Where do we stand on Pierce Brosnan? Opinion, well, the little of it I canvassed before meeting him, seems divided. Men are unexpectedly harsh. He’s too smug, they say. Too knowing of his good looks. Clearly spends a couple of hours a day working on his hair. Women are kinder, their theme being not just that Brosnan is good-looking but that he has been a good father to his five children (two adopted) as well as a good husband to both his wives (his first having died of cancer). That’s three goods.

My impression of him, when we meet in Soho, is that he does not seem particularly comfortable in his skin. Though he has a crusher handshake, there is a primness to him, a preciousness. He is immaculately groomed in black suit, black shirt and black scarf flicked over his shoulder, just so. His hair is (suspiciously) black too, as well as neatly cut and blow-dried, and all this blackness makes the vivid blueness of his eyes the more startling.

He’s had his teeth fixed, which may be a sign of vanity. Then again, if you look out for him in his full screen debut – he plays ‘first Irishman’ in The Long Good Friday – you’ll see he had teeth like Victorian gravestones, so this seems fair enough. Unless he has had his face fixed as well, which he claims he hasn’t: he has indecently smooth and young-looking skin. Perhaps it’s the L’Oréal moisturiser. There is an ad campaign running at the moment showing his face next to a pot of the stuff.

He may not look his age, but does he feel it? ‘No, it’s good Irish genes,’ he says. ‘I don’t feel 54, but I do see the age creeping in. You do change little by little.’ He saw his Spotlight photograph the other day, the one that appeared in the official casting directory when he first started acting in 1975, after training at the London Drama Centre.

‘This young kid in the production office said, “F— me, is that you?” So he thought I’d changed. Perhaps it’s a matter of perception. I don’t think my mother looks her age. She has a sharp disposition in her 76th year. And the old man that I never knew had a spry, chiselled look to him. Snow-white hair. Flinty, squinty eyes. I look a bit like him.’

Thomas Brosnan was an alcoholic who earned a living as a carpenter in County Meath and who abandoned his family when Pierce was two. The young Brosnan’s mother left Ireland for London to train as a nurse, leaving her son to be brought up by her parents. He followed her over when he was 11, only to be picked on at school for being Irish. He fought back and soon learnt to conceal his Irishness. He has described his childhood as full of ‘loneliness’.

As an adult he has been compared to an expensively elegant yet tightly furled umbrella, and that’s about right. But the unease you notice is also partly to do with the way he talks himself up, partly with his convoluted, overly wrought speech patterns – they are almost stream-of-consciousness at times, with him asking and answering his own questions. It is also to do with his mid-Atlantic voice. It seems self-consciously smooth, whispery and polished, tortured almost, as if he is still a teenage boy trying on various voices to see which one seems the most impressive, rather as schoolchildren try out different signatures before settling on one. There’s an obvious explanation for this: an identity crisis. He’s an Irishman who has taken American citizenship, but has made his name playing a well-spoken Englishman. ‘It’s only confusing if I let it be,’ he says. ‘Intrinsically, I’m the same person I was as a young lad and I think I still have the optimism of life, still the same wants and desires to be good and great about what I do. I have asked myself that question. When I went to America I spoke so much about who I was and gave so much away in a confessional, Irish, story-telling way that I suddenly realised I had given up a lot of myself. I had to shut up.’

Did his 11-year-old self have a strong Irish accent? ‘Yes, and a strong sense of his Irish identity. Very Irish. Nineteen sixty-four; Putney Comprehensive School. Made to feel different, and no child wants that, so the performance began. The seeds of acting. Before that, I was in Ireland and the first theatrical performance was being an altar boy at church. The whole celebration of the Catholic Mass. I was enjoying being up there and looked at. I still go to church. Went last night.’

The impression he gives of being uncomfortable with himself may also be to do with his having had his identity stolen by James Bond. These days he seems to want to play it down. The biography on his website even begins: ‘Perhaps best known worldwide as James Bond…’ Perhaps?

There is no perhaps about it. The four Bond films Brosnan made were huge box office hits, the first three generating a billion dollars in revenue, the last one, Die Another Day in 2002, making half a billion on its own. Before him it had been generally assumed that the Bond franchise had run out of steam, with Roger Moore turning Bond into a cartoon figure and Timothy Dalton putting the final nails in the coffin with his politically correct version. For the purists, Brosnan represented a return to the hairy, misogynistic and cruel Sean Connery glory days. He also made it possible for Daniel Craig to introduce his darker, grittier version of Bond… and this is a sore point. Brosnan had wanted to take Bond down that route himself, with two more films.

‘Connery did six,’ he said after making Die Another Day. ‘Six would be a number, then never come back.’ But in July 2004 he announced that ‘Bond is another lifetime, behind me’, which may have been a negotiating ploy with the studio. If it was, it didn’t work because in October 2004, when his agent rang to say negotiations had stopped, Brosnan said, ‘I was shocked. It was a bit of a body blow. They had invited me back and then uninvited me.’

Let’s face it, this bitterness about Bond, if bitterness it is, gives an interesting texture to Brosnan’s moisturised façade. I want to explore it further but he only wants to talk about his new film, Mamma Mia! And he keeps dragging the conversation back to it. He keeps telling me, indeed, how good it is and how pleased he is with his performance in it.

The story revolves around a young girl who is about to get married and decides to track down the father she never knew. Brosnan plays – and sings – one of her possible fathers, and Meryl Streep plays her mother.

Given the sempiternal popularity of ABBA, and of the stage version which 30 million people have seen worldwide, Mamma Mia! the movie looks certain to be one of the biggest block-busters of the summer. We shall come to it, I assure him. For now I want to know more about his confused identity, especially what it is like having his identity swallowed up by James Bond – having, for example, people in the street shout out, ‘Look, it’s James Bond!’ rather than, ‘Look, it’s Pierce Brosnan.’ He purses his lips. Breathes through his nose. ‘I have very little to say on the matter,’ he says. ‘I promised myself before I started on Mamma Mia! not to discuss Bond because all has been said from me. All is done. That is it.’

But isn’t that a little perverse? Bond is, after all, a huge part of his life, his identity, his career. He even has a Bond museum of sorts at his home (the watches, tuxedos and cars he was allowed to keep). And when, one day, the Brosnan obituaries are written, James Bond will surely be in the opening paragraph. ‘It will be there, front row and centre, just as it will be for Sean and Roger or any man thereafter. I think Daniel is in the first blush of what it all means. You become an ambassador to a small country. Bond is an industry. You make your pact with the devil. You know that it will follow you. But you just hope you get yourself off the ropes. I have no bitterness but I just feel exhausted by it.’

The no-bitterness line doesn’t quite ring true. But perhaps it is more disappointment at the way his tenure as Bond ended. Either way, he now says more firmly: ‘Let’s talk about Mamma Mia!’ Hmm. I suppose GoldenEye, his first Bond movie in 1995, was the opposite of the almost guaranteed hit that is Mamma Mia! He takes the bait. ‘It was daunting. Having left the press conference for GoldenEye I did go back to my small hotel room and say, “What have I done? What have I done? What have I said yes to?” Dear God, give me strength. And it’s such an institution. You can’t get it right. You’re just not going to get it right.’

Yet he took on the role at the right time. Had he been able to take it when he was first offered it in 1986 – his contract on the television series Remington Steele prevented him – he could have ended up the Timothy Dalton of the Bond story. He was devastated at the time – ‘I felt a kind of ugly numbness when it all fell apart,’ he has said. ‘It was a very painful experience.’ But as things turned out, Dalton was given the part as a second choice after Brosnan and Timothy Dalton became the Timothy Dalton of the Bond story. But the subject of Bond is making him hot. ‘Oh God, I’ve got to take my scarf off now,’ he says unwrapping the garment. ‘Look. Bond was there. It was great. It has allowed me to make movies like The Matador [a dark comedy in which Brosnan played a deranged hitman]. To have a working career. It also allowed me to make Mamma Mia! Let’s get back to that.’

OK, OK. Was he nervous about the singing? ‘All trained actors have to learn to sing just as they have to learn to do tap and fencing. I had actually made a film before, called Evelyn, in which I sang, but singing pub songs in Dublin is different from the musical acrobatics and precision of a pop song. I was mildly terrified about singing the songs in Mamma Mia! but the musical director, Martin, left me with an iPod full of tunes and I spent the next few weeks in my house in Hawaii singing into the ocean. Driving my sons crazy as I drove them to school in the morning.’

He wasn’t an ABBA fan before this film. ‘No, I wasn’t. Did I dance to them? Hear them? Live with them? Yes, we all did, but it wasn’t my kind of music. I would never have gone to see this musical if I hadn’t been offered the job.’

Does he dislike the musical genre? ‘It’s not high on my list. I thought Moulin Rouge was inspirational, and Jesus Christ Superstar I loved.’ So the romance of musicals is lost on him? ‘I have a romantic side, of course, and a sentimental side. If it’s good and meaningful and coherent, I will have tears. It’s the most wonderful thing to be moved by a performance. Edith Piaf. The life of an actor lends itself to emotion and yet you have to be tough as old boots to stay at the table.’

We are on the subject of emotions. When Cassandra Harris, his first wife, died in 1991, four years after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, he said he was in ‘a helpless state of confusion and anger’. The grief would strike unexpectedly. He would be driving along the Harbor Freeway in California and find himself screaming at the top of his lungs: ‘Why? Why?’ I ask if he has ever drawn upon his memory of those extreme emotions in his acting and, if he has, whether that made him feel compromised, whether he felt it had devalued the real emotion. He gives a long sigh.

‘Well, I’ve never had to reproduce that particular emotion. I’ve never been in a piece where I have to lose a wife. I’m in a piece now where I have to lose a son. A movie with Susan Sarandon. I hold myself in abeyance about it somewhat. I will have to find that emotion… but you do use it. You do. It’s not as pure as the original emotion and there is that sense of fraudulence and of scavenging in your heart for that emotion, but if it is well written, you get an echo anyway and a subtext of what happened in your own life. What happened in my life back there has its own private place. With other emotions, well, you know the experience of pain, laughter and deep frustration because we all act everyday, to our wives, our children.’

He sometimes catches himself using his skills as an actor to manipulate other people’s emotions in his everyday life. ‘Of course. I could be doing it now, but so could you be. I have been subjected to many a lovely interview only to read in print that they have cut me to ribbons. I was being sincere but because they didn’t like what I did as an actor, or the way I spoke, they had made their mind up before I walked in the door.’

Oh dear. Perhaps I’m a little guilty here. Certainly I am finding him more sympathetic now that he is opening up a bit. And I can see why he might find it frustrating to live in the shadow of James Bond. For a proud man he doesn’t seem especially proud of himself for doing those films.

Tellingly, he once said of Christopher Fettes, an actor and one of his oldest friends, ‘I don’t know what he thinks of my doing Bond – I’ve always been scared to ask. Maybe he’ll say, “Could do better”, or “Try harder” – or “What are you doing?”‘ (Actually what Fettes said was, ‘To be honest, I think James Bond is a bit below his talents.’) Besides, there is more to Brosnan’s career than acting. He is a canny businessman who has his own production company, one that has made six films, his biggest being the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) in which he starred. ‘Thomas Crown was very good at playing on an iconic theme,’ he says. ‘There was room for manoeuvre with it, in terms of “suit acting”, which Steve [McQueen] never did very well. He was never comfortable with. I thought there was a chink in the armour there. We’re going to be doing another Thomas Crown. How do we find him again? How do we make a surprise? Good sex scenes. It’s great when you get it right, but very fleeting.’

He’s been a Hollywood star, and indeed a Hollywood mogul, for quite a few years now; what motivates him to keep at it? Is it the money? Surely he’s made enough to retire. ‘I’ve got a house in Hawaii and another one in California and a few overheads still. I’m building two homes in Malibu. I have a mortgage to pay. I’ve invested. I have my properties and want to keep them. I could cruise along but I like working. I’m getting older. I’m 54. What’s next? Do I want to direct? I love the visuals of it all. I paint. How do I mix that with acting? I like producing. I enjoy having my company. So a musical, why not? Having Meryl singing The Winner Takes it All on a bluff overlooking Greece is wonderful. I’ve worked with some beautiful ladies, Halle Berry and so on, but Meryl is the tops.’

Speaking of Berry, her Bond bikini is on display at the Imperial War Museum at the moment, as part of a Bond exhibition. Is he going to see it – the exhibition, I mean? ‘I have no desire to go to see it. I’ve been asked but I don’t have the heart. As for the bikini, I saw the real thing. I saw it on the day and so did half of Spain. She came out of the water, which was very cold and not clean. You looked to the right and looked to the left and there were huge crowds of people. Everyone had turned up to see that scene.’

I tell him that I had canvassed opinion about him before meeting him and that female colleagues had all seemed to know that he was a good husband and good father. ‘Interesting,’ he says. ‘I found it quite cathartic to talk about my wife after she died. The disease of ovarian cancer is so insidious and frightening, I thought it would be good to explore my own feelings in an interview with People magazine, which I later regretted.

‘That had a huge effect. I was fairly numb and deeply in pain when I gave that interview. I was grieving. It put an enormous focus on me as a father and husband. You don’t want to lose the common touch and get adrift from your life, because fame is glorious but it’s also hollow and meaningless without love and family and mates and bricks and mortar.’

Hollow in what way? ‘If you’re having an off-day it can be a very uncomfortable experience to be recognised in public. You have this other persona following you. Being observed and judged all the time can make you feel neurotic. The way to deal with it is to be nice to everyone, really. I hope I’d be nice without the mantle of fame. I’ve been working down in Soho these past five days and I am now the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine. From Thomas Crown to Thomas the Tank. I go to the pubs around here. Meet mates for lunch. My son [Sean]. He lives here. He’s 24, went to the Central School of Drama here, he’s in the first throes of being an actor, played Romeo with the RSC. I think he’s got the talent and the guts and the humility to be a good actor. He looks like me, actually.’

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? ‘It’s a great thing, for goodness’ sake! Looks like me – and his darling mother, God bless her.’

After his first wife died, was it Sean that forced him to re-engage with the world? ‘The children forced me to carry on, and my life carried on because of the children, no question. We had been together for 17 years, my wife and I, so that was a long partnership and it was very hard for me to find myself again. The main thing was to find a positive place for her in my life. We still talk about her. She’s not forgotten and I am blessed with a wife now [Keely Shaye Smith] who always keeps in her heart a place for my first wife. Keeps it open because she has a stepson and I have stepchildren. It takes a mighty heart to do that. A special kind of woman.’

Oddly enough, when I see his words written down, without hearing him deliver them, I find them more moving. For the record, he believes that he is comfortable in his skin. ‘I’d say so. I can be pretty hard on myself and have a good, healthy dose of insecurity and doubt, though. All the foibles of being human and being an actor and being a husband and being a father, wondering where to go next, wondering how talented I am. Where is that talent? How big is it? How small?’

Having heard that he prefers to be photographed from the left, I ask whether he is a narcissist. ‘There is always someone to cut you down. I have enough people to take the piss out of me and tell me to shut up and go away and don’t be boring, but actually I’m my own worst critic. I’ve tried to use my looks as well as I can but they have also cost me jobs. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.’

I like him for saying that. The interview is winding up, but before I go I ask if he will sign autographs for my James Bond-obsessed sons, aged 10 and eight. Rather endearingly, he signs with a flourish, signatures so big and flowery they take up two whole pages of A4. And when I inspect them later I see he has put in brackets at the bottom of each page (007!!).

To understand the man, Freud believed, you must look to the child – and as a child Rupert Everett was asked to leave his prep school for ‘being difficult’. The reason given for his expulsion from drama school several years later was ‘insubordination’. It would not surprise Freud, then, to learn that interviews with the adult Everett tend to end in tears – the interviewer’s.

