How Amy Adams went from singing waitress to 5-time Oscar nominee

The career arc of 'princess 275' might be the most exciting one in Hollywood today

The thing Amy Adams found hardest about musical theatre was the teaspoons. In her early 20s, Adams was a chorus girl in a chain of Minnesota dinner theatres - a tough circuit, where the artistic value of any given production lies in direct proportion to its ability to distract the audience.

"Inevitably people ordered sundaes," she says, with a haunted look. "So every night you'd have this clink, clink, clink throughout the second act." She evokes the sound by poking the air with her index fingers, in a way that suggests the eaters might as well have been tapping their spoons on the cast's foreheads.

"But that's the thing about dinner theatre," she continues. "It's a wonderful" - a tactful pause - "training ground for focus. You have to sing right on through the plate-scraping."

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Adams is now 42, and her journey from someone who dances while you eat pudding to five-time Academy Award nominee might be the single most exciting career arc in present-day Hollywood.

Name-brand fame arrived nine years ago via the role of Princess Giselle of Andalasia in the Disney musical Enchanted - a part that embraced, or perhaps healthily sent up, her concrete-grinned show-business roots.

She'll return to the role next year in a long-planned sequel, Disenchanted, in which Giselle will question whether her ever-after with Patrick Dempsey is really as happy as all that.

She reveals that Disney has been pressing her to make the film for five years - "now, especially considering where the world's at, we need another one of those feel-good moments".

In the interim, she's had a lot on. Adams has been, among other things, a demure, dormouse-y nun (in Doubt ), the brains and backbone of Philip Seymour Hoffman's bewildering cult (in The Master ), a tough-talking boxer's moll (in The Fighter ), and a deep-cover con-artist with a perilous neckline (in American Hustle ).

That can't be pulled off without serious range and depth, and when Adams is granted space to work, every performance feels exploratory, inquisitive, engaged. But what makes the variety so thrilling is the way she reconciles it with the very different duties of a movie star. Every performance also feels like Amy Adams.

Her latest role is in Arrival, a science fiction film. There are even aliens in it, who turn up in the skies above Earth one day. Adams plays Dr Louise Banks, a linguist who's enlisted by the US military for the purpose of saying hello. Given the visitors' lack of anything that looks or sounds like human writing or speech, though, working out how will not be easy.

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The story behind it was inspired by the Sapir-Whorf complex: a theory which holds that, since each language is a way of decoding the world, learning new ones might unlock new ways of mentally decoding it. (Very roughly, it's a developed version of the idea that each tongue has a strong suit: for instance English, with its pliable syntax and shades of ambiguity, supports comedy in ways that rigorous, orderly German doesn't.)

Adams's character shows such a persuasive command of the theory on screen that it's a genuine jolt when she says her own "tiny little artist brain" never quite managed to make sense of it.

"I know from years of struggling with mathematics that at some point you just have to accept who you are," she laughs. "But what I learn prepping for roles like this, when the character's mind works so differently from mine, is that I have to connect with the emotional truth of what they're doing, and the intellectual truth just kind of falls into line."

I don't think I've ever spoken to an actor more self-conscious about unpacking their work than Adams.

WATCH the trailer for Arrival

As a female lead in a sci-fi film, Arrival's Louise is a scarce creature. She might have been scarcer still: when the screenplay started circulating, one studio executive asked if her character could be rewritten as a man.

For Adams, that's missing the point. "I don't see Louise as a quote-unquote strong woman, but she uses female strengths, like her intellect and instinct, in order to stand up to the militarised world she's navigating," she says. "And we made her vulnerable too, but you need that vulnerability to sell what comes later."

She wonders if the "strong woman" archetype - as understood by men, at least - is unhelpful. "You wouldn't meet Louise and think 'ooh, strong', but for me, a strong female character means that female stories are represented correctly. Let's get away from archetypes and let's tell women's stories."

To that end, Adams has taken on her first active producing role on Sharp Objects, a forthcoming HBO miniseries based on the same-named novel by Gillian "Gone Girl" Flynn.

As the fourth of seven children, born on an Italian army base and raised in suburban Colorado by Mormon parents who divorced when she was 12, Adams is someone for whom adapting comes naturally. After her father left the army he became a club singer; her mother was a gym instructor and amateur bodybuilder: Adams remembers waiting backstage at competitions with her siblings while her mother flexed on the other side of the curtain.

She more or less went straight from high school to the dinner theatre gig.

After tearing a muscle in her knee, she auditioned for a film that was shooting locally to keep working while still giving herself time to heal. When the cameras started rolling, she was bitten.

"When I realised I could use what I'd learnt to pursue film acting - and not just chase a dream, but make a living - I just became completely obsessed."

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She moved to Los Angeles at 24, got an agent, and hit the audition circuit. Three years on, she was convinced she'd found her big break: a major supporting role in Catch Me If You Can, a Steven Spielberg film, in which she'd play opposite Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.

It didn't translate into steady work. For the next three years, she was a self-declared "disaster" .

Two films broke the drought. One was Enchanted, the other the 2005 indie comedy Junebug, in which she played the heavily pregnant small-town sister-in-law of a big-city art dealer, and for which she received her first Oscar nomination.

You might assume Enchanted was some kind of cosmic reward for Junebug . But in fact Adams auditioned for the former at a mass cattle call before the latter had been released (she was princess 275 of 300).

When she left the room, Kevin Lima, Enchanted 's director, said: "That's Giselle." Disney's plan had been to hire a voice double for Giselle's musical numbers, but Adams retrained her voice, which had grown rusty - her dinner theatre days were almost 10 years ago - and sold them on it.

Princess 275 turned out to be a better deal than anyone expected. Midnight struck long ago, and she's not leaving. - The Daily Telegraph

• 'Arrival' is on circuit now.