KATRIN Cartlidge, who has died at the age of 41, was one of Britain's most versatile and passionate actresses, equally powerful on film as on stage. She was an uncompromising, adventurous performer who always excelled playing edgy, often neurotic characters.

Her death was sudden and shocking. According to reports, she had awoken in the early hours of Saturday morning in her London home suffering from what she thought was food poisoning. She was rushed to a local hospital and died within a few hours. It's believed that the cause of death was septicaemia.

Katrin Cartlidge was born in London, the youngest of three siblings. Her father, Derrick, a Scots-born manager of a furniture removals firm, was briefly jailed during the war for his pacifist beliefs. Her art gallery-owning mother, Barbara, was from a Jewish family which had fled Germany in the late 1930s.

Katrin, who suffered from mild dyslexia as a child, attended Parliament Hill School for Girls in Hampstead. She began her theatrical career as a dresser for the actress Jill Bennett at the Royal Court (ironically, it was there that she made what was to be her final stage appearance in November, last year, as a stalker's victim in Boy Gets Girl).

She made her acting debut in 1979 in One Rule at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith. Later that same year she made her first appearance on the West End stage as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet.

It came as a surprise (to Katrin as much as to anyone) when she was chosen, against type, in 1982 to take the role of violent schoolgirl Lucy Collins in Channel Four's Brookside. Consequently, her small-screen debut was the soap's first episode.

However, after just a year with the hit series, she left to return to the stage in order to hone

her craft.

Though she continued to concentrate on her theatrical career, she did make brief return forays into the world of television and film, most notably in the 1984 BBC television film Sacred Hearts. Her feature film debut came in 1987 with a cameo role in the Comic Strip's satirical spin-off comedy, Eat The Rich.

Her major screen breakthrough came in 1993 when Mike Leigh cast her as Sophie, the brooding, bitter, punk bedmate of grungy loser David Thewlis in Naked.

Other arthouse movie roles followed, the best of which was probably Ann, the English picture editor who refuses to accompany her photographer lover to the Macedonian village where he was born, in Milcho Manchevski's Oscar-nominated, Venice Film Festival Golden Lion-winning, Before The Rain (1994).

Two years later came another feature film breakthrough when she played Emily Watson's repressed sister-in-law in Lars von Trier's highly acclaimed Breaking The Waves.

In 1997 she was re-united with Leigh for Career Girls, a movie which, for both actress and director, was something of a disappointment. Told in two time frames, it's the story of two successful self-assured young women (Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman) who, 10 years earlier, had been a couple of neurotic student flatmates. Disappointing it might have been, but Katrin's performance earned her the best cinema actress prize in

the Evening Standard awards that year.

Leigh, who went on to use her once more (a cameo role in 1999's Topsy-Turvy), adored her as an actress. He once said of her: ''Katrin is a total original. She's not frightened of ugliness or danger. She confronts everything with courage. She's very droll, sharp, perceptive, but also incredibly generous. She's an ensemble actor.''

For her next significant movie role in 1998, Katrin adopted an American accent to play the title role in Claire Dolan, a film about a high-class call girl who, on the death of her mother, is forced to face up to the emptiness of

her life.

More recently, she played the truth-seeking reporter in Bosnian director Panis Tanovic's Oscar-winning No Man's Land (2000) and a Jack the Ripper prostitute victim in last year's From Hell.

Katrin, whose substantial stage appearances were often overshadowed by her movie work, was a totally committed performer in both mediums. Her theatrical triumphs included Lady Macbeth in the Manchester Contact Theatre's production of Macbeth (1983), Florence in Kora at the Traverse in Edinburgh (1986), and Sarah in The Strangeness of Others, at the National (1988). Katrin Cartlidge was a master of personal quality control, always choosing her projects carefully and wisely.

Deeply intelligent and not afraid to be outspoken when the occasion arose, she had a profound knowledge of and interest in other forms of art, including sculpture, poetry, and music. Though always serious about her work, she was blessed with both charm and a wry sense of humour. She went out of her way to help other actors, particularly younger ones.

Writing in the Guardian, friend and director Beeban Kidron said: ''She was famously strong but paired with her strength was a fragility, a translucency, and an empathy that was at the core of her talent.''

Katrin had a partner, Peter, whose privacy she guarded jealously. She had no children.

Katrin Cartlidge, actress; born May 15, 1961, died September 7, 2002.