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.”