And yet I’ve been told by an old friend of the actor that he is ‘funny, sharp and easy-going’. So, I ask Everett as we square up on a sofa in the Grosvenor House Hotel, London, am I going to get Nice Rupert or Nasty Rupert? ‘That,’ he says with an ominous arch of his eyebrow, ‘depends.’

At 42 he still has the brooding features of a teenage delinquent: sulky mouth (lip-glossed), imperious nose and hooded brown eyes (lined with mascara). Even though his T-shirt strains against the muscled contours of his upper body, hardened by hours spent in the gym every day, he still looks gangly. It’s partly to do with his height – he’s a rangy 6ft 4in – partly to do with his legs, which look weedy in tight jeans (he used to wear several pairs of tracksuit bottoms at once to make them look bulkier), partly to do with his large, angular head, as out of proportion as a toddler’s. It’s partly to do, too, with the way he sprawls, his trainers resting on the coffee-table in front of him.

Despite the posture he seems edgy and suspicious, which is only to be expected, given that he finds journalists’ questions ‘unpleasant – like having someone shine a torch in your face’. He didn’t always, though. There was a time when he could be relied upon to say or do something outrageous in his encounters with the press. He would gamely talk about his time as a rent boy (which was how he said he earned his living for a couple of years after his early departure from the Central School of Speech and Drama), or his enthusiastic consumption of heroin, or about the time he had a wobbly and sent a cutting of his pubic hair to a woman who criticised one of his stage performances.

Then, in 1997, he co-starred with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding, playing her gay friend and confidant. The film made £200 million. It also made Everett a hot property in Hollywood – and he refused to talk any more about his youthful follies. So could it be that the studios decided it was time he toned down the junkie rent boy stuff? Nothing to do with the studios, he says, everything to do with his family who were mortified by the stories and are ‘excruciatingly embarrassed’ by him. A belated attack of conscience, it seems.

Even so, Everett is contractually obliged to promote his films and next month he has a new one out, a romantic comedy called Unconditional Love. In it he plays the secret lover of a popular crooner (Jonathan Pryce) who is a heart-throb to women (especially a Chicago housewife played by Kathy Bates) but who is very much still in the closet. So, let’s start gently. Talk about the latest project. He’s a bit like the character played by Jonathan Pryce in the film, isn’t he? After all, when he first found fame in the mid-1980s, with Another Country and Dance with a Stranger, he became a pin-up to schoolgirls everywhere, as well as to schoolboys who wanted to emulate his dark, scowling, foppish look. ‘What do you mean?’ he says in a lazy, patrician voice.

Well, he is, is he not, in the unusual position of being a sex symbol to both women and men? ‘I see what you’re saying. But I don’t think I’m a sex symbol to men, to be honest. Sex symbols to men are people like David Beckham.’ Perhaps ‘role model’ would be a better term then, in the sense that many heterosexual men wish to emulate his easy way with women, that ability to become the confidant, as he has with his friend Madonna? ‘Be the GBF, you mean? The Gay Best Friend? Well, yes. Lucky me. But I think it’s an old-fashioned view that only gay men are capable of fulfilling that role. I’m sure David Beckham could talk about eye cream and shopping for clothes.’

Everett is the second son of an Army major who later became a stockbroker. While his parents were stationed abroad, he and his brother, Simon (who now runs a fleet of helicopters in Nairobi), lived with their maternal grandmother in Norfolk. He was sent away to board at the age of seven, which he says ‘calcified my heart’. At the same age he watched a film that was to change his life, Mary Poppins. He found, he says, that he identified with Julie Andrews so much that he knew from that moment on that he wanted to be a star.

Was it a parochial childhood? Military? Bourgeois? ‘Um, we weren’t the sort of family who went to St Moritz. We went to Scotland in the summer, stalking. And I had a pekinese, one of my first acts of rebellion. My idea of a holiday was following my family up the hill with my pekinese, who would skip over the heather in front of me. All the other dogs were big and butch.’ He smiles broadly at the memory – it’s a disarming, boyish smile; toothy and mischievous.

Presumably he was a rebel at Ampleforth, the Roman Catholic public school in North Yorkshire he attended? ‘I never wanted to take part in any group activities. I felt really proud of the fact that I never once played rugby in five years. No, that’s not quite true. I was forced to play it twice. I felt good about hiding out in the music school.’ Indeed he did – he’s an accomplished pianist – and in the school’s music and theatre wing, under the stairs, he had a ‘dressing room’ covered in pictures of himself. He would invite friends round to it for imaginary cocktails. Not very Mary Poppins, but certainly starstruck.

He thinks for a moment. ‘I’ve never been any good with authority. I just thought I had all the answers.’ He stands up, walks over to the window, lifts one side of the swagged curtain and peers out across Hyde Park. ‘Authority figures are so irritating,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘Because they always tell you to do things for reasons that aren’t very good. That sums up what authority is about for me.’

Did he have a nickname at school? ‘No.’

Come on, he can tell me. ‘Everett Two. My brother was Everett One.’ Everett Two has written two novels: Hello Darling, Are You Working? (1992) and The Hairdressers of St-Tropez (1995). The reviews weren’t at all kind (‘Deplorable’ – the TLS; ‘Abysmal’ – the Guardian) but the first one, about a boy who wants to wear a wedding dress, and later becomes a hard-up bisexual actor, forced to work in soap operas, had a cracking opening line: ‘By the time he was eight he knew he would never be a Great Actress.’ Was it autobiographical? ‘I don’t want the interview to be about that.’

Oh go on. ‘All right, yes, there was an autobiographical element. As a kid I would be put to bed when my parents had guests and because I was such a show-off I would go to my mum’s room, put on her nightdress and Jackie Onassis shawl, run downstairs, go outside, ring the doorbell and pretend to be one of the guests. I’d say, “Hello, I’m Mrs So and So.” And my parents would say, “Come in.” I would join the other guests for ten minutes, then be sent to bed again, only to reappear ten minutes later at the door in another outfit. This was repeated a couple more times before I became over-tired, refused to go to bed and clung on to the banister sobbing. Those were my dressing-up days.’

So his parents can’t have been that surprised when he told them he was gay? The temperature drops. ‘No,’ he says icily. ‘I think they were very surprised.’ He sighs. He frowns. He unscrews the top of a bottle of fizzy water, making it hiss angrily. ‘Look,’ he snaps. ‘Does everything have to be about me being gay?’ He takes a swig from the bottle. ‘Why can’t we talk about my new film?’

But he, er, plays a gay character in his new film, as he did in his last one and the one before that. And Another Country, his first film, was about homosexuality and betrayal in public schools. ‘Yes, but we’re not talking about them, are we? We’re talking about me being gay, as usual. Why are you so interested? Are you a closet fag? Would you ask a straight person about what they did with their parents’ clothes aged six?’

Of course I would, I say, if I thought it would offer some insights into the person.

There is a cold fury in his eyes now. His nostrils dimple in and out as his breathing quickens. Nasty Rupert has taken possession. ‘Yes. But with me it is the only thing that people are interested in. People aren’t just about their sexuality – and it’s very, very frustrating.’

What to do? Make a run for it? Faint? I slowly cover my head with my hands and draw my knees up to my chest. It seems to lighten the mood. He sighs once more, this time more calmly, and says: ‘OK. OK.’

He stands up and walks over to the window again, his back to me. ‘I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with talking about a person’s sex life. I’m just saying it can’t be the only identification point.’ He turns to face me. Pauses for dramatic effect. ‘It is provincial and old-fashioned to make it so.’ Fair enough, I say, let’s look for a different identification point then. Everett changed his identity radically in the mid-1980s when he left London to live in Paris – stayed there for a decade before coming back to make The Madness of King George. Was it a self-imposed exile? ‘I wanted to get out of England,’ he says flopping back down on the sofa, no longer in a strop. Nice Rupert.

Why? ‘Because everything had gone wrong. I wasn’t getting the jobs. I was feeling paranoid. I wanted to escape the attention that I was getting. It was pretty negative [two pop songs he had recorded were panned]. I went for one weekend to Paris and thought, “I’m so crazy, I could get out of all this negativity and move here,” and I did, the next week. And I didn’t understand French much at first and lived in this blissful fantasy world. I reinvented myself – and had a new character because I couldn’t express myself. All my new friends thought I was rather mournful.’

Were they right? ‘Yes, I do get depressed. Not so much recently though.’

What’s changed? ‘My spirits were low in my twenties because everything unravelled. I thought I was doing one thing, but when I looked at it objectively I was doing another. Some people would say your work is really, really fantastic, that you’re like a matinée idol from the 1950s, and others would say it’s really, really crap. Both were partly true, but neither was the whole truth. When this was happening to me it was at the time I was exploring my sexuality [he didn’t decide he was totally gay until he was 26], and it is a very trippy thing, like being in a kaleidoscope. So you spend a lot of the time bewildered and confused and having dysfunctional relationships.’

So were those his wilderness years? ‘They weren’t wilderness years for me, no. I’ve always been forced to move on and probably always will be. But wilderness years, no. Moved to France, learnt two languages [French and Italian], and working there set me up for my next successful moment.’

Is there anything he would change about himself now? ‘Everything and nothing. I like being Rupert Everett but I’d also like to be a muscly black billionaire hip-hop singer.’

And so you shall, Rupert, I say, waving an imaginary wand: Ping! ‘The Sunday Telegraph,’ he says dryly, ‘the paper that just keeps giving.’ He yawns without opening his mouth.

Does he contemplate his own mortality? ‘And immortality. A lot.’ Through film? ‘Hopefully. Yes, you see a whole life ageing on screen. Life as a selection of repeats.’

He has also been ‘immortalised’ as a model, the face of Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium for Men. What was it like seeing himself on billboards everywhere? Did he become a narcissist? ‘Mm. Yeah, narcissism. I think most people who are vain have a lack of belief in their looks, they want to look better and they want people to tell them they are good-looking.’ He takes another sip of water from the neck, then swirls the bottle round and round absent-mindedly. Bored now. But did he ever look at himself in magazine ads and think, ‘Phwoar’? ‘All the time! I would go to bed with a magazine and just stare at a picture of myself. Sweet dreams!’

Does he sleep well? ‘Not the last three nights, but normally, yes.’ No guilt or angst keeping him awake? ‘Guilt for what?’ He pulls a mock nervous face. ‘What have I done now?’ Everyone feels guilty. ‘No, I don’t feel guilty at night. Only during the day.’ So he’s a man with a clear conscience? ‘Mm, lazy but well-disposed. And unpunctual. And easily bored. And quite selfish.’

Is he a good friend to his friends? ‘For the most part, but I have lapses.’

So he does. His friends speak of the bust-ups and mood swings – inevitably, he had a brief falling-out with Madonna – but he is usually quick to make up. What everyone says is that he has never been able to settle down. It’s the ‘always forced to move on’ factor he mentions. His longest relationship lasted a year – or rather his longest human relationship. A man’s best friend is said to be his dog, and that was certainly true in Everett’s case. He divides his time between London, Miami and Paris, and at one stage bought a home in Los Angeles just so that his arthritic black labrador Moise – Mo – could get the veterinary treatment it needed. And he once turned down a role on the London stage because it would have meant Mo being quarantined for six months. Mo died in November; was he heartbroken? ‘Yep.’

Will he get another dog?

‘Nope. It would be too depressing seeing another grow old and ill. You have them from puppies and they age so quickly. Always trying to keep up. So obliging.’

And would he characterise what he felt for his labrador as love?

‘Mm. The closest I have ever come to it.’ Does that surprise him? ‘Not really.’ Why? Is it because, as an actor, he has to be able to say, ‘I love you,’ to a relative stranger, in front of a film crew. ‘Yes, you can say it with as much conviction as possible, even if you hate the bitch. That’s what it’s about. When you say, “I love you,” on screen it destroys the next time you say it because it has just become a sense memory.’ He taps his long fingers together. ‘I sometimes find myself standing back from emotional situations in real life and thinking [he adopts a German accent], “Ziz is werry interestink. Later I shall go to my room and write a sonnet about it. Over a glass of dessert vine.”‘ He laughs crisply. ‘You’re looking at me as if I’m mad!’

Not mad, but sensitive, amusing, erratic – and a little bit lonely. An encounter with Everett can be a bit hair-raising – his one-man good cop, bad cop routine – but he probably feels it’s what is expected of him. So Rupert, I say as we wind the interview up, that wasn’t so bad now, was it? ‘No, not so bad.’ And, I add, we didn’t even touch on the dreaded rent-boy stuff. He looks at my tape-recorder and says quietly and with unexpected dignity: ‘That’s still running. Please. My parents read The Sunday Telegraph.’

It has become a journalistic convention, when interviewing Ray Winstone, to say that he is nothing like the hard man he plays on screen; that, actually – who’d have thought it? – he is a rather calm, reflective and polite man. It has become a convention, in other words, for the journalist to dress up a bitter disappointment as an interesting human paradox.

Imagine my joy then when I arrive at a Soho hotel to find the actor in a state of agitation. His blood is up. He has, he tells me, just been sitting in traffic on Shaftesbury Avenue for 40 minutes. ‘I was going about a mile an hour. Facking terrible. Everyone was getting the ‘ump. You find yourself screaming at people out the window. Major rows going on. Facking Livingstone. I would beat that man with a baseball bat.’

I would beat that man with a baseball bat. This from a former boxer who, at 51, still looks as if he could go a few rounds. He has a barrel chest and a jawline like the prow of a ship. His stomach looks fairly flat, certainly not as paunched as it has been. ‘Yeah I’ve been keeping fit. Just had six weeks off. Swimming every day. Steam room. Walking on the treadmill. At the moment I’m drinking once a week and eating sensibly. Cutting out pasta. Have a roast at the weekend. Mind if I smoke?’ This is said without ironic timing. He runs his thoughts together, as he does his words, in a fast-paced East End patter. The cigarette seems to calm him down. Makes him more reflective and polite. Damn.

Ray Winstone is not a leading man exactly, but he is one of the most sought-after character actors in Hollywood – a favourite of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, no less – and the story of how this West Ham-supporting son of a Plaistow fruit and veg stallholder got there, via bankruptcy (he neglected to pay his taxes) and bouts of unemployment and hard drinking, is worth a movie in itself. His big break was to be cast, almost by accident, in Alan Clarke’s hard-hitting borstal drama Scum in 1979. He went along to the auditions to keep a mate company and the director spotted him in the corridor, or rather he spotted his arrogant, shoulder-rolling boxer’s walk. That was the film in which Winstone delivered the immortal line ‘I’m the daddy now’ after working someone over with an iron rod (as opposed to a baseball bat). It was clear this actor did anger and violence like no one else, not even Robert De Niro. Like a dark forest or a stormy sea, his anger and violence was a force of nature, what the Romantic poets would call ‘the sublime’.

The assumption that he is not acting is partly to do with his voice. He speaks rapidly in a cockney accent so thick you could stand a spade up in it, on screen and off. He does occasionally do accents, as he did playing Jack Nicholson’s major domo in Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed, but he always seems more comfortable in his own voice, as in Sexy Beast, the film in which he played an excruciatingly convincing run-to-seed villain on the Costa del Crime. Winstone speaks without Ts and Hs. He doesn’t bother much with middle Ds either (as in ‘di’n’t’), or Ms, come to that. Written phonetically, ‘something’ becomes ‘sa’i’. It seems to emphasise the anger and violence.

Yet, as he demonstrated in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth in 1997 and Tim Roth’s The War Zone two years later, there is more to Ray Winstone than anger and violence. Don’t get me wrong, he was angry and violent in those films – very – but he also proved he could bring subtlety to his performances and, most importantly, the camera seemed mesmerised by his moments of unblinking stillness. His natural gift as an actor is that you don’t think, can’t believe, he is acting, which is why journalists are always disappointed to discover that it is an act, sort of, and that he is calm, reflective etc.

