If you want to find yourself breathless over a designer frock then just ask screen beauty Rachel McAdams about the torments she went through to become Sherlock Holmes’ main squeeze.

“Honestly, I had my own personal ‘Gone with the Wind’ situation,” McAdams says, laughing. “I had to wear real corsets, with my bones crushed and totally cinched in. The costumers would come to strap me into the corsets in the morning and I would try to push my belly out so I had a little bit more room.”
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Robert Downey Jr. (left) is the title character in “Sherlock Holmes,” and Rachel McAdams plays Irene Adler.

“I would be holding onto the trailer door and trying to eke out just a little bit of space so I could speak properly. Still, they managed to squeeze me in every day. They even tried to make me laugh, and on the laugh they’d yank tighter.”

It was still worth it to be the female lead in the bromance of the holiday season. In Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes,” McAdams plays Irene Adler, an American mystery woman who takes Sherlock on in ways he never expected.

“This character is from New Jersey, so I had to combine my voice with a certain English lilt from the late 1800s,” she says.

Perhaps she invented Victorian New Jersey? “Exactly. Victorian New Jersey. There aren’t a lot of experts in Victorian New Jersey, so I can’t get a lot of critical backlash.”

Her Irene is not the sweet English rose who runs around needing any saving. In fact, at one point, she handcuffs Sherlock Holmes to a bed and then skips out on him.

“She’s not your typical woman from the 1800s,” McAdams says. “She really is a free spirit in the sense that she is her own boss. This was a time when women were at home and not independent. So for a woman to step out and play at this level was really revolutionary.”

She says finding chemistry with Downey wasn’t tough.

“We do have chemistry, but it’s more like an experiment gone wrong,” she says. “They want to kill each other and love each other at the same time. We really tangle it up in this film, but that’s half the fun.

“As for chemistry, I don’t think that - bam! - you just have it with another actor. It has to develop story wise,” she says. “You have to have the support and backbone from the script that accentuates this potential chemistry between the two of you.”

McAdams was raised by her father, a truck driver, and her mother, a nurse, in St. Thomas, Ontario. By age 4 she was participating in competitive figure skating. She put her skates down to act in local Shakespearean productions and eventually majored in theater at York University in Toronto.

“I wanted to get into acting as a little kid and my parents were like, ‘Honey, maybe later.’ But a theater company came to town and I begged my mom to let me do it,” she says. “I started on stage with that company and then I studied acting in college.”

Her career didn’t experience many lulls.

“I pretty much got noticed right out of school,” she says. “York University is great for showcasing their talent and their students. They bring the agents in.”

Her first break was the Disney series “The Famous Jett Jackson” (1998) and in the film “Mean Girls” (2004). But her biggest break was getting cast as the female lead in “The Notebook.” She also has famously dated and split from her “Notebook” costar Ryan Gosling.

“Separation is something you deal with as an actor,” she says. “You have to fall off the face of the earth sometimes to do a movie role. I’ve often been torn away from the people I love, which never gets easier.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m living two lives. I have my work life and I have my regular life,” she says. “I’m in the 1800s during the day on a movie set and then come home and clean the toilet or go out and buy groceries.”

DETROIT - A Nigerian man who became ill on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit - the same flight involved in Friday’s terrorism attempt - triggered a security alert at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after the pilots requested emergency assistance upon landing, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Sunday. The department said that the response to Sunday’s incident, which included informing President Obama, was “an abundance of caution.”

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Earlier in the afternoon, Delta Airlines, which acquired Northwest last year, said in a statement that the crew had requested police assistance on the ground because a passenger was “verbally disruptive.” The Transportation Safety Administration said in a statement that it had been alerted to a “disruptive passenger on board” Flight 253. The T.S.A. said that the flight landed safely at Detroit International Airport at approximately 12:35 p.m. Eastern “without incident.”

“The aircraft has been moved to a remote location for additional screening,” the agency had said then. “T.S.A. and law enforcement met the aircraft upon arrival, the passenger is now in custody.”

A little before 4 p.m., the large white jetliner sat at the southeast corner of the vast Detroit Metropolitan Airport, surrounded by police and other emergency vehicles with their lights flashing in the fading afternoon light amid falling snowflakes.

About a half hour later, the Homeland Security press secretary, Sara Kuban, released a statement, sorting out what had happened on the flight.

“A passenger on today’s Northwest flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit spent an unusually long time in the aircraft lavatory,” she said in the statement. “Due to this unusual behavior, the airline notified T.S.A. and the agency directed the flight to taxi to a remote area upon landing to be met by law enforcement and D.H.S.

“The passenger in question, a Nigerian national, was removed from the flight and interviewed by the F.B.I.; indications at this time are that the individual’s behavior is due to legitimate illness, and no other suspicious behavior or materials have been found. Though this does not appear at this time to be a security incident, in an abundance of caution, the aircraft was fully screened, with negative results, and all baggage is being rescreened before the aircraft taxis to the gate.”

The suspect in Friday’s failed terrorism attempt on the same flight, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is also Nigerian. He has been charged with trying to blow up the plane.

CNN and The Associated Press had previously reported that a Nigerian man had locked himself in the lavatory for such a long time that the crew requested help on the ground.

A Homeland Security official had earlier described the incident as “nonserious.”

At 3:55 p.m., CNN said that law enforcement authorities has offered an “all clear” signal - indicating that the threat had passed - and the plane began to be moved.

Rows of bags and luggage long remained on the tarmac, approached by dogs sniffing for contraband, whether as serious as explosive devices or the usual agricultural products not allowed to be flown in on passenger jets.

Bill Burton, a White House spokesman, said that President Obama, vacationing in Hawaii, had been notified “shortly after 9:00 a.m. Hawaiian time of the incident regarding an unruly passenger on the flight arriving in Detroit by N.S.S. chief of staff Denis McDonough.”

“The President stressed the importanceof maintaining heightened security measures for all air travel and gaveinstructions to set up another secure teleconference briefing as soon as possible,” Mr. Burton added.

“It’s a pretty typical response,” Scott Wintner, the airport spokesman, said of the police vehicles. “With an aircraft situation, speed is of the essence.”

A Delta spokeswoman said that the other 255 passengers have been safely taken off the plane.