The Sun

SEXY TV actress LISA FAULKNER and her Trainspotting star boyfriend JONNY LEE MILLER are getting married.

The former Holby City babe was stunned when Jonny got down on one knee and proposed.

The lovestruck pair had an on-off relationship from October 2000 but got together for keeps in September last year.

Lisa, who played Dr Victoria Merrick in the BBC medical drama, is said to be over the moon. Jonny who played Sick Boy in the cult flick about heroin addiction has been telling friends and family the happy news.

A source close to the actor said: He and Lisa are madly in love. They were out one night last week and Jonny got down on one knee and asked her to marry him.

Lisa didn't hesitate to say yes and she got quite emotional. She was clearly over the moon.

Jonny has been grinning like a Cheshire cat since Lisa said yes.

The couple were mates at school 15 years ago and kept in touch as their acting careers took off.

When they started dating, Lisa who quit Holby a year ago said: I can recommend finding love with an old friend.

It's the best thing ever as you know each other so well. Lisa dated TREY PARKER, creator of cult cartoon South Park before getting back with Jonny.

Her husband-to-be was once married to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider star ANGELINA JOLIE.

They divorced after a year. Jonny has also dated ex-All Saint NATALIE APPLETON.

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Looks, charm, a Saint on his arm
Four Nights in Knaresborough
Dir: Richard Wilson.Jonny Lee Miller
by Shane Watson

Back in the spring the Appleton sisters of All Saints were photographed for the July cover of Marie Claire. The scene in the studio was much as you would expect - photographer, fashion editor, hair stylist, make-up artist, and a couple of "friends of the band" including a pale-faced bloke who only had eyes for Natalie (the older one). At one point the two of them disappeared and when they reemerged his state of mind had not improved, and the hair stylist had to start over again. The man in question was Jonny Lee Miller.

"He was absolutely smitten," says my source, "he couldn't take his eyes off her. It was a bit wet actually." That's the thing about Jonny Lee Miller, you can't quite decide if he's a man or a mouse, a sexy Sick Boy (the peroxide blonde junkie in Trainspotting, the first film we saw him in) or a sensitive Edmund (the bookish character he plays in his latest film, Mansfield Park). They are both good performances, the former glamorous, cocky, punkish, the latter intense and gently simmering, but you can't help wondering where, in between the two extremes, lies the real Lee Miller. The last thing you expect is that, in person, he will make Edmund Bertram look like an exhibitionist.

My first glimpse of him is standing side on, in a phone booth at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn - baggy Carhart trousers, backpack, cropped brown hair - every inch the fit boy you would expect of an All Saints escort. But then he turns and reveals the fragile, pale features and dark eyes that you associate with tortured poets or young World War I officers (one of his best performances to date was the shell-shocked Billy Prior in Regeneration). He is polite, speaks slowly and gently and doesn't say a lot, although you can tell he's trying.

Lee Miller is the latest of his peers to show what he's made of on the stage. His mate Jude Law is currently starring in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at the Young Vic, and last year Ewan McGregor scored a hit with Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs. Returning to the theatre for the first time in five years, he plays one of the knights who murdered Thomas à Becket, in Four Nights in Knares-borough, an ensemble piece that's been compared in style to Reservoir Dogs.

"Something like Mansfield Park doesn't really feel like work," he says. "I guess that's why I'm doing this. I wanted to feel like a new boy again [he is the youngest in the cast at 26]. You get so judged as a film actor and people think they know who you are, so you wanna go back and reaffirm for yourself that you have a right to be doing what you're doing."

You can't blame Jonny Lee Miller for wanting to prove himself. He is far more famous than he has a right to be because Sick Boy was the sexiest part in the sexiest film of the decade but, aside from Regeneration, he hasn't had much to shout about since - unless you count Plunkett and Macleane, which the critics didn't, or his performance in Afterglow, which he dismisses as "wooden".

Then there's the fact that Brit acting's golden boys Ewan McGregor and Jude Law are his friends, and colleagues in the production company Natural Nylon, and together they enjoy a kind of Rat Pack celebrity independent of their work, based on looks, charm and mutual connections. They are to the current London party scene what Jagger, Terence Stamp and David Bailey were 30 years ago, even if McGregor is the only one who has really shifted into top gear. Finally, Lee Miller has a particular reputation with the ladies. He's already been married and divorced (to Angelina Jolie, one of Hollywood hottest newcomers and his co-star on the first film he made, Hackers), he's been out with Kate Moss and now there's Nat.

Since they met, Natalie has turned actress and, along with two of her fellow All Saints, is starring in Dave Stewart's film, Honest. "Yeah man, that's something, because I was like I'm never going out with an actress again. No, actually, you want someone who understands what goes with being a little bit famous. If they didn't, it would be uncomfortable for them."

Recently they were voted 1999's "Coolest Couple" (no sniggering, please) by the read-ers of Elle magazine: "I thought, this is just too funny. Then they read my name out and it was highly embarrassing." Nevertheless he went along with it, maybe for the fun of beating co-nominees Jude and Sadie to the ultimate prize (the other one, best actor, went to Joseph Fiennes).

So far he has not been stung by a kiss-and-tell, though I remind him about his ex-wife's confessions of sado-masochistic tendencies (they married in black leather and Jolie wrote Jonny on her shirt in her blood). "Oh yeah," he says, unfazed. "I don't mind that at all. That's really good for my image." It's possible that Lee Miller flirts with the dark side to distract attention from his sensitive looks, but none the less there is something intense and tightly contained about him, which is the key to his appeal and explains why he is so often cast as a man waiting to explode.

Next he plays the lead in the film of Iain Banks's Complicity, a black tale about a journalist who becomes a murder suspect, and a part in Love, Honour and Obey, "a sort of a gangstery film, mostly improvised" with a stellar Brit line-up from Jude Law to Rhys Ifans and Ray Winstone.

Meanwhile he runs every morning, "just over an hour, five or six days a week. I'm getting silly now: I run with weights and back packs." That's about more than clearing the mind, isn't it? "Well, it's about getting really fit," he laughs. And then it's time to go and he's walking away, a muscled-up commando walk that makes you think he might at any moment squat down and do some one-arm press-ups. But minutes later, when I see him in the phone box (10 to one it's Nat again), he looks like a vulnerable kid. Who knows?

Four Nights in Knaresborough opens at the Tricycle on 8 November, 0171 328 1000.