On that point, though, perhaps we ought to clear this up once and for all. He doesn’t actually get the red mist, does he? ‘It’s more a matter of being intensely into what I’m doing,’ he says. ‘I do get exhausted. It’s the mental energy. The concentration levels. I could spend two weeks in bed after a film like Nil by Mouth or War Zone. There is one scene [in Nil by Mouth] in which I’m talking about how my father dies and we done that on the first day. The picture and the sound went to the lab and they lost the sound. So we did it again almost on the last day of shooting. It was the best take. I think it needed the energy levels to drop a bit. You think you switch off when you go home but you don’t. It was mentally and physically demanding, that film.’

What about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, his latest movie? ‘That’s just physically demanding,’ he says with a laugh. Go on, Ray, I say. Tell me the plot. I won’t tell anyone else. ‘I can’t. It’s for your own good. I’m contractually obliged to kill anyone I reveal anything about the movie to. It’s a brilliant way of selling a film. Swear everyone to silence. Great salesmanship.’

The last Indiana Jones was 19 years ago. Winstone never imagined he would appear in one. Apart from anything else, it seems so mainstream compared to the dark, art house films he is known for. ‘The script starts off at a gallop and gets quicker, the camera never stops. I’m in it all the way through. The first shot is where I get dragged out of the car and they throw Indy’s hat on the floor and all you see is his shadow putting the hat back on and Harrison’s voice saying ”Russians.” From that moment you know you are in an Indiana Jones movie. Harrison is so fit. Forget the age thing. He’s in his 60s but he moves like he’s 30. He’s like a stunt man. Drives the jeep. And he can hit that spot on the door with his whip.’ Winstone jabs a finger. ‘Ping! He can pull a gun out of your hand with his whip, too. Harrison is a geezer. Pretty straight. Bit introverted. Loves to tell a joke. Doesn’t tell ’em well.’

So how did Winstone unwind after a day’s filming? ‘Radox bath. Vodka and Coke. Indy was fun to make. Didn’t need much unwinding. You’re laughing all day.’

I can imagine Nil by Mouth was a laugh a minute, too. ‘You don’t realise when it’s crowding in on you. War Zone as well. Both about abuse. You have to ask yourself how you feel about what you’re doing. Nil by Mouth I played a wife-beater. OK, that was bad but War Zone I played a man who raped his own daughter. I thought, why am I doing this film? It made me question my own moral parameters. Like going to see a shrink in a way. If you’ve got problems, don’t go and see a shrink, become an actor and act these things out.’

Has he ever seen a shrink? ‘Na. I think a shrink would need to see a shrink after seeing me. I’ve never needed to, I think because I always boxed and got rid of aggression that way.’

I ask him to try a little self-analysis now, ask how well he knows himself. ‘I know I rabbit on. Give it large. Think I’m more important than I am. I also know when I’m starting to feel down, feeling lousy and when I’ve got a brew coming up. I know it. I can do something about that. It follows a pattern. I know how to get out of that. Feeling physically low pre-empts feeling mentally low. So I take more exercise. I don’t need no geezer on a couch telling me that. That’s what my wife’s for. She tells me all that stuff. She’s cheaper too.’

He married Elaine, a northerner, 28 years ago. They have three daughters. The eldest two, Lois and Jaime, are actors. ‘I can be completely candid with my wife but she’s never really asked me about work, and that’s kind of cool. I never tell her about the job I’m doing. I wait for her to see it on the screen because she’s very honest and will tell me what she thinks.’

What! He didn’t tell her about War Zone? He grins. ‘Na, actually I did warn her about that. That was the one exception.’

How did that conversation go? ‘It was fine. The hard conversation was with Laura, the actress playing my daughter. I wanted her to meet my three children, three gals, so she could see I was all right. She’s a great kid, Laura, she looked after me in the end because I weren’t coping. Even when I slept it was still going on in my head. When we got to the final scene I thought f— this, what am I doing here? But it’s a film I’m very proud of now it’s done.’

For all his flippancy about analysing himself, I get the impression that he gives a lot of thought to how he plays a role. He sounds like a method actor, in fact, one who immerses himself. We discuss the Laurence Olivier approach versus the Dustin Hoffman one in The Marathon Man. When Hoffman was doing press-ups before a scene in order to look exhausted, Olivier asked him why he didn’t just act exhausted. ‘I think Sir Laurence should have tried acting as well,’ Winstone says. ‘Because I’ve seen films he’s been diabolical in and Dustin Hoffman has never given a bad performance. Maybe he should have tried doing some press-ups and running round the block himself. Who the f— was he to give a comment like that? It annoys me.’

Excellent. He’s annoyed again. His eyes are bulging behind his black-rimmed glasses. So does he analyse his role in the way Hoffman does? ‘Nine times out of 10 I don’t have a clue how I’m going to play it and I think it ain’t gonna happen. I think, what am I going to do?’ A sort of actor’s block? ‘Yeah, but the fear keeps you on your toes. Keeps you buzzin’. I like to paraphrase. They call me Ray Paraphrase Winstone because I paraphrase everything. Sexy Beast was one of the few I didn’t change a word on because it was so tightly written.’ When I ask if he has ever considered directing, he laughs. ‘One day maybe, when my legs ain’t working properly anymore. Trouble is, I’m impatient. If actors started f—ing around I’d probably lose it, you know.’

I know, I know. But presumably, with his hard-man reputation, actors wouldn’t dream of ‘f—ing around’. ‘Yeah I reckon I could…’ He trails off. ‘Boxing stood me in good stead. Control and discipline and the way you look at someone. In boxing you can give someone a look and they know they can’t beat you. You look right into their soul. It’s not the verbals, it’s the look. Usually the one giving it large, mouthing off, is the one who is scared.’

Winstone grew up watching boxers fight. ‘I used to go to a place called the Cage in Spitalfields market that went on for 15 minutes. Bare-knuckle. Half-way through, they went for a tea break, then came back and finished it. No referee.’

He started sparring with his father. ‘Yeah, one day when we were sparring I saw him getting too close to the armchair and he tripped so I clumped him. He chased me up the stairs and I closed the door and the door knob cut him below the eyes, so then I thought I’m going to die. I put the bed up against the door and then I heard him laughing on the stairs. My dad only hit me once in my life and that was because I was caught cheating at school. He told me I was being hit because I got caught.’

His father is still working, driving a black cab. ‘He’s got a picture of me up in his cab, so I think he’s proud. But dads are the head of the family so maybe it is a bit strange for him having me getting all this attention.’

The house he grew up in, he says, was ‘very loud’. The day would start at high volume and get louder. ‘My dad would get up early and listen to Judy Garland on the Pye record player. It would be loud. There would be rows. Shouting. Everyone had their piece to say. Controlled mayhem. We never bottled anything up. But it was fun. I was told I was a little f—er as a kid. That was not how I remembered it. I thought I was a charming little boy.’

He recalls one day when he and his sister Laura began an argument over Sunday lunch. She threw a knife on the table, it bounced and stuck him in the sternum. With blood trickling down his shirt he dived across the table. ‘I’m strangling her, my dad was strangling me and my mum was strangling my dad. Then me foot went through the French window. It was like a nuthouse. No one sulks in my house. Twenty minutes later we were all sitting down in front of the telly watching The Champ and crying.’

The Champ, of course, is a rather sentimental, father-and-son film about boxing. Encouraged by his father, a keen boxer himself, Ray had joined the Repton Amateur Boxing Club at the age of 12 and, over the next 10 years, had won 80 out of 88 bouts. At welterweight, he was London Schoolboy Champion on three occasions, fighting twice for England. He spent so many hours in the gym as a child, he says, that it put him off gyms for life. ‘I get a nosebleed just thinking about training.’

The Winstones, like so many East End families at that time, lived in the shadow of The Krays, who were also keen boxing fans. ‘Yeah, I was aware of them. My dad knew them very well. I peed all over Ronnie Kray as a baby. He picked me up and I peed on him. He told me the story himself years later.’

The Krays, he now realises, were about the closest he came to glamour in those days because they were always mixing with sportsmen, actors and singers. ‘But no one where I came from actually became an actor because actors were in the category of poofs and poets.’

His career options were limited. Some of his fellow pupils at Edmonton comprehensive school went on to become professional criminals – ‘Well, we didn’t live in Surrey.’ It was his father’s idea that he should try acting, in part because the only CSE Ray had left school with was in drama. When Ray enrolled at the Corona Stage Academy in Hammersmith in 1974, it was his father who dug deep to find the £900-a-term fees. He only lasted a year before being expelled for bursting the headmistress’s tyres (because she didn’t invite him to the Christmas party). ‘I was lucky to go there, though,’ Winstone now says, ‘someone other than my dad might have said, bollocks. I did use to question myself whether acting was a proper job. But I also realised it was the only thing I really liked doing.’

He has been similarly encouraging to his daughters, but he has also tried to instil in them some of the working-class values of which he is still proud. ‘My gels went to state school. We looked at private schools but when we saw the workload and the Ferraris and all that, I thought no, that is not what we want. I’ve nothing against private education. I just think it would be better if everyone got the same education.’ He takes a thoughtful drag. ‘The trouble with the working classes nowadays is that they don’t work. Whereas my family were grafters. We never went without. The house was always spotless. You knew everyone in the street. Front door never locked. There were still bombed houses around us, from the war. We used to play in them.’ He stubs out his cigarette. ‘I remember the first West Indian coming into our street. He had a zoot suit on and the kids used to follow him and touch him for luck. Unbelievable, but true.’

How does he feel about immigration now? ‘It don’t affect me as long as everyone respects everyone else. London has always been cosmopolitan. But I do think the English way is always to say sorry. We get trodden on. I think we apologise too much for what we are. I’m proud to be an Englishman. Now in London you see mosques but if you went to their country you wouldn’t be allowed to build a church, there would be f—ing murders.’

When I ask him to elaborate on what he means by ‘working-class values’ he talks about his belief in the death penalty. ‘Do ’em. Put an injection in them. Child murderers, I mean. People who murder in cold blood, like this guy who murdered five women [Stephen Wright]. I would have no qualms about hurting him. Maybe I could even do it myself. I would like to think I could. But maybe it would f— up the rest of your life.’

Belief in the death penalty is usually associated with being Right wing, I note. Is he? ‘My dad was a royalist who voted Tory. I don’t vote for no cant.’

I can just see that on a Saatchi and Saatchi poster, I say: Don’t vote for no cant. ‘My right to vote is not to f—ing vote,’ he clarifies. ‘I mean, who do I trust?’ He’s getting worked up again, which makes me wonder, again, how much he does act and how much he merely reflects the anger he feels. For an actor, he seems admirably unaffected and unpretentious. That is not to say, though, that he isn’t affected by his performances. On the contrary, they seem to take a lot out of him, leaving him raw and emotional. He doesn’t seem to build up layers, as others actors do, between himself and the roles he plays. I have read somewhere that he has high blood pressure.

Is this still the case? ‘Yeah, but I take tablets for it.’ That’s something associated with a short fuse isn’t it? ‘Is it? Is it? What are you saying?’ He’s laughing again; big, shoulder shaking laughs. ‘I don’t think I have a short fuse any more. I used to have when I was younger.’ His assistant comes into the room and he turns to her and says, ‘Blinding job this, baby. I’m sorted out now. Had my therapy. Not mad any more.’ With this, he swings out of the room, rolling his shoulders. Walking on the balls of his feet. His boxer’s walk.

The fastidiousness should not surprise, yet somehow it does. When two mugs of tea are placed on the wooden table in front of him, Bryan Ferry leans forward and lifts them straight off again. ‘Can we get a couple of magazines to put these on?’ he says to his assistant in his wispy, halting voice. ‘Or some pads. Thick ones. This table has got some rings on it already.’ He is fussing, in other words, even though his manner and speech could not be more languid. And, though I don’t know much about furniture, I’m pretty sure the table he is fussing about is fairly ordinary, not obviously antique.

The reason it shouldn’t surprise, of course, is that this particular rock star is known for his exacting taste in, well, everything – suits, paintings, cars, women, houses, wine, even interior design (Nicky Haslam once said that Ferry was more likely to redecorate a hotel room than to trash it). And he is capable of making grown producers cry with his, shall we say, attention to detail in the studio (his album ‘Mamouna’, released in 1994, featured 112 musicians and took five years to complete). Also, he is quite a strict and controlling father to his four grown-up sons (his words not mine). He is traditional, believes manners maketh man and likes to have the dinner table set properly.

Age doesn’t seem to have mellowed him, or left its patina. He is 62 and still looks as he has always looked – tall, lean and lupine with his floppy, side-parted hair still (suspiciously?) dark. When I suggest he hasn’t changed much, he sucks in air and says, ‘I don’t know. There are days when I look in the mirror and see the picture of Dorian Gray.’

Yes, but he’s not exactly rock-star addled is he? He’s no Keith Richards. ‘Mm, mm. I suppose when I started I was 25. Fairly grown up. I was never a wild, teenage pop-star type.’

Perhaps he simply cared too much about how he looked in those narcissistic and, at times, epicene early years: the eye patch and shoulder pads, the pencil moustache, the dinner jacket and studiously undone black tie. Tom Ford, the designer behind the Gucci brand, once said that Ferry was the ultimate style icon. And Peter York once memorably said that Ferry had led such an avant garde ‘art-directed existence’ he should be hanging in the Tate. He must love that quote, I say. He smiles shyly, avoids eye contact and hunches his broad shoulders as if drawing himself in. ‘I tend to be rather downplayed in real life, compared to my on-stage life. Quite self-contained. But I think my life has been interesting, for sure. Whether it is an artwork, I couldn’t say. Certainly, I’ve no intention of pinning myself to an art gallery wall. It’s a funny thing being such a shy person yet being a singer in a rock band. It’s a sort of contradiction.’

He certainly enjoyed his reputation as an aesthete, an exquisite, a dandy. But he thinks in retrospect that the emerald-green eye-shadow and the fake leopard-skin jackets of his early Roxy Music days were a mask to hide behind. ‘I felt I was playing a role. I felt the music was me, but the presentation wasn’t, necessarily. The spotlight can be a real handicap. It’s one of the reasons I like being in a band. Safety in numbers. I suppose it is quite hard to get on stage for the first time and so the clothes and the make-up helped. It can still be quite hard even now, when I’m not in the mood. You know, I think, “What are you staring at?”‘

We are in a high-ceilinged room above his recording studio near Earl’s Court, the one he once jokingly referred to as his Führerbunker, to his later regret. The walls are white-painted brick, the rugs Arts and Crafts. There are dustsheets over the furniture and, on the walls, paintings and prints by his friends and mentors the pop artists Richard Hamilton and Mark Lancaster. He knows a lot about fine art, does Ferry. Collects it. Has spent a lifetime studying it. Even did a degree in it in the mid-Sixties at Newcastle University, near to where he grew up in County Durham.

His father was a miner there, in charge of the pit ponies. It was a life of tin baths and outside privies. The contrast with his adult life in the South could not be greater: the aristocratic friends, the sons at Eton and Marlborough, the imposing country house near Petworth in West Sussex, the elegant town house in Chelsea (the one with the Bentley parked outside). There is still a trace of the North East in his vowels, but it is like ink that has faded in the sunlight. When you ask a question, he will murmur agreement softly under his breath, ‘mm mm’, and just when you think that’s all you’re getting, out will waft his answer.

The career shift from artist to musician seems to have been unplanned. ‘After graduating, I moved to London and found work as a supply teacher. Then I kind of drifted into music. I remember discussing it with Mark Lancaster. After he went to live and work with Jasper Johns, he told me it was much cooler to be an artist than a rock star. I’m not really sure why I didn’t take his advice.’

