Jude Law and Sadie Frost: Too cool to be true?

Jude and Sadie. The very names are redolent of that generation's preoccupation with the celebrity-laden and the achingly cool. Blessed with four children, the hippest gang of muckers that Cool Britannia could muster, and a new £2.2m family home, Jude Law and Sadie Frost seemed to personify the Hollywood-via-Primrose Hill dream. They were the Larry and Vivien of the heat-reading generation. But now the marriage between the actor and the actress/ fashion designer is the subject of scrutiny with the news that Frost has been hospitalised with depression, while her husband hovers on the edge of the A list with the rumour that he will be the next James Bond.

"She has been suffering a severe bout of post-natal depression," Law is quoted as saying. "She is feeling very blue." Currently staying in London's Cromwell Hospital, Frost is at the centre of tabloid rumours concerning the state of her marriage and an alleged incident in which she cut her wrists in LA. A routine session of celebrity crash and burn does no serious star any harm, but Sadie was always more famous by association (her husband before Jude Law was Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp; best friend is Kate Moss), and this latest incident can only exacerbate the growing imbalance in the Law-Frost household.

In the annals of golden coupledom, Frost and Law are minor players, Frost's role in the equation a triumph of determination over talent. Like double acts before them, they have buffed each other's publicity value very nicely. But unlike Burton and Taylor, or Olivier and Leigh, they exude a home-grown vibe that places them in our imaginations, forever lobbing frisbees and infants on Primrose Hill of a Saturday afternoon. Until recently, that is. While Frost recovers in her private clinic, Law is not only tipped to be the new James Bond, but also spends much of his time in LA, has just wrapped Cold Mountain with Nicole Kidman, and is about to shoot The World of Tomorrow with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Blessed with looks like his, Jude Law's stardom was inevitable. The man is about as handsome as it gets. With the his nearly perfect bone structure, his soulful gaze, and just enough stubble to roughen the edges, he is almost preternaturally beautiful. As his friend Sean Pertwee says, he has cheekbones "you could open a letter with". Now 30, his transformation from arthouse pretty boy to old-style Hollywood idol is just a few steps away, and 007 would clinch the deal.

The son of teachers who named him after both the Hardy hero and the Beatles song, Jude Law was brought up in south-east London with an older sister, Natasha. He started acting with the National Youth Music Theatre at the age of 12, and dropped out of Alleyn's School in Dulwich at 17 to star in a daytime soap called Families. A serious stint in theatre followed, resulting in a Tony nomination for his role in Indiscretions. Various TV and film parts led to the 1994 joyriding flick Shopping, where he met Sadie Frost. It was love at first sight, and the end of her nine-year marriage to Gary Kemp.

The other half of the coolest couple in town was also named after a Beatles song, Sexy Sadie, and grew up in sprawling bohemia with various father figures and a clutch of sisters, one named Sunshine Tara Purple Velvet. Frost's real father was David Vaughan, a psychedelic pop artist, who absented himself early. Like Law, Frost's thespian talents emerged precociously: she starred in a Jelly Tots ad at the age of three. She studied at the Italia Conti stage school before legging it to Liverpool to become a punk, appearing in Casualty and the odd pop video. At 19 she married 1980s guy of the moment, Gary Kemp, by whom she had a son, Finlay, now 12. In 1992, she enjoyed the one film role that anyone half-way remembers: as Winona Ryder's blood-sucking sidekick in Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Frost, now 34, and Law had a son, Rafferty, now seven, before the divorce from Kemp came through. They then married in 1997 on a barge in Little Venice in true It-couple style. "I was not the guy who got all the right girls," says Law. "Until I met Sadie." And indeed, rumours of discontent aside, Law's clearly besotted attachment to his wife despite his global lust-object status only adds to his appeal.

Though born to play romantic leads, he has, like Johnny Depp before him, shown a desire to push boundaries with darker roles, and thus garnered himself a good measure of artistic credibility. "When you're young you've got to do work that's got a risk," he says. "To me, acting isn't about fame." This may account for a past portfolio of fairly obscure films, with the exceptions of Wilde, Gattaca, and his Oscar-nominated breakthrough as the alluring playboy Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley.

Fame of a more nebulous variety anointed Sadie Frost when she and Jude Law got hitched, and became central to the Brit pack. Frost and Law notoriously set up their own film production company, Natural Nylon, with starry pals including Ewan McGregor, and seemed lodged in the press as the ultimate It couple. Naturally, Frost plays it down: "I hate it," she says. "We call ourselves the shit couple, the It-couple-that-talk-shit couple."

The notion of Sadie tends to irritate women. First, because she landed Jude Law. And second, because she has always appeared to be a celebrity in search of a cause – whether it be acting, producing, manufacturing a line of scented knickers, or designing for her recent fashion label, Frost-French. With her hooded eyes, bobbed hair, hesitant pout and camera-hungry gaze, she has a habit of yanking the limelight as she poses at premieres with her arm-candy husband, or launches her clothes designs by using her supermodel mates in their undies.

Yet what mother of four can genuinely sustain a high-octane career while her children are young? Frost's two-year-old daughter, Iris, was the subject of recent tabloid headlines when – while at a children's party – she found an ecstasy tablet on the floor of private members' club Soho House. She had to be rushed to hospital. Frost's fourth child, Rudy, was born less than five months ago.

The Frost-Law myth crash-landed straight after an idyllic January holiday in Phuket alongside Kate Moss and Jefferson Hack. Heat-blurred photographs of the beautiful people clutching bare-skinned offspring were printed, trailing that sense of exclusivity that has always followed the couple and their Nobu-habituating cohorts. Shortly before Frost's hospitalisation, Natural Nylon was disbanded. In the week that has seen the separation of Zoë Ball and Norman Cook, and disruption in the Ritchie household, a sense of Schadenfreude looms large.

Poor Sadie Frost is suffering from post-natal depression, a common affliction. Meanwhile, Jude Law, described by one reviewer as "pure Eros and adrenalin", looks set to transcend Ralph Fiennes and Pierce Brosnan as the next European leading man. He wants to be stubbled everydad, yet he's an international star in the making. She craves glamour, yet is a mother of four with less discernible talent than her husband. Perhaps even the most stable of marriages will buckle under the impossible strain of celebrity.