvis (she did most of her stunts, "except for the flips") and the strain on her marriage (she and Lawless divorced in 1995). "The show was a bit of a body snatcher," she says. "It owned me. It wasn't the acting. It was the physical nature of it. I never wanted to go into action, never liked sport. I have a very casual and comfortable relationship with exercise. It was like somebody getting up and pretending to be a rugby player every day when they would really rather play Scrabble." She was also overwhelmed by the extent of the mail she received, from women - mainly "empowered" by the example of Xena to leave theirhusbands or buy motorbikes - and from men, mainly asking for underwear. The subject still makes her uncomfortable. In fact, at one point, when I ask her if she gets her own groceries, she looks really nervous. "I, um, I don't know. I do the groceries if I have to. There are people who . . . I don't want to talk about it." She looks over her shoulder as if there might even be a stalker lurking there, and whispers: " The trick is not to make yourself too accessible in print. You don' t want to be too approachable, too human. Otherwise, they think they know you. I've learnt that. I've been coached in it." Any stress she felt was complicated by the fact that she became emotionally involved with Rob Tapert, the show's producer. At first, they saw eachother secretly - "It was very fun, very wild, very exciting. If something happened tomorrow to Rob, I don't think I would ever be able to find a situation that would be more electric than that" - but in 1998 they married. "There were times," she says, "when it was difficult because it was Rob's show. I couldn't come home and bitch about how much I hated my producers because the person you'd love to hate is the person you love most in the world. So there was that awful dichotomy. But for the most part I surrendered to the demands of the job." She and Tapert divide their time between New Zealand, where Daisy lives with her father, and Los Angeles, "where they like their ladies with long hair and where they don't like you to cuss like a trooper." They now have twochildren - Julius, three, and Judah, one. She refers to them, and to herself as a mother, indirectly but repeatedly. The dinner with Clinton in which Chelsea eyed her, "this buxom brunette" , suspiciously, "until she saw I was, like, eight months pregnant." The offer from Playboy: "But I was pregnant at the time and nothing in the world would compel me to do it." The stint on stage in The Vagina Monologues,"hugely pregnant, like about eight months". "I might not have an Oscar," she says, "but I have a Daisy and a Julius and a Judah and there are plenty of American actresses who would give their right arm to be me."