Instead of taking his easel to a garret, Ferry taught himself the piano and began to write music. He teamed up with five other musicians, including Brian Eno, he of the peacock-feather collars and synthesiser, to form Roxy Music. They also worked with the fashion designer Anthony Price to combine the look of glam rock with edgy, intelligent lyrics, innovative electronic music and highly stylised vocals. Their first single, Virginia Plain, came out in 1972. After that the hits kept coming: Let’s Stick Together, Do the Strand, More Than This, Love is the Drug, Avalon…

But Ferry’s love of art never went away and now he thinks not pursuing art as a first career has meant it has retained its allure for him. ‘The art world today is very social. I’m always going to dinners and openings. I have quite a few friends who are artists and dealers. I’m much more at home in that world than the music world. More comfortable.’

It was his aesthetic sensibility that landed him in trouble last year. In an interview with a German magazine, he described Albert Speer’s buildings and Leni Riefenstahl’s movies as ‘beautiful’. The tabloids savaged him and he apologised, explaining that his comments had been taken out of context and that they did not mean that he approved of the Nazi regime. On the contrary, he found it ‘abhorrent’. The Mirror in turn had to apologise to Ferry for misleading its readers in its reporting of this story. Among other things, the paper admitted that Ferry hadn’t even mentioned the word Nazi in the original interview. I’m glad The Mirror apologised. I remember thinking at the time that the press were being unfair to him. He was, after all, merely echoing a legitimate and respectable academic view that, as the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin put it, ‘Fascism is the aestheticisation of politics.’ Leni Riefenstahl’s movies and Albert Speer’s buildings were beautiful. It was their context that was ugly. When I raise this subject, Ferry folds his arms and rocks forward as if in a straitjacket. ‘Ah. Please don’t draw me into this again. So boring.’

OK, I say, but I want him to tell me what it felt like to be monstered by the media after so many years of enjoying a good relationship with it. ‘It was like being in some film noir. Bizarre. Very scary actually. And very ugly. There was a feeding frenzy and because there is 24-hour media now…’ He trails off. ‘I’m sort of speechless about it. I don’t want to say anything because… You could be in disguise. One becomes totally untrusting.’ He sighs. ‘It was all so…’ He sighs again. ‘It was so absurd. Anyone who knew me would tell you it was… ridiculous.’ He looks over his shoulder to the table behind him, searching for something. ‘I have this letter about it from a friend. A film-maker… Actually, can we change the subject please?’

OK again. In 2000, Ferry, his wife, Lucy, and two of their sons, were flying from London to Nairobi in a Boeing 747 when a mentally ill passenger dashed into the cockpit and grabbed the controls, forcing the aircraft to plummet. Is it true he told his son off for swearing as the plane plunged? He smiles. ‘Oh yeah. Wouldn’t you? I sort of woke up to hear my son.’

In those seconds when he thought he was going to die, what went through his mind? ‘Did I contemplate my own mortality, you mean? It all happened too quickly for that. The pilot said afterwards we were five seconds away from death. It was the co-pilot who pulled us out, while the pilot was fighting with the intruder. After that, I did consider life was beautiful and rich and in glorious Technicolor. You have to savour every moment. When I’m on a plane now I feel much easier about it because I can’t believe lightning will strike twice. Also, since that episode, I have tried to get a better balance in my life, between work and everything else. But it’s a struggle. Last year, I think I toured too much. The ‘Dylanesque’ album. I was on the road for nine months, on and off. My real life got left behind.’

‘Real life’ meaning? ‘Well, I’m quite curious. I like going to galleries and things. I go out a lot. Not an at-home type. I don’t cook. I like to be entertained.’ While he has been talking the intercom has been buzzing and the phone has been ringing. He now says to the intercom: ‘Hello? Hello I’m busy!’ The phone rings and this time he crosses the room and picks it up. ‘Hi, someone keeps buzzing me and I’m in the middle of an interview. Could you, kind of, shoot them? Thanks.’

An engineer and a producer are waiting for him in the studio, it seems. ‘We’re just working on something; building it up around a piano motif I’ve recorded. Some of the best things I do are where I think I’m not being recorded, so you almost have to trick yourself into recording.’ He’s always making notes for lyrics, he adds. Has notebooks scattered around. ‘I suppose if I ever stop doing it, it will be a sign I’ve grown up.’

He folds and refolds a piece of paper as he talks. He smoothes the table with the side of his hand. He doodles and fidgets. Endearingly, he is not really sure why he has agreed to this interview, as he doesn’t have an album or a tour to promote. But there is a reason of sorts, the film Flashbacks of a Fool. It is directed by Baillie Walsh and stars Daniel Craig as Joe Scott, a decadent English film star who is suddenly tipped into a mid-life crisis by the death of a childhood friend. The flashback of the title is to the early 1970s, with one particular Roxy Music track acting as a trigger to memory in the manner of Proust’s madeleine. When Ferry saw a preview of it, he was moved to tears. When he realises I won’t be seeing the film myself for another few days, he asks, fastidious man that he is, if I would like to meet up again afterwards so that I can tell him what I made of it.

And so we do, at his house just off Sloane Square. In the intervening days, another example of his attention to detail, he has sent me a copy of a book I was asking about: Re-make/Re-model, by Michael Bracewell, a history of the cultural influences that led to the formation of Roxy Music. I tell him I liked the film, by the way. It is intelligent, subtle, funny and, above all, evocative. It had me dabbing my eyes, too. Along with David Bowie and George Best, Bryan Ferry seemed to epitomise that glamorous period. ‘I think the girl in the film who mimes to one of my songs was a great improvement on the original,’ he says. ‘I found that quite touching, actually. She looked very good, very much like an idealised Roxy fan with the make-up and the clothes.’

In the film, the teenage Joe has eye-shadow applied by this girl, so that he will look like Ferry. I ask what Ferry’s father, the Durham miner, made of the eye-shadow. He laughs. ‘Not sure, actually. We didn’t discuss it. I didn’t see a lot of my parents around that time. They didn’t move down from the North until about 1976, when I bought my place in Sussex. I was away all the time, so they moved in there and had a new lease of life. They didn’t drive, poor things, so they were kind of stuck there. But they liked to walk and they thought it was paradise, which it was, which it is. The South Downs are beautiful. I don’t think my dad felt uprooted. For him, the world was wherever he was. A vegetable garden was his world. He wasn’t interested in flying to New York or Paris. He was quite a solitary figure. A real one-off. My mother was much more gregarious. She used the telephone.’

Does he look like his father? ‘A bit. I’ve come to resemble him more as I’ve got older. It’s like when I see pictures of my sons and I think they look just like me, or how I did at a certain age.’

He says it is a mild regret to him that his sons don’t know the meaning of hardship; don’t have anything to compare their comfortable lives to, as he does. ‘It’s good to have layers in your life. If I’m in a limousine on the way to the airport, I still haven’t forgotten what it is like to stand in the rain at a north-eastern bus stop for hours. I do have memories of deprivation, but I don’t carry them around like some bitter, Left-wing hammer to beat people on the head with. The human experience is all about contrast.’

He concedes that he made a conscious effort to bury his old identity and invent a new one. ‘But there’s nothing wrong with that. If you see the house I was born in. It wasn’t very nice. And the fact that I wasn’t born into a house with tapestries and paintings makes me appreciate these things more. I do like to surround myself with beautiful things. I’m not into cash or stocks and shares and markets. All I’m interested in are things. Art. They are very important to me.’

This time he makes the tea, a pot of it. As he pours we talk about the book he sent me. In one passage it notes how many gay men there were in ‘the Roxy circle’. Ferry went for an androgynous look, of course, like Bowie. Did he ever find himself questioning his sexuality? ‘Oh God, no, but the art world, the Seventies world, was such a gay world. One of the principal architects of Roxy, that whole movement, was Anthony Price and he never married. He designed the first album cover and was very influential. He’s still a dear friend. Quite a character. That was the time a lot of people like him were coming out. I’m not sure Roxy had much of a gay following though. I think that was more Bowie. Roxy was a group of straight guys from the North with girlfriends.’ He gives his shy grin, eyes downcast. ‘I’m not trying to apologise for being straight, but I did go to co-ed schools. That might have had an influence on me. I think a lot of my gay friends went to single-sex schools.’

And, of course, the album covers were the stuff of heterosexual teenage fantasy. One, ‘Country Life’, featured two scantily clad models. It had feminists in an uproar, resulting in it being sold under brown-paper covers in America. But in Britain people were pretty relaxed about it. I remember it well. Many was the teenage hour I would contemplate it. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it’s remarkable how liberated the climate was then. There is much more political correctness around today. What you can and cannot say. As I discovered last year. In a way it was much freer in those days. You could speak your mind. You certainly wouldn’t have got told off for talking about Albert Speer’s buildings in the 1970s.’

His main collection of Bloomsbury paintings is in his Sussex house, but he does have some here. ‘That’s a Wyndham Lewis,’ he says, when I ask about them. He stands up and leads the way out into the hall. ‘And that’s a Duncan Grant. Through this is a Paul Nash.’ We talk about Nash’s letters from Passchendaele and discover that both our grandfathers fought there, both for Yorkshire regiments. Mine survived. His died there. ‘I found his name at dusk on a memorial in Belgium,’ Ferry says. ‘It was freezing cold. So many dead. Awful. I became really tearful. I just stood there sobbing.’

In the drawing-room there are pots containing dozens of neatly sharpened pencils. There are pads of paper fanned out, art books and brocaded cushions. Everything is tidy. I don’t see any photographs of the women who have been in his life, but I suppose you need only look at the Roxy album covers for them: Playboy playmate Marilyn Cole, supermodels Amanda Lear (who would later date David Bowie) and Jerry Hall (who left him for Mick Jagger in 1977). The album cover girl he married was Lucy Helmore. That was in 1982. She was the one he had the four sons with. When they divorced, 20 years later, he cited her adultery. She was nevertheless awarded £10million in the settlement, or so the reports said at the time.

Since 2003, he has had been with Katie Turner, who is 35 years his junior. The relationship seems to have been on-off – off last month but apparently on again this, according to the tabloids. The trouble, reportedly, was that she wanted children, whereas he felt he was too old to go through all that again. How’s his love life at the moment, I ask? He laughs and groans and says something that should be quoted only in the context of our previous conversation: ‘Oh dear. I should have been gay, shouldn’t I?’

So the story in the papers? ‘Oh, I didn’t read it. Presumably, it was asking: Will they, won’t they? Don’t know, is the answer. Saw a friend for lunch today who said there was something horrible reported. A friend of mine said… A friend of Katie’s said… But they never reveal who these friends are. Hope your love life is more straightforward than mine.’

Well I married a Catholic, I say, so yes. ‘I was married to a Catholic for 20 years,’ he counters. ‘Didn’t stop our marriage ending in divorce.’

He worries about the effect his divorce might have had on his children, not least because they don’t have one place to go to that they can call home. He was lucky, he says, because he grew up always knowing where his parents were. He is taking two of his sons to Seville tomorrow morning to watch a bullfight. ‘It’s quite festive. You feel in contact with Spanish culture. They respect the bull. Admire it and yet fight it. Very similar to people who hunt foxes. They respect them.’ He grins. ‘I’ve suddenly realised this is a controversial thing to say. I don’t want to be controversial.’

Bryan Ferry controversial? Never! ‘Well, nowadays, it doesn’t take much.’ He folds his arms and puts his feet on the coffee table at the same time, the self-conscious man trying to be open and relaxed. Parking charges and speed cameras are his biggest bugbears at the moment. It’s not that he has become a grumpy old man, he says. He was a grumpy young man. Certainly, there is a contrariness to him, an understated wilfulness. His eldest son, Otis, seems to have inherited it. He was the one who broke into the House of Commons to protest against Labour’s ban on hunting. ‘People usually come up to me and say your son is a hero, give him a hug for me. People like a rebel, I suppose. The hunting ban was mean-spirited. And futile. Because it has made hunting cool.’

He is proud of his son, he adds. But what is it like, after all these years of having the attention himself, suddenly getting his toes trodden on by his son? ‘Very annoying! Especially for someone who has come from the “me” profession. Forget him. What about me!’ The comment suggests that while Ferry may be a reserved man he is not without a dry sense of humour. I ask if he is a Conservative. ‘Never was anything really. Never really voted. Always lived in a huge majority where I don’t think my vote would have made much difference. Where I was born it was a 23,000 Labour majority and now I live in a similar Tory majority. But yes, I am conservative by nature so it would be fair to say I was supporting them now. That said, I always felt politics and art don’t mix very well.’

Not since the Nazis tried it, right? He looks puzzled for a moment then rolls his eyes. ‘Oh. I see. Politics and art. Right, right.’

Everyone seems to have a John Hurt story. A friend of mine who works in the film industry once had to assist him as he made his way unsteadily from a hotel bar to a waiting taxi. A husband and wife I know bumped into him at what might be described as a ‘bohemian’ party in London. Another friend, an artist, invited a few people back to his flat after a night out, only to find that one of them was John Hurt. My friend left the room briefly and, upon his return, found the actor had taken off his clothes. He wanted to be painted in the nude.

But those days are behind him now, apparently; that behaviour a distant memory. Certainly the man I meet in a hotel a short walk from the place he shares with his fourth wife, on the Tottenham Court Road, seems calm and dignified; a little wistful if anything. ‘Walked here,’ he says in his hypnotically low and croaky voice, clipping his sentences. ‘Love walking around London. Rarely get recognised.’

And this despite his melancholic, downturned eyes being pretty recognisable. Small and narrow they are, like raisins set in a craggy rock face. Today he is wearing glasses, which disguise them a bit; and the grey goatee, with what looks like a nicotine stain on its moustache, is a newish addition. At 68 his 5ft 9in frame is wiry and he looks healthy; healthier than he used to. ‘Not short of energy. Reasonably fit. Don’t do anything other than walk. Walk a lot.’

And the drinking? ‘Oh, my drinking days are over.’

When did he last have one? ‘Three, three and half, four years ago, perhaps.’

That was when he got married, near enough. Does he miss it? ‘Not at all, not at all.’ Because it has bad associations? ‘It has good associations for the most part. It’s just times change. You change. When it no longer seemed to help, creatively, I mean, as it unquestionably had helped at one stage, it seemed time to give it up. Besides, attitudes to drinking have changed. Would Churchill have been able to get away with his drinking if he had been a politician today? Yet it really helped him. He was able to make good decisions while drinking. Huge decisions. The crowd I used to drink with, people like [Peter] O’Toole, used it as a fuel for their creativity. We used to go to Muriel’s, near St Martins. Like-minded people congregated there. Francis [Bacon]. Lucian [Freud]. It was a café society really. Muriel would say, “Hello c—y.” A term of affection.’

It’s true, it’s true. The café society part. Hurt belonged to a circle of wild-living and hard-drinking but also highly creative artists and actors. As well as O’Toole there was Richard Harris and Oliver Reed. But Hurt seemed to keep it up, or at least stay alive, for longer than most. He wasn’t particularly pleasant when he was drinking, mind. ‘There were times when he was a boring drunk and prickly, contentious,’ his friend Don Boyd has said. And just before he stopped drinking he was ejected from Spearmint Rhino for ‘boorish behaviour’, which, considering that’s a lap-dancing club, must have been very boorish indeed. He now says he could not have carried on drinking as he did because it would have killed him.

Has the not-drinking left a vacuum in his life? ‘Not really, no. No, I didn’t find any… any difficulty.’

Did he like himself when he was drinking? Long pause. ‘Oh God. This is all going to be about drink, isn’t it?’

He’d rather not talk about that aspect of his past? ‘Not really. I get a bit tired of it. Because it takes up so much space and it’s not important enough for that. My life has changed as my circumstances have changed. So to talk about my drinking now is of no interest to me.’

Which is fair enough. And besides, my favourite John Hurt story is not one of drunken excess but of mistaken identity. The DJ Andy Kershaw told me it. As a young man in 1985, Kershaw was asked to present Live Aid simply because, he said, the organisers knew a live broadcast on that scale would be one cock-up after another, but that with Kershaw’s air of amateurishness and naivety they might just get away with it. At one juncture his producer said into his earpiece that he had to go into the next room to interview John Hurt. ‘John who?’ Kershaw whispered. ‘You know,’ the producer whispered back, ‘The Elephant Man.’ Kershaw duly began his interview: ‘So, tell me about your work with elephants.’ Hurt, being a kind man as well as an old pro, said: ‘Well, when I was working on the film…’ and seamlessly launched into an anecdote.

In Kershaw’s defence, John Hurt didn’t exactly look like John Hurt in that film – just as he didn’t look like John Hurt when he played Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, or the heroin addict in Midnight Express, or the unwitting host for the alien in Alien, or the petulant Caligula in I, Claudius. He is, in other words, a great actor. An actor, moreover, who is always in demand, specialising in eccentrics with sinister charm, in victims, in misfits and lunatics. In the next few months we will see him in the new Indiana Jones movie (he was the only actor who refused to sign up to it without seeing a script) as well as the new Hellboy and, oh, various others, three or four, as he might vaguely say. Cameos mostly.

And that’s the trouble. He is also a promiscuous actor, having been in more than 100 films. This means that for every soaring eagle there is a flightless turkey; for every Alien, a Spaceballs. He says so himself: ‘I’ve done some stinkers in the cinema. You can’t regret it; there are always reasons for doing something, even if it’s just the location.’

Perhaps that will be his excuse for The Oxford Murders, which opens this month. Oxford is a lovely location, after all. The film is about two men – a professor of logic (Hurt) and a student (Elijah Wood, he of Lord of the Rings fame) – who meet for the first time at the moment a body is discovered. A series of murders follows, none of which is, technically, a murder. ‘It’s a murder story without a murder,’ Hurt says. ‘They are intellectual murders that happen in front of your eyes.’ The film amounts to a somewhat clunky bluffer’s guide to Wittgenstein: specifically, the philosopher’s idea that truth lies only in mathematical equations. The mathematics side appealed to Hurt. His father was a mathematician. Got a double first. Became an Anglican vicar.

‘I drove him mad when he was trying to teach me maths,’ Hurt recalls, dragging his fingers through hair so thick it is a global affront to balding men. ‘He was the sort of person who would do an equation for fun. But I couldn’t summon the energy for things I wasn’t interested in. The mind just wandered. Anyway, parents are the worst teachers, if they are good at it and you’re not. My father thought I was the densest offspring he could have produced.’

Hurt’s older brother Michael went to Cambridge. We shall come to him. Hurt, meanwhile, went to an art college in Grimsby and, after that, to St Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, where one of the models he painted was Quentin Crisp. He dropped out after a couple of years to go to Rada. That was in 1960. He burnt all his canvases. ‘It was one of those Faustian deals you make with yourself at that age. Shouldn’t have done, really. Didn’t even take photographs of it. But it doesn’t matter. A man is his memory. I’m with Buñuel on that.’

John Hurt seems to have lived an unsettled life, and that was part of the problem in terms of keeping paintings. As well as being on location much of the time, he has lived in Ireland, Kenya (where his ex-wife still lives, with most of his possessions, including his awards) and he has a second home in Ibiza. He has said that it is a good job he travels light: ‘I have to. I’ve given it all away three times. Three ex-wives. I tend not to keep things now. Not a collector of memorabilia.’

Still, he has recently taken up painting again. It seems to have helped fill the bottle-shaped hole in his life. He doesn’t show them though. ‘Quite private. Haven’t got enough, quite honestly. Enough finished, I mean. For an exhibition. I suppose I could exhibit anonymously like Bruce Bernard?… In the end the reason I gave up painting was that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to paint. I hugely admired Munch, but Munch knew exactly what he wanted to paint.’

Was it pride? Fear of being criticised? ‘Fear of not being good enough.’ Did that fear ever filter into his acting career? ‘Difficult areas these. Need a psychiatrist to work them out. Don’t know quite. How my film career happened, I don’t know. It was unplanned. I’d been in films and TV throughout the Sixties and early Seventies but it was really The Naked Civil Servant in 1975 that put me on the radar. It was so autre, as Quentin would say. Everyone told me not to do it. It will wreck your career. You’re going too far. You will be typecast as a homosexual after this. At the time it was considered so outrageous. The mailbag I got after making that?… The people?…’

Homophobic insults? ‘No. Gratitude. It changed people’s lives. It was fascinating for me to find out how all these men had been living with this secrecy.’

At the moment he is planning a sequel. In negotiation. Can’t really talk about it. ‘It will be a bookend but with a different aspect. The whole period in New York. Instead of dealing with the abuse, Quentin is dealing with sycophancy and fame. On a personal level I do have admiration for him. He is a remarkable man. He had his weaknesses like anyone, but he chose a route that was as difficult as it is possible to chose. He was both oblique and objective about my performance. He said,’ – he adopts a camp and wispy voice – ‘Mr Hurt is my representative here on earth.’

He is intrigued by the extent to which attitudes have changed. ‘Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral. Look at homophobia. Attitudes have changed 180 degrees. Family life has totally changed as a concept. Divorce is a commonplace. You almost wonder when you get married how long it will be before the divorce.’ Well, he might. ‘Oh no, not me. Not any more. I’m wonderfully married. Enjoying it.’ He flicks imaginary dust from his trouser leg.

His wife is Anwen Rees-Meyers, some 25 years his junior. She is a former actress and classical pianist who now directs advertisements. They have no plans to have children, not least because he already has two grown-up sons from a previous marriage. I ask what is he like to live with. Does he help with the housework? The cooking? ‘I’ve always done that. Think I’m probably easier to live with now than I was before. I don’t know. Maybe I’m in denial.’

What did his father make of his divorces? ‘He wouldn’t marry anyone who had had a divorce. I shared his religious views until I was about 16, then I started questioning. I thought, how can this part be right if that is wrong? Where does religion come from? It seemed clear to me that religion came from man’s impatience, his absolute need to answer the mysteries immediately. Can’t sit back and say, “I don’t understand that.” Instead you have to have voices coming through from the heavens and the word becoming God and so on. With Muslims it is Allah speaking through the Prophet.

“That’s why religion causes so much war. Religious people know deep down that that is the most vulnerable area of their lives and when others question it they are liable to hit out and feel insulted. You know it is absolutely without proof yet people still commit themselves totally to this belief. They cannot refute it because it is so central to their lives.’

For the first time in the interview, Hurt has dropped his calm demeanour and become animated. He clasps his hands. He sits forward. This, clearly, is a subject that vexes him, it being an uncomfortable reminder of his distant relationship with his father.

Yet if religion cast a long shadow over his life, it cast a much longer one over his brother’s. ‘He converted to Catholicism to become a monk at Downside. Then he jumped over the wall and married a nun and that was a disaster that ended in annulment. Then he met a 19-year-old girl, had three children, the youngest of whom is now 26, then that marriage was annulled too and he went back to the Benedictine monkhood. Fascinating character.’

I’ll say. Especially in terms of his utter rejection of his father’s Protestantism. ‘Well quite.’ And if his brother has had doubts about a life of celibacy once?… ‘Yes, I’ve had conversations with him about this. I know there are doubts there, but somehow he keeps them out. This was when we were younger – I liked to stir things up a bit.’

One of Hurt’s best performances in recent years was as the philandering politician Alan Clark. Like Clark, he has been targeted by the press over drink and marital split-ups, once, memorably, with the headline, ‘Elephant Man packs trunk’. Clark supposedly had a deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Has Hurt considered the possibility that he might have one, too? ‘Quick blessing at the end, you mean? If it did happen I would know it was my weakness rather than a strength. I hope I shall have the courage to say, “Vroom! Here we go! Let’s become different molecules!” I saw the doubt in my father’s eyes. He was 95. I was with him almost when he died.’

That was in 1999. He thinks his father probably suffered from acute mood swings, which were glossed over within the family. He also thinks he may have inherited them. ‘Ups and downs’, he calls them. One of the worst downs came in 1983, on the day he saw Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, his girlfriend of 16 years, killed in a riding accident in Oxfordshire. His horse bolted. She went after it but lost her stirrup and was thrown, landing on her head on the road.

His mood swings were worse in those days. ‘Drink doesn’t make you feel better,’ he has said of that period in his life. ‘It just exacerbates the mood you are in.’ His wild behaviour may have looked like fun on the outside, he added, but actually it was a sign of a distressed person looking for something he couldn’t find. Eventually he did find it, it seems: in the world of acting, of pretending to be someone else. ‘Reality is dull. I’m complete when I’m working. It isn’t work.’

Some actors, of course, become actors because they never felt loved for themselves as children. With this in mind, I ask if his urge to perform grew out of watching his father give sermons every Sunday. ‘I suppose he did hold a congregation the way an actor holds an audience. A similar contract was entered into.’

Though he has spent much of his adult life in front of a camera, he can still feel a self-consciousness about it. ‘It varies. Ebbs and flows, like confidence. That spark is not always there. You have to find a way round that if inspiration is not with you. Acting is an imaginative exercise. It would be odd if you didn’t try to identify with the roles you play, but I think I can differentiate between where my imagination is leading me and where I actually am. I see myself as an interpretative actor rather than a creative one. And I quite like to be directed. There are great talents out there. Spielberg, of course. But Indiana Jones is a tried and tested franchise. Lot of build-up. Let’s hope the public like it. It will be a guarantee for the first weekend. Whether it has legs will remain to be seen. But there is also the likes of Guillermo del Toro. A great talent. As you will see with Hellboy II.’

Does he intimidate younger directors? ‘I hope not. I try not to intimidate. I find it hard to imagine that anyone could be intimidated by me. I wasn’t like Larry. When I played the Fool to his Lear, the scene on the heath, I said, “Watch out here, it’s slippy,’ and he hissed: “Is it.” And I said, “All right, slip over then and break your flipping neck, dear.” ‘

It is an endearing anecdote; perhaps it’s the one he told Andy Kershaw at Live Aid all those years ago. It reminds you of his longevity and his range. It also reminds you that John Hurt is one of the least acquisitive actors in the industry. He probably preferred being a Fool to a Lear. Less obvious. More quirky. He doesn’t seem overtly ambitious in that way. He covets few roles, chases few scripts, declines to build up myths about himself. Just waited for things to come to him, as with his answers to the eternal questions.

Unexpectedly, for an actor, he even seems to have lacked vanity. For many years, I have read, he refused to have a mirror in the house. Perhaps it was simply that he didn’t like what he saw in it – until he stopped drinking.

‘The Oxford Murders’ opens on 25 April; ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ is scheduled for release next month; ‘Hellboy II: The Golden Army’, is scheduled for August

The Naked Civil Servant.’Half the stuff I have done which has been successful would never have been made if it had been shown to focus groups. ”Elephant Man” would never have been made. Imagine the pitch for ”Naked Civil Servant”. A self-confessed homosexual who crusades for gay rights. They’d say f— off. You have to be brave’.

The Elephant Man.’Mel Brooks [producer] had the vision, actually. When I read the script it made me cry. I was cast because David Lynch had seen me in ”I, Claudius” and ”Naked Civil Servant”. He encouraged me not to do the same thing, to try something different, so I worked on the sweet voice and demeanour. Nowadays directors want youto do what you’vedone before’.

Love and Death on Long Island.’Great title, super script. Richard Kwietniowski took seven years to get it made. I suppose that was better than the20-odd years it took to make ”Gandhi”. When Dickie Attenborough was telling me it had taken him 20 years to get it off the ground, I said: ”You did that one? I thought it was David Lean.” He had a bit of a sense of humour failure about that’.

It’s not the tilting columns that make you smile, diverting though they are. Nor is it the mirrored walls that swerve and collide in random curves and playful angles. What amuses, as you walk through MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is the yellow hazard sign erected by students at an intersection of walkways. ‘Nerds x-ing’ it warns, under a stick man with glasses, rucksack and satchel.

It could be argued that I am here, in snowy Boston, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to meet the king of the nerds, the godfather of the geeks, the ultimate web-lebrity (there is such a word, I saw it in The Guardian). But that would seem disrespectful. And Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, deserves respect. He could have become a multi-billionaire by charging royalties for his invention. Instead, with Olympian selflessness, he gave it to the world for free. No charge. Help yourself. That was 15 years ago this April.

He is not just British by nationality, he is British by temperament. A reserved and modest man, he shuns the limelight, preferring instead to closet himself in academia – lecturing, working with research students, staring wistfully into space as he tries to solve a software conundrum. He rarely agrees to be interviewed and on the odd occasion when he does, you suspect it is merely out of politeness. He seems intense and nervy, his small, starey eyes flitting around the room like a cornered heron’s. But he has good bone structure, a toned physique and an air of youthfulness about him that belie his 52 years. Perhaps it is simply a matter of his reputation preceding him, but his greatness seems almost palpable, an aura that surrounds him like a Ready Brek glow. He was, indeed, voted the greatest living Briton in 2004. That was the year he was knighted. Three years after that he became one of only 24 people entitled to have the letters OM after his name. Not that he would use them.

His office reflects his unassuming, if slightly geeky nature (he considers the term ‘geek’ a compliment, by the way). There are sandals under his desk, an orange cagoule on the hanger, a rucksack on the table. His sheet-metal shelves are dotted with lever arch files, ringbound computer texts and even – how old fashioned – a book (Cybermetric Orientation Programming is its title). But apart from a small photograph of his wife, Nancy, the mother of their two teenage children, Alice and Ben, there are no pictures. The thing that dominates this room, inevitably, is a computer, one with a big, really big, flat screen. It’s a Mac, as far as I can tell, though he will not say because, as head of the World Wide Web Consortium, the impartial body that sets international standards for web use, he avoids endorsements.

That’s the thing about this place. As important to the computer world – and therefore the world generally – as Silicon Valley. I tell him I was surprised that I was able to walk in off the street without any security checks. ‘Well, we’re a campus. It wouldn’t be practical. We only have ideas here. There is more security next door. They have a nuclear reactor there.’

That may sound funny, but Sir Tim has no sense of humour as far as I can tell. When, for example, I ask him if he ever wakes up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, screaming: ‘My God! I’ve created a monster!’ he blinks, cocks his head to one side and says: ‘No. Um. No, I don’t.’ He is a great blinker. And a fidget. Ironically for one who revolutionised the way the human race communicates, he is himself a fairly hopeless communicator. It’s not just that he ums and aahs, he also gabbles, clicks his tongue, gulps and, when excited, runswordstogether. And as he talks he makes notes. He is no good at remembering names and faces and, occasionally, he will spin round on his chair to Google the word he is looking for.

He first proposed the web in 1989, he tells me, while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research based in Geneva. The internet already existed as a series of computers linked by cables. His idea was to allow computers all over the world to talk to each other – through the internet, using a language of his devising (HyperText Markup Language, or HTML as it is better known). He never got the project formally approved, but quietly tinkered with it anyway, getting the first browser up and running on Christmas Day, 1990. The unwieldy name and initials ‘www’ – they have three times more syllables than the phrase they’re abbreviating – came about as a result of the inventor’s modesty. Originally he had come up with the name The Information Mine, but he found the initials, TIM, embarrassing.

On 30 April, 1993, Sir Tim’s browser was placed in the public domain. His invention spread across the planet like a cheer in a crowd, partly because it coincided with the growth in personal computers, partly because, thanks to the generosity of its creator, it was open to anyone. Now more than a billion people use the web and it has more pages than there are neurons in the brain, 100 billion by some estimates.

The concept of cyberspace, moreover, with its fathomless resource of information, has revolutionised the way we work, shop and play. Without Sir Tim there would be no Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and, yes, telegraph.co.uk. It is no exaggeration to call his invention the most significant since the printing press. But it has also helped gamblers bankrupt themselves, fraudsters prey on the gullible, and pornographers sell their virtual wares; and, of course, it has created a sinister new breed of paedophile. That’s partly what I mean by characterising Sir Tim as a Dr Frankenstein. His monster could prove to be a force for good or bad. The jury is still out.

‘I had the idea for it. I defined how it would work. But it was actually created by people,’ he says. ‘So when you refer to the web as a monster well, yes, it has all these arms and legs but the arms and legs are humanity. The technology allows humanity to express itself and interact. If you are frightened of it then you are frightened of what humanity can do.’

And not without good reason… I ask whether he has heard about the copycat suicides in Wales, the ones in which 17 teenagers hanged themselves in order, it seems, to get on a virtual wall of remembrance on the web. He hasn’t and scribbles it down to look up later.

‘Well that has always been a fear,’ he says. ‘That the web will become cult-like because you can filter off your mail and form a cultural pothole with steep slippery sides where the only form of communication is people telling you to commit suicide. Another fear is that, because of the web, we will all end up speaking McDonald’s English across the globe and end up with a vocabulary of 2,000 words.

‘These are opposite fears: one that it will make everything too bland; the other that it will lead to cults and cultural potholes. But there are few global things on the web. There is no one newspaper read all over the globe because, actually, the web is composed of a tangled mess of groups of different sizes. They all interconnect, so you don’t have one mushy group. That is the middle path. Interconnected communities. That is how the world can survive.’

It soon becomes apparent that when Sir Tim refers to ‘the world’ he usually means the virtual world, the world wide web. ‘What the web does is change the shape of communication,’ he says. ‘For example, all these wormholes. It’s not on a sphere any more. The world is flat, as Tom… sorry, I’m not very good with names. The guy who wrote that… New York… I get name blanks. He wrote the, um, world is flat…’ Sir Tim spins round and Googles the name. ‘Friedman. Tom Friedman. He describes the world as flat but actually it is multiply-connected.’

In his Who’s Who entry, Sir Tim does not mention his family, but he met his first wife, Jane, while reading physics at Oxford and they married soon after he graduated (with a First). That was in 1976. They both went to work in Poole, he for Plessey Controls as a programmer, she for Plessey Telecommunications. He met his second wife, an American, in Geneva while working for CERN. That was in the late 1980s. It was through an amateur acting group. She was a software engineer and former figure skater. They married in 1990, the year he invented the web. On the ‘frequently asked questions’ section of his page, the question ‘Can you tell me more about your personal life?’ gets the answer: ‘No, I can’t – sorry.’

But ask him whether the web has brought out the best in people or the worst and he will purse his lips. ‘It has reflected humanity,’ he says after a brief stare out of the window. ‘I believe there are more good people than bad. I’m an optimist. Perhaps that makes me naive. But in general, people’s experience of the web has been positive – people who have saved a relative by finding out from the web what disease they had. But people complain about the smutty sites and the phishing, and the pretend bank sites trying to steal your identity. They also complain about the people who process information gleaned from the web without taking any trouble to find out whether it is true or not.’

I ask if he has looked at any porn sites. ‘Um, I haven’t spent a lot of time going into the goriest side of it, but I have logged on to a bunch of social networking sites to see how they work. I prefer more open protocols. I think part of the push for Web Science is that we realise no one understands the web in the way that we understand the brain. What would happen if we changed the parameters slightly? Email, for example, started as a friendly academic tool, it worked until people had the internet in their homes and restrictions on using the web were relaxed, and then it quickly reached a tipping point. Then the email disintegrated.’

Ah yes, all that spam about Viagra. ‘Exactly. It wasn’t designed for that. We now have to go back and redesign the technical stuff to cut down on spam. We also have to ask what happens to democracy in the internet age. Will the blogosphere end up being more exciting than, with all due respect, the Telegraph online? Who knows? But I think we will end up placing more importance on reliable reporting. Democracy depends on it. Otherwise people end up electing leaders purely on the basis of rumour and celebrity status rather than facts and science. Maybe with the web we can produce a democratic system that works even better. Applying all the brainpower in the world to solve problems.’

The comment reveals the high idealism that lies just below Sir Tim’s surface. Perhaps aware of this, and the immodesty that it might represent, he quickly deflates the conversation with a reminder that, actually, his invention was born of low practicality. ‘Partly I invented the web for myself because it was something I needed. A lot of ideas, such as the spreadsheet, were developed by geeks who needed them. I needed this. I wanted it for my job. My job was designing software for particle accelerators and physics experiments. I was working with a distributed group of people and I needed to reach them and gather their data. It was partly frustration. A lot of people express frustration at the software on their computers, but some have the ability to fix it. A geek will sit down – and I use “geek” as a term of high praise – and write a programme and fix it.’

Sir Tim believes that if his technology had been in his total control it would probably not have reached the critical mass it needed to reach in order to work. In other words, if he had charged royalties as well as asking every user to use the same Uniform Resource Locator (URL), large companies and geeks in garages alike would have dropped his invention. ‘There was a rival system to mine being worked on called the Gopher,’ he recalls. ‘That could well have been the one we are all using now if the University of Minnesota hadn’t tried to extract royalties for it.’

So, there we have it. Sir Tim insists it wasn’t altruism on his part, this business of not charging royalties, so much as practicality. But I’m not sure I believe him entirely. ‘No, really, it was just a matter of being practical. It was also to do with the ethos of the time. The spirit of the internet was not one of patents and royalties but of academic openness.’

He dismisses the notion, by the way, that his invention came to him in a eureka moment. ‘I think the eureka moment is a myth. I think our creativity is subconscious. It happens slowly… it’s not that you are really clever and you just thought it up, it’s because you’ve been washing dishes, skiing, talking to people, reading up, concentrating on different aspects of the problem. My hunch is that Archimedes spent a week thinking about the displacement of water, then eventually it came to him. I don’t believe it came to him in his bath. It’s a nice story.’

He also dismisses the suggestion that he has an exceptional mind. ‘I am an ordinary person. I was just a programmer with some useful experience that happened to line up with what I wanted to do with the web. I’m sort of bright and given to thinking about technical things, but then so are a lot of people. I didn’t have any magic. My boss allowed me to do it in my spare time and I put in the effort to write the code. It wasn’t because I was some kind of star.’

Even so, does he find that computer geeks are in awe of him? ‘Not people I work with, partly because I am so… well, my spelling is terrible, just terrible. We chat a lot on the internet and they always note how I can’t spell and how my letters arrive in different orders.’

This apparent dyslexia apart, he claims not to have many insecurities. ‘I think I’m middle of the road there, though throughout the web I was always concerned that it was going to break and there are still things I do worry about. There is also net neutrality, which I worry about. If large corporations control our access to the internet and determine which websites we can go to, we’ll lose its openness and its democratic nature. I think a lot of people are worried about privacy and inappropriate use of data.’

He tends not to dwell on what he might have done with the billions he could have earned if people had been prepared to hand over royalties. ‘It would be nice to be in Bill Gates’s position, where you could donate huge sums to tackling world health problems. We all ask ourselves what we would do if we had loads and loads of money. I would buy huge tracts of coastline in the UK and donate it to the National Trust. I’d also buy ugly buildings and knock them down.’

Diplomatically, he does not fuel the speculation that he is no fan of Bill Gates. ‘Um, I don’t know him… not, er, personally… do I? Er… let me think. One of the interesting things about inventing the web is that I do get to meet all kinds of people.’

I bet he does. He must be the Nelson Mandela of the computer world. Everyone must want to meet him. ‘Actually he’s an example. I did get to meet Mandela.’

As an adult, Sir Tim rejected his Anglican upbringing, which, he says, ‘relieved a great tension’. He certainly hasn’t replaced religion with materialism. Until recently he drove a 13-year-old VW Rabbit. ‘I’ve just replaced it with a little VW Eos. You’re right though. I’m not very materialistic. I enjoy being in nature, so protecting nature would be how I would want to spend money.’

Other than paying for skiing holidays, his pleasures in life come cheap. He likes ‘wandering around in shorts and sandals. Walking in woods. That sort of thing.’ He also plays the piano a little. And the guitar. ‘Ralph McTell songs mostly, although that was when I was a student really. I also listened to a lot of Steeleye Span then.’

His parents were both mathematicians and they worked on one of the earliest computers. I ask what it was like growing up in such a cerebral household. No television presumably?

‘There wasn’t an atmosphere of high seriousness, if that’s what you mean. The whole point about mathematics in our house was that it was fun. We were always joking. I wouldn’t say it was an intellectual house. For a lot of my childhood we didn’t have a television so it wasn’t a question of what to watch. What we did have was a drawer of scrap materials which I could use to make gadgets. A baring, or a nozzle, or tubing, or springs. I would glue things together. Washing-up-liquid bottles. I would make Airfix models as well, but they were too formal for me. I preferred my “scrapmat box” – scrap materials box. Then I got a train set and became fascinated in the electronics side of that.’

He was soon itching to build his own computer. At Oxford, after being banned from using the nuclear physics lab’s computer (thanks to an incident in which he hacked into it for rag week), he managed it. He built a computer with a soldering iron, an M6800 processor and an old television.

Happy, rebellious days. A far cry from the responsibilities he now has. As well as acting as a sort of regulatory authority for the development of the web, Sir Tim and his team at MIT are also working on the next stage in the web’s evolution, the semantic web. Its searches can be expressed in natural language, such as ‘Where can I find the nearest store with cheap Manolo Blahnik shoes?’

Having invented the web and changed the world for ever, did he suffer from difficult ‘second album’ syndrome? He blinks again. Does not smile. ‘The semantic web I’m working on is not a follow-up to the web, it is part of it. It’s about using one application in another. Putting my bank statements onto my calendar, say. It is about allowing your computer to understand what a date on a statement means. But that is not to say computers will be able to analyse what data mean in a philosophical sense, in the evening over a drink.’

Some evidence of humour, after all. Perhaps he has just grown used to Americans not getting British humour, and so has given up on it. Although he often comes back to Britain, Sir Tim feels part-American now. ‘It’s inevitable, really, being married to an American and having children grow up immersed in American culture. They have American accents. My American accent is probably less pronounced. British people usually think I have an American accent and the Americans usually think I have a British accent, so I guess that makes me in the middle.’

Berners-Lee is not an easy man to read, and is certainly not given to self-disclosure. Ask him if he’s sociable, for example, and he will tell you that on the Myers-Briggs test, he rates ‘pretty much in the middle on introversion v extroversion.’ In the middle again. As we have seen, he also believes there is a middle way for the web to develop, between suicide cults and McDonald’s blandness. Yet actually I think he is more exotic than this middling characterisation allows. And more romantic. All that walking in the woods. All those hippy ideals about sharing and democracy.

‘People get things wrong about me,’ he says as we embark on a quick tour of the building, starting with a black cube in the corner of his office which has the same NEXTSTEP operating system he designed the web on.

I ask what things people get wrong about him. He nods earnestly. ‘I only played tiddlywinks as a student to get a ride to Cambridge one day. I wasn’t a champion or anything. Things can get out of proportion.’

From the bow window of his drawing-room, more a belvedere of curved glass, Sir Alan Ayckbourn can contemplate the North Sea. It’s the reason he moved his bed here, while convalescing after his stroke last year. Well, not his bed – a hydraulic one on loan from the hospital. The playwright adopts a comedy Yorkshire accent as he recalls the words of the orderly who came to take the bed away: ‘I see you’re standing then. Normally when I come to collect these it’s because the patient is dead.’

Although Ayckbourn’s house – actually three Victorian terrace houses knocked into one – overlooks Scarborough’s South Bay, he is not a Yorkshireman himself. Far from it. He was born in Hampstead and went to school in Hertfordshire. But he clearly delights in northern bluntness. Indeed, he tells me with an ambiguous grin about the time a local taxi driver dropped him off at his theatre in Scarborough and noticed a poster on the wall. It was for an Alan Ayckbourn play and it was peppered with press quotations praising the production. ‘If you’re that good,’ the taxi driver said, ‘what are you doing here?’

The short answer is that Ayckbourn, who is now 68, first came to Scarborough as an 18-year-old actor in 1957, liked it and stayed. The longer answer is that Scarborough is where his mentor, the theatrical pioneer Stephen Joseph, founded the theatre-in-the-round that was to become Ayckbourn’s spiritual home.

Ayckbourn is not only the most prolific playwright of his generation but also the most widely produced. He is probably, in fact, the most successful-in-own-lifetime playwright there has ever been, including Shakespeare. And nearly all of the 70 plays he has written have had their first performances at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre. Many have ended up in the West End, too. There and Broadway, where a street was briefly renamed Ayckbourn Alley in his honour.

He has two plays opening in the next couple of weeks and they follow this pattern. Absurd Person Singular, written in 1972 and probably his best-known play, is about to open at the Garrick Theatre. It stars Jane Horrocks and David Bamber. A new production of his play A Trip to Scarborough, meanwhile, is about to open at the Stephen Joseph Theatre. With time shifts between the 18th century, the Second World War and the present day, it is loosely based on the original play of the same name by R.B. Sheridan. Unusually, exceptionally in fact, this play is not set in the South.

‘I’m not sure why this is the only play I’ve set in Yorkshire,’ Ayckbourn says. ‘I suppose it is because your voice as a writer is formed early and before I reached puberty I was branded a cockney – so I still write with a cockney voice in my head.’

Actually, his ‘voice’ is more genteel than that. He is usually described as ‘the Molière of the middle classes’. His domain is usually an unspecified Middle England, probably somewhere around Peterborough. His genre is usually the ‘serious comedy’ of suburban manners – astute observations about middle-class foibles, artful dissections of the failures of family life, pitiless but funny examinations of the strange and loud egomania of the unhappy. It is said he creates happiness by depicting unhappiness, and this formula has served him well.

But his commercial success hasn’t necessarily endeared him to the cognoscenti. Faber & Faber declined to publish his plays in the early 1970s because it regarded him as ‘too successful’ (it relented in 1986, after the production of Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Disapproval at the National Theatre, and has been his publisher ever since). What Faber meant, of course, was that Sir Alan Ayckbourn didn’t seem to be in quite the same league as Sir Harold Pinter, Sir Tom Stoppard and Sir David Hare.

When I ask him how he feels about not being mentioned in the same breath as these ‘heavyweight’ playwright knights, Ayckbourn doesn’t seem defensive. ‘I’m comfortable with it now. Years ago I did think: why aren’t I being taken very seriously? But as someone once told me, I have an ability to make audiences laugh so I should treasure that. I don’t want to lose that. There are plenty of people who can make audiences cry. Woody Allen has spent years trying to be taken seriously off and on, but we all go back to Bananas. Unlike David Hare, who writes about the state of the nation and current affairs, I write about domestic affairs. I see myself more as a Jane Austen who never bothers with the Napoleonic Wars going on around her.’

He may be known for his comedies, and occasional farces, but in recent years his plays have been getting a little dark. Does he think his stroke will make his writing darker still? ‘I don’t know. I do look at my writing in terms of pre-stroke and post-stroke. I found it hard to get back into writing because you have to be on your own and I felt quite frightened about that. I’ve never really analysed how I write and I wasn’t sure whether the instinct would still be there. I had taken it for granted, up to that point, that the part of the brain responsible for creative writing would function automatically – but a stroke is a dysfunction. I’m still not quite right. These fingers are a bit odd.’ He waves them. ‘And this foot is less than mobile. That thing one doesn’t like to talk about, that shaft of light that suddenly arrives and we think of as inspiration, would it still be there?’

Ayckbourn has two jobs, it should be explained. As well as being a playwright, he is also the long-standing artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre (though he has announced he will be giving up that demanding role next summer, to become an associate director instead).

‘When I first came round in the hospital after my stroke I imagined writing would be easier to get back into than directing, because writing is sedentary and solitary while directing is more active. But actually it was the other way round. I got straight back into the rehearsal room, with the doctor telling me it was too soon. I found it a shot in the arm. I get so excited when I get into a rehearsal room. I am like a racehorse being ushered into the starting gate, under starter’s orders.’

It helps that his rehearsal studio – a converted school – adjoins his house. Indeed, everything seems to be handy for him here. He has his own indoor swimming pool. One of his sons – he has two, both in their forties, both from his first marriage – is living with his family in a large flat upstairs. ?And one of the actors in his company is renting a flat from him downstairs.

He has no regrets about giving up his own early career as an actor. ‘At least as a writer you are standing beside the thing you have created. As an actor you are inhabiting that body they are criticising. It is direct and personal. Your personality and your appearance are being criticised. It’s like a head butt. Critics who maul actors don’t understand what it does to them. The actress Charlotte Cornwell once sued a female critic for saying her arse was too big. I did think she was right to sue. The critic had overstepped the mark.’

Surely it is just as bad for a playwright, because it is his mind that is being criticised? ‘I do get depressed and lose confidence if criticised over a new play. But I can put this much distance’ – he holds up a finger and thumb – ‘between the work and myself, even for a new play. If someone says now that they think the Norman Conquests [a trilogy written in 1973] were rubbish it doesn’t bother me because they are miles away and I have to think twice to remember I wrote them. With a new play, I am always anxious when offering it to actors. I await their reaction with trepidation.’

After all these years, all that success? ‘I think because when I write something new it really is new, sufficiently new to make me nervous. That’s the test. If I am unfazed, I know I must have written it before. That it is the same old formula. I stopped acting when I was no longer nervous about going on stage.’

He is beyond retirement age, he clearly doesn’t need the money: is it a form of failure that he still hasn’t got writing and directing plays out of his system? ‘I don’t suppose my wife would want me under her feet if I retired,’ he says. ‘Besides, I think if I walked away from the theatre I would probably die. Sometimes you need something to retire to. When I’m not writing or directing I wander around not knowing what to do with myself. But does it amount to failure? I’m not sure how to answer that.’

Actually he answers it with an inscrutable smile. For all his southern gentility, openness and politeness, there is something oddly wooden and closed about Sir Alan, as if he is a man playing himself. His voice is actorly and hesitant, a little ingratiating if anything. His laughter is polite, but he is not fully engaged. Such is his diffidence, he is incapable of holding eye contact for longer than a couple of seconds, preferring instead to stare ahead of himself. When he does try it, he has to swing his whole body round, holding the gaze almost as an act of will before retreating. He has few close friends, it is said, and finds it difficult to be spontaneous because he is always thinking ‘I could use that’. Self-absorbed, that is what he seems – the self-absorption of a child.

It is reflected in his feverish writing method. He writes very quickly, taking a week or two for the dialogue once he has his idea. In fact he always starts with the title, which goes on the posters before the writing process begins. He draws on his own life in a lateral way. He thinks his stroke, for example, might throw up some material. For a while it left him confusing the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’. A reversal of word circuits was diagnosed, a relatively normal side-effect of strokes. A title for a play has duly come to him: The Man Who Couldn’t Say No.

He finds writing dialogue the fun part. ‘The trick is to make characters sound convincingly different: some might talk in short sentences, others long, others will fade away.’ He sometimes feels they are with him, crowding round his head – and when he goes to bed they are in suspended animation until he brings them back to life in the morning. ‘My wife, Heather, will touch my head sometimes as she is on her way to bed and say: “Blimey, it’s overheating tonight”.’ He treasures his hang-ups, he says. ‘Please God, don’t make me sane. My characters have faults that roll out of me. Most of the flawed characters are me in some phobia or other, some prejudice or other. I’m sure I had terrible childhood traumas but I have mined them so much now they are neutralised.’

His father, Horace, was a first violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra. One day he ran off with the second violinist, abandoning the young Alan and his mother, Irene. Horace had never been married to Irene though, partly because she was already married to someone else, and only divorced him to marry a bank manager in 1948. (Ayckbourn had an arrangement that was almost as complicated: he separated from his first wife after 10 years but did not divorce her for 30 – and only did so then in order that he could marry Heather, the woman he had been living with for those same 30 years.)

By all accounts, Irene was rackety and bohemian. She once put two ailing newborn puppies in the oven, on the vet’s advice, and then forgot about them. A volatile woman with a fondness for drink, cigarettes and men, she would pick up sailors and GIs and tell Alan they were his uncles.

She once threw his father’s framed photograph at him in fury and told him that all men were bastards. When she died in 1999, Ayckbourn wrote a eulogy which included the line: ‘She gave me far more complexes, hang-ups, phobias, prejudices, inspirations and self-insights than any writer has a right to expect from a parent.’

‘Although I had a stepbrother, I was essentially an only child,’ Ayckbourn says now. ‘And I remained a loner. My insecure childhood gave me an emotional energy. Alan Bennett’s characters are reassuringly ordinary whereas mine tend to be extraordinary – my women, particularly, because my only contact with them was through my mother’s extraordinary girlfriends, journalists mostly. Girls remained uncharted territory for me for a long time. I was shy among them. They were another race, and I suppose that is why I was drawn to the theatre – as a way of meeting girls.’

Something else he seems to have inherited from his mother is a passive-aggressive streak. The play of his that is about to open at the Garrick is the first one he has allowed in the West End since his self-imposed moratorium in 2002. His complaint then was that West End producers had lost their nerve and wouldn’t put on plays unless there was a television personality or Hollywood actor attached to the show. The last straw for him came when a feeble-voiced and stilted Madonna was cast in a play.

Does this mean he has forgiven the West End now? ‘Yeah, yep. I won’t take the new ones there, though. They are welcome to the revivals. With Absurd Person Singular they have a cast of proven actors. None has come off a Dubonnet advert. That’s what I really objected to: the casting of people who weren’t proper theatre actors. Some Hollywood actors struggle to be heard beyond row three. And the trouble with putting an actor from ­EastEnders in a play is that audiences will come in who don’t normally come to the theatre and they will expect those actors to be the same as they are on television. When they are not they will go away disappointed and not come back to the theatre. My mum was a bit like that. She would ­confuse an actor with the part he was playing. She would say, “He’s a nasty piece of work.” And I would say, “But Mum, that’s just the character he is playing”.’ Beyond the bow window, seagulls are wheeling and screeching. It is a reminder that the theatre in this country does not begin and end on Shaftesbury Avenue.

In his slightly apprehensive way, Ayckbourn has been trying to imagine how his play set in Scarborough will go down with a local audience. ‘When you meet Yorkshiremen for the first time they can seem quite rude,’ he says, levering himself up from his chair with the aid of a walking stick. ‘If I meet them on their way in to see one of my plays they will say: “Am I going to enjoy this, then?”‘

What do they say afterwards?

He grins the ambiguous grin. ‘Usually they will say: “Not bad”.’

Before I meet Russell Brand I meet his cat. At least, I’m assuming it’s his cat because: a) I’m sitting in his kitchen in Hampstead, and b) The cat has one of those diamanté-studded collars on it, the sort of thing that Brand himself might wear, only around his wrist, and with metal studs rather than fake diamonds.

It is early evening and he is behind schedule, upstairs somewhere meeting a deadline. When – eventually – he descends the staircase, he is barefoot; tall and lean in black jeans and black jumper; padding as softly as a panther. His left eyebrow forms a permanent arch; his lower lip a puffy curve; his long, black mane is down, rather than back-combed up, which is how he wears it when doing his show on television or when performing comedy on stage – award-winning comedy, quirky, effervescent, stream-of-consciousness comedy.

By his own exuberant standards, he seems subdued, weary and, well, dignified today – more dignified than you would expect. He also seems distracted: he fiddles with the flat-screen Bang and Olufsen TV; he languidly circles the kitchen table; he plays with the dimmer switch before opting for muted lighting, which casts his neatly bearded features into partial shadow. When he settles it is with the side of his head resting on an upturned hand, as if offering it on a plate. He has about him an air of wanton self-possession. This, you sense, is not a man to whom you would lightly entrust a wife or grown daughter.

I am here because Russell Brand is about to publish his life story.

This you might think a little premature, given that he is 32 years old. But the man has lived. With candour bordering on the pathological, he spares his readers little as he turns seedy episodes – the crack dens, the orgies, the brothels – into picaresque anecdotes. Everything is played for laughs – from his teenage bulimia and his expulsions from school and drama college, to his numerous sackings, his 11 arrests for petty crimes, his sexual humiliations, his Olympian promiscuity and drug abuse, and, finally, his treatment in a clinic for heroin addiction, and, after that, for sex addiction (he calls it being sent to winky nick).

His prose is vulgar at times – he would prefer ‘saucy’ – but it is also pleasingly deadpan and, on occasion, lyrical. I tell him so and then add that I sensed he was holding a lot back – my little joke. He looks puzzled. ‘In what?… Why?’ To be fair, if you have to explain something is a joke, it probably isn’t one. ‘Right,’ he says, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Because I’m so open about everything, you mean? Right.’

Open is one way of putting it, I say. Dementedly honest is another. He’s addicted to honesty. Stuff you would hesitate to tell your best friend, he tells the world.

‘Really? What like?’ Like the time he spat in a girlfriend’s face. Or the time he pleasured a man in a public lavatory for a TV show he was doing (it was never aired), despite being, in his own words, ‘hysterically heterosexual’.

‘You’re the first person to read it who isn’t involved in the publishing process. Now you’re making me nervous that I’ve said too much.’

He feels exposed? ‘Not really, no, because although I am the subject, the instrument referred to in the book, I think I can be quite objective in the way I make jokes about all the things that ‘appened to me.’

To rob them of their power to wound, he means? ‘That’s the mentality which has seen me through, Nigel.’

A word about his delivery here. It is quite fey and whispery, then he will get excited – ‘cited’ he would call it – and become shouty and deeper voiced. He hams up his Essex accent, dropping his ‘h’s’, as in ‘appen, and ‘g’s’, as in slumberin’ (take them as read for the rest of this article). He deliberately uses rotten grammar: ‘Them things.’ ‘I weren’t.’ And he would refer to ‘me grammar’ rather than ‘my grammar.’ Yet he also uncoils extravagant sentences, full of quaint old-fashioned vocabulary and Victorian syntax. When he does this on stage he spirals his hand like a hypnotist.

He seems to be on a roll at the moment – he has his own Radio 2 programme as well as a show on Channel 4, and he has a budding acting career (among other films, he is in the soon to be released St Trinians and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, from the team behind Knocked Up). He has even had a fling with Kate Moss. So where did it all go wrong, as the hotel waiter once asked George Best? Brand traces it back to several things: being an only child, having parents who separated when he was six months old, being ‘fingered’ by a tutor when he was seven. ‘A lot of the things, to me, are quite ordinary because they are literally what happened. It couldn’t be more mundane. Having spent time in treatment, around drug users, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t had mildly intrusive sexual encounters as a child.’

But most people don’t end up having treatment for sexual addiction as an adult. That, to me, seems unusual. ‘It’s not something I would have done if left to my own devices. I was coerced into it. Like with drug addiction, once a problem is highlighted people become more judgmental. More than if you just kept quiet about your addiction. I haven’t used drink or drugs for five years so I am a much less volatile prospect than once I was.’

His public persona seems egomaniacal, yet in private, judging by his memoirs, he doesn’t seem to like himself that much. Does the bravado hide self-loathing? ‘I imagine really, Nigel, what with the self and the individual being arbitrary constructs rather than objective ideas, that if you are resolutely happy with who you are then you are drunk on an illusion. And I am not. I accept there is a conflict there, though. Because I am, as you have said, egotistical. I am compelled to pursue ambitions and goals whilst at the same time recognising they are futile.’

See what I mean about him being dignified? I mention a childhood incident in which he stamped on flowers because he had been expressly told not to by a park keeper. A cry for attention, surely. One to do with his father being absent. Is it that he would rather have people hate him than ignore him? ‘If the park keeper hadn’t told me not to stamp on the flowers, I wouldn’t have been compelled to do it. The flowers were innocent casualties in all this. I sometimes just think, what will happen? What’s the worst that could happen if I do this?

‘Usually the answer is: not much. Looking back, I wish I had rebelled more. I wish I had gone further. I wish I had been in more trouble at school. I wish I had taken more drugs. I wish I had been rude to more people. I wish I had been sacked from more jobs.’

The most memorable sacking, for the record, was when he wore an Osama bin Laden costume for his MTV show, on the morning after 9/11.

‘Come on guys,’ he said to his viewers. ‘Get over it. It was yesterday. We’ve got to move on.’ Quite funny that, but only in retrospect.

Conformists, I suggest, don’t just conform because they are boring but because they don’t want the stress of non-conformity. They conform because it makes them happy and frees them to think of higher things. As Socrates is said to have said, the greatest form of freedom is slavery.

‘Yes, but conformity was never an option for me. I didn’t feel contentment. The demands to conform are deeply encoded, yet the penalties are so inconsequential when breached. For petty rules, I mean.

‘If a policeman gives me an ultimatum not to drop my trousers of course I am going to drop them. When that happened to me I wasn’t arrested. What will happen if I do take heroin in front of people at work? Nothing. Well, I got sacked, but so what. And what if I do refuse to get off this aeroplane? OK, I got thrown off but I wasn’t charged. Actually, I am less like that now I have stuff to lose. Before it was: what are you gonna take from me? A lump of me nothin?’

His non-conformity, he adds, has another dimension. ‘As Socrates said, the male libido is like being chained to a madman. That was certainly true in my case. I was literally sex mad.’

‘I have not had sex for approaching 14 days. There is someone I might be interested in. I have known her for a while. Not sleeping with her yet. Not sleeping with anyone. But I took the other phone numbers out of my phone – 784, but who’s counting?’

Through my laughter I ask if he does know the actual number. I presume he doesn’t, given his drug-related memory losses. ‘It cannot but sound coarse and bragging to put a number to it. It’s a lot, though, because I have been devoted to it. I’ve worked hard. The figures are a reflection of years of toil and dedication. I would say to any young womaniser out there if you are prepared to commit your life and sanity to the cause you should be able to archive these quite bafflingly high figures.’

And yet there was Amanda, a girlfriend he refers to in his memoirs. She left him because of his infidelities. He seems to have loved her. Did he? ‘Mm. It was certainly a f—ing nuisance. If that’s a synonym. I think that relationship was held together by conflict rather than compatibility. But I loved her, yes.’

How come he can’t show restraint in the way other men can? Are his sexual urges more powerful, does he suppose? ‘I’m not sure. It’s difficult to ascertain. Sex is a biological necessity. It is also good for my self-esteem because it makes me feel powerful. I also have a tendency towards addiction, so those things combined amount to a powerful motivating force. Also when I sit in a park and see beautiful women walking past I see an avenue to an alternative reality: all those possibilities, all those adventures. It’s not just me thinking I want to come, but me thinking what if I fall in love? I wonder what stories she has. I wonder what she will look like cleaning her teeth. I wonder what she will tell me about her father. I wonder how she treats her pets. I wonder what her bedroom will smell like.’

He describes being overweight as a teenager before becoming slim at 16 and losing his virginity. Was his hysterical heterosexuality also about making up for lost years of feeling sexually unattractive? ‘It was astonishing to go from feeling all tubby and unlovely and odd and obscure and bland in Essex to having beautiful girls find me attractive and exotic. It was like some Shakespearean mistaken identity.’

He still associates sex with guilt – ‘afterwards a fog of guilt descends’. When he made that contract with himself did he worry that he was denying himself the prospect of more meaningful encounters – ones combined with feelings of love, ones free of guilt, ones after which he would not feel, as he says he usually does, le petite mort? ‘Sometimes I do feel as if I am in love with the women I am having sex with. I don’t know whether this is a masquerade or a pose but often I feel incredible intimacy and unity, not only with a regular sexual partner, but also in fleeting encounters with strangers, a shared humanity and bond. Why is it, Nigel, that longevity is considered a necessary part of the feeling of love? Why can’t you fall in love for half an hour? Is it less valid? Who cares about the difference between an hour and a decade and a lifetime.’

Besides, heroin was his true love. His descriptions of the drug are disturbingly poetic and tender. ‘Yeah. First time I tried it it was beautiful. It was a relief.’

Doesn’t talking about heroin in such loving terms rather unsettle him, because he knows he can never have it again? ‘Part of the mentality of recovery is one day at a time. I don’t have to not take drugs for the rest of my life. I only have to not take drugs today. Also those feelings of love come at a price because heroin itself is demanding. It won’t let you just have a little bit. If you want heroin you have to give up everything else. First it will take your job, then your girlfriend, then your house, then the clothes you are in, then it will take your skin. And when there is nothing left to take it will take your life.’

He was told he would be dead in six months unless he went into rehab. ‘At the time I felt rather pleased. Really? So long?’ One of the doctors at the Residential Treatment Centre for Sexual Addiction thought he was bipolar (what used to be called manic depressive). Had that diagnosis ever come up before?

‘Three times, at school, at drama school and then ‘im. I’m aware of an oscillation but I’ve spent most of my adult life on drugs. It is hard to diagnose what it is, whether it is an inherent or inveterate chemical imbalance. I don’t know. It wasn’t self-inflicted as a child. I still felt volatile inside then. Anyway, the down times are a necessary correlation of the up times. With friends and people I know well there will be moments where I get uppity and show-offy, but most of the time, I’ll be sitting watching and listening quietly. The performance isn’t all there is – that would be unbearable.’

Now for the cheap psychology. It could be that he behaves badly to others to justify to himself the potential rejection he fears. He will tell you how temperamental he can be – hurling glasses of water during an argument – also how indifferent, cruel and affected. As he found when he got clean, he doesn’t enjoy his own company much. A lot of it seems to be to do with his father: ‘Sometimes he would turn the light of his attention on me and it would be brilliant,’ he writes in his book. ‘He’d tease me and wind me up and be very funny, but he’d get bored really quickly, and then I’d just be there again – all tubby and useless.’

It would make sense of his ‘priapic excesses’, as he calls them, because his promiscuity could be seen as a way of winning his father’s approval (his father was something of a lothario, one who had no moral qualms about sleeping with prostitutes). Not far below the surface bravado, then, is insecurity: fear of being alone, fear of being bored, fear of rejection. Conversely, Brand seems to have had almost too much attention from his mother, in that he was left with a rampaging ego. He’s funny about it, of course. ‘My mum thinks I’m an excellent swimmer, simply because I’ve not yet drowned.’

In the Hampstead kitchen there is, next to a stack of vegetarian cook books, an award for the world’s sexiest vegetarian. And in the hall there is a biography of Peter Cook, next to an antelope skull encrusted with diamanté. It amounts to a shrine. His other heroes are Alan Bennett, Huxley and Camus. And that’s another thing he feels insecure about, or at least frustrated. He has a quick wit, certainly, but he also seems to be highly intelligent. And to compensate for his lack of formal academic training, he has become an autodidact, an obsessive one, inevitably.

‘I get excited by it. But I still feel when talking to friends who have been well educated that I am just skitting on the surface of knowledge, that I have no depth. I know enough about Chomsky or Derrida to have a superficial conservation but I can’t keep it going.’

That said, he does still see himself as a typical Essex man who likes football and ‘birds with big bottoms and big boobs’. And the prostitutes he had ‘joyless sex’ with? ‘I haven’t done it since the sex clinic. I should probably have mentioned that in the book!’ He laughs and pulls a mock worried face.

‘Frankly I’ve had no need or time. I would say, though, I do feel comfortable among vagrants, prostitutes and drug-users. I seek them out. Like homeless people, they are raw and honest because they don’t have the same protective social layers as everyone else. They don’t have the material possessions. Unlike me!’ He raises his arms and looks around. ‘Look at me ensconced in my lovely home.’

He has things to lose now, I tell him. ‘And I’m sure I’ll find a way to lose them.’

Given that Charles Dance is an actor, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his manner off stage is quite actorly. Yet somehow it does. I suppose it is because he is often cast as the reserved, taciturn, patrician type, while, in person, he is tactile and garrulous. Sitting on a sofa in his dressing-room at the Wyndham’s Theatre, London, he makes big theatrical, off-the-shoulder gestures, taps the wood of his dressing table – the superstitious actor – and leans forward to touch my knee occasionally, to emphasise a point. Moreover, he punctuates his anecdotes with ‘darlings’, ‘sweethearts’ and ‘dears’.

Physically, he looks taller and more athletic than seems decent for a 61-year-old. He doesn’t dress his age, either: his 6ft 3in frame looking rangy in faded jeans, T-shirt and heavy black boots. His hair may be thinning and becoming as pale as his skin, but his face is still strong boned, his hooded eyes still flinty. Intellectually, you suspect, there is not as much depth there as he likes to think there is, but he is friendly and engaging. Like many in his profession, he enjoys having a whinge about the actor’s lot.

Don’t get him on the subject of dressing-rooms, for example. He has just been touring the provinces before opening in the West End this week – ‘the foreplay before the penetration,’ he calls it, rather alarmingly – and the dressing-room he had in Cambridge was dark and subterranean. This one is windowless and has a fan whirring, but at least it is freshly decorated and all the light bulbs around the mirror are working. ‘That’s thanks to Madge,’ he says. ‘I was doing The Play What I Wrote here in 2002, just before Madonna did a show here and she paid for the dressing-rooms to be done up. But the funny thing was?…’ he bounds up from the sofa and marches across the room to the shower area; here he describes two diagonal slashes with his arms, ‘…?they put crime scene tapes over the shower so no one else could use it before Madge.’

The play he did before that was Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘In the dressing-room were little sachets of vermin poison. Pretty bloody awful. There was a mattress in there with a piece of fabric that looked like Monica Lewinsky’s old dress on it. Half the lightbulbs had gone. I was there for 12½ weeks doing a play that was not a bundle of laughs, so I bought some ready-made curtains and a throw and some lightbulbs and insisted they had the room painted. They brought colour swatches of white, white or white – so I chose white.’

In his latest play, the first major revival of William Nicholson’s award-winning Shadowlands, Dance plays C.S. Lewis. Although Nigel Hawthorne, on stage, and Anthony Hopkins, in the Oscar-nominated film version, are hard acts to follow in that role, Dance proves himself worthy. His struggle as the middle-aged Lewis to accept that he has fallen in love for the first time, only to lose his new wife to cancer, is mesmerising. ‘It is about love in the presence of pain and suffering,’ Dance says. ‘C.S. Lewis believes pain is a tool. Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.’

Presumably getting in the right reflective mood beforehand, while sitting in a pleasant dressing-room, is crucial to this performance? ‘Your mood can be affected by the state of your dressing-room, and by the day you have had, but hopefully that doesn’t affect the performance.’

I ask whether he can relate to the religious aspects of the play: C.S. Lewis, the devout Christian, agonises over the faith that has let him down. ‘Not at all. I am an agnostic. I’m not bothered about not knowing. Religion is at the core of the play, but we pretend. It’s my job. If I’m playing a murderer I don’t murder people.’

And the academic aspects, the donnish world of Oxford? ‘I am not an intellectual. I am reasonably intelligent, but not intellectual.’ I only ask because he often plays men who are in professions that others find inspiring: Army officers, doctors and so on. When he prepares for such roles, does he ever wonder whether, by comparison, being an actor in greasepaint is somehow not quite a proper job for a grown man? He seems affronted by this question and answers in a loud and indignant voice. ‘Some might think it’s a job for children, but it’s not! We do work very hard!’

Slightly taken aback, I say that I didn’t mean to sound rude. I reframe the question in terms of the Samuel Johnson quote about every man thinking meanly of himself for not being a soldier. ‘I see; well, I like pretending to be all those things. I like pretending to be someone in the military, but whether I could do it I don’t know. That’s why I am an actor.’

I tell him I went to see his Coriolanus years ago, the ultimate role for an actor with martial aspirations. ‘London or Stratford?’ The Barbican. ‘Good. I was reasonably happy with it by the time we reached the Barbican.’ It was a powerful and memorable performance, I say. Perfect casting.

The irony, though, was that Coriolanus is the patrician who is condescending towards the plebeians, and Dance’s background is plebeian. He is the son of Nell, a former parlour-maid.

Dance returns to his actors-are-just-pretending theme: ‘I just pretend. I was able to observe the aristocracy at close quarters because my mother worked for them. She certainly worked for much posher people than we were. Housekeeping. One observed it and absorbed it. My mother married above her station. She came from the East End. I’m not sure what my father did, because he died from a perforated ulcer when I was four, but I think his family had been confectioners. And I think he had been an engineer. A little further up the social scale than my mother. He used to do the occasional music hall recitation.’

Despite this background, when Dance started out in acting a fellow actor noted that he was ‘a toff actor’ as opposed to ‘a peasant actor’. ‘It’s because I have a patrician face,’ Dance says. He does indeed. But it is also to do with his bearing. As an actor he has a commanding presence and a certain grace. He can convey emotions with the flicker of a muscle, with the slightest movement of the eye. Two of his more polished aristocratic roles are the Earl of Erroll in White Mischief and Lord Raymond Stockbridge in Gosford Park. When he was filming the latter he told the director, Robert Altman, that he was in the wrong place, upstairs with the toffs; he should be downstairs with the servants. Altman said: ‘Not with that face, Charles.’

It might be that he learnt his patrician bearing from observing his step-father, Edward, a civil servant. He had been the lodger. He drank lots of tea and did the pools. ‘A fairly solitary men who seemed to have no friends or family, but quite decent. He looked after my mother. She would say, “When your father died I had 10 bob left in the world, dear”.’

His mother’s wasn’t a happy life. Nell nursed Edward through cancer and then died from a heart attack six months after he did, in 1984, the year The Jewel in the Crown was making her son’s name. They used to row a lot, mother and son. ‘Terrible emotional scenes. She was a very emotional woman.’

I ask if she was socially insecure. ‘She came from the servant class, which was not the same thing as the working class. The servant class is right in the middle. I’m not sure I believe there is such a thing as a middle class: it is either working class on the way up or aristocracy on the way down. She also, of course, was a lifelong Tory voter, as most people from the servant class were; you can’t possibly be governed by your equals. You have to be governed by your betters.’

His brother is 10 years older, a retired naval officer who lives in France. ‘He had been a difficult adolescent and my mother thought joining the Navy would make a man of him. So she marched him off to the recruiting office when he was 15, a decision my mother regretted until the day she died. I remember sharing a bedroom with him before he left for the Navy and there were books of poetry around the place and he wasn’t a bad draughtsman either. All that had to go. My mother learnt from her mistake and allowed me to indulge in poetry and the arts.’

Charles Dance had been studying graphic design and photography at Leicester Art School when he got the acting bug. Steve McQueen and Peter Finch had inspired him to become a screen actor, while ‘Brian Rix dropping his trousers in a farce made me want to prance about on stage’. He abandoned his course in favour of acting lessons from two retired thespians, Leonard and Martin. They were gay, but quiet about it, as society demanded at the time.

What was he like at that age? ‘When I was 19, I was long-haired, going on the Aldermaston march, shagging everything in sight. The march was more fun than anything. I’m not especially political.’

Was he narcissistic as a young man? ‘Not really, not until way after my teens. Mid to late twenties, possibly. I look around now and see guys who are fantastic looking and then I look in the mirror and think this is a very odd face. It doesn’t bear close scrutiny. Bags under the eyes, thinning hair, I don’t see a handsome man when I look in the mirror. Never have done. It is not an easy face to photograph, which is tricky in a film career unless you are in the hands of an astute and clever director of photography. I wear clothes quite well and am reasonably fit and have a good body, but I don’t think I am particularly handsome. When people first started describing me as being that, at the time of Jewel in the Crown, I was surprised, but then I learnt to embrace it, a little too fondly.’

At the time, he was described as the English Robert Redford. I suggest it must have given him confidence to be told he had matinee-idol looks, even if he couldn’t see it himself. ‘Confidence is something I have had to acquire. This profession is littered with people, who, by their nature, are more introvert that extrovert. I can have my flamboyant moments, but I am, by nature, an introvert. I acquired confidence by giving myself severe talkings-to from time to time. I found that aspect of Coriolanus – the opening scenes where he is confident, strutting, all “I’m f—ing wonderful, and powerful”, harder to act than the more vulnerable moments later in the play when it emerges that he is a mummy’s boy.’

He thinks that early on in his career he may sometimes have been cast because of his looks – but not any more. ‘Now I am getting more interesting roles. Mr Tulkinghorn in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, for example. Or Ralph Nickleby [in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby]. He is a complete s—. Evil, but interesting. Whereas there are only so many ways you can play a romantic leading man. You know you are there for a reason.’

He described himself earlier as ‘shagging everything in sight’; just how successful was he with women? ‘Not that successful. You know how it is when you are a young man: lots of groping most of the time, nothing serious.’

For 23 years he was married to Joanna, a sculptor. They have grown-up children: Oliver, who works in film, and Rebecca, who is in publishing. Then, in 2004, they divorced. Dance’s name has been linked to one or two actresses and models since, but he nevertheless worries that he might end up alone. He prefers not to think about it. Indeed, he feels uncomfortable with this conversation, not least because his ex-wife was door-stepped by the press at the time of their divorce. ‘I’d rather you avoided the subject,’ he says, ‘but I can’t blame “the business” for the breakdown of my marriage. I don’t want to talk about it. If I had a choice in the matter I would say “please don’t go into all that”, but if you want to insert something about it I can’t stop you.’

I note that actors tend to be liberal by inclination, that this is partly to do with the bohemian life they lead: the touring, the intimacy with fellow cast members, the abandonment of self-consciousness. In Dance’s case, that includes appearing nude. He has no qualms about it, as he demonstrated recently in the film Starter for Ten. He turned up on set for that scene already naked. When the wardrobe assistant offered to cover him up, he said: ‘No need, darling’.

‘Well, if you’ve done it once, after that it doesn’t bother you,’ he says now. ‘To continue the painting analogy, painters have brushes and paints, we have this.’ He sweeps his hands the length of his body. ‘The audience feels cheated if you don’t open up and be honest about yourself. I feel I have cheated myself if I don’t go that far. Having stuff in reserve is to cheat.’

Similarly, he is not fussy about what he appears in, so long as the money is good. He has done a number of forgettable Miss Marple-type dramas on television and memorably wore fishnets and a red rubber micro-skirt for the Ali G movie. ‘I’ll do anything for money,’ he says. ‘People talk about choices. What choices? The choice is to work or not to work.’

I suppose he has an additional choice in that he can also write, produce and direct. Notably, he wrote, produced and directed Ladies in Lavender, a film about two sisters, played by Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, living on the Cornish coast, who take in a Polish stray just before the Second World War. ‘There was a day when I was stupid enough to try to direct Judi. She came up with a line that was a bit sentimental for her and I knelt down and touched her knee and said: “Judi, it is a bit Celia Johnson-ish.” And she said: “How dare you? And get your hand off my knee.”.’

The film grossed more than $30million. ‘But none of it found its way into my pocket. It all went to the f—ing distributors and sales agents. I see the returns. I get “0000” next to my name while they are coining it in. It was a bugger to get the financing together for that film. I had to ask Judi and Maggie to defer fees and they sweetly said “of course, darling”, even though they knew deferment usually means deferred indefinitely.’

He slips on a black polo-neck and scoops up a packet of cigarettes from among the greasepaint pots. He is going to pop outside for a quick fag. As we walk through the theatre we talk about Shadowlands and its funereal themes. He says he would have loved to have gone to George Melly’s funeral. ‘He had a cardboard coffin which people wrote funny things on, like, ‘You owe me 20 quid, George”.’

As we stand outside the stage door, in the drizzle, I ask if he has thought about what form he would like his own funeral to take. ‘God no,’ he says, lighting a cigarette. ‘Too busy trying to live, for f—‘s sake.’