Bill Nighy: Send in the clown

Bill Nighy still has the trademark hair: floppy, fair and just a bit longer than you'd expect to be tossed by the average 51-year-old. "I always ask if I can cut my hair, and they always say no.

Bill Nighy still has the trademark hair: floppy, fair and just a bit longer than you'd expect to be tossed by the average 51-year-old. "I always ask if I can cut my hair, and they always say no. I don't know why; I'm beyond the point of being employed for my cuteness."

Well, maybe. He was a bit of a sex symbol when he played a philandering academic in The Men's Room on television in the early Nineties, and has been sending up would-be romantic and glamorous characters on the big screen in the past few years. The hair was a useful accessory (with added extensions) in the extravagant appearance of Ray, the raddled old rock singer in Still Crazy, for which he won the Peter Sellers award for comedy, and for another Ray, the demon hairdresser in the newly-released Blow Dry. Eyebrow glitter and tight legwear complete the picture.

No such comic indignities attend his current stage role as Robert in Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange, a taut three-hander in which two doctors in a psychiatric hospital wrangle over the fate of Christopher (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a young black patient. Should he be de-sectioned and returned to the community, as Robert argues, or does he need further treatment? This gripping discussion of race, mental health, political correctness and careerism, a hit last year at the National, transfers to the Duchess Theatre this week and Nighy is preparing to repeat his mesmerising performance as the ruthless senior consultant ­ a part written with him in mind.

A year ago his arrogant, manipulative, possibly racist, possibly liberal-thinking psychiatrist gained and lost the audience's sympathy by turns. Was he rightly championing the African-Caribbean men who are much more likely than other groups to be diagnosed as schizophrenic, or was he trimming his arguments to fit his own theories and, incidentally, the need for beds? Was he justified in being viciously rude to his ambitious younger colleague (Andrew Lincoln), or merely telling him a few home truths? Either way, he was often wickedly, ironically funny.

It is, he says, "a bit spooky" coming back to it after such a long gap.The cast were all too busy to transfer to the West End sooner ­ "Chiwetel was Romeo and Peer Gynt at the National, Andrew became a teacher [in the Channel 4 series Teachers] and I've been in prison." In the new Peter Cattaneo movie, Lucky Break, yet to be released, he plays "a toff serving a stiff sentence for fraud. He's at a bit of a disadvantage, not having a criminal mentality, and he gets involved in a prison escape attempt." It is ­ guess what ­ a comedy.

The cinema has discovered Nighy rather late ­ "I'm not sure why; actors of my generation didn't segue neatly into film like they do now" ­ but it has made the most of his uninhibited comic streak. The publicity for Blow Dry describes him as "renowned British comic Billy Nighy", and he's delighted. "That's the way to flatter me ­ put the word 'comic' and my name in the same sentence. In fact, I have retired from doing plays with no jokes. It seems rather vulgar to expect people to sit in the dark for two hours without a laugh. Besides, in proper plays, jokes are how information travels best. If they laugh, they must have understood. In this play ­ once we get good at it ­ people laugh about every two minutes."

In conversation, Nighy is never less than entertaining. The old cliché about his crippling lack of confidence is beginning to look a bit hard to justify. "Yes, I've been banging on too much about that. It began with an attempt to be frank, but it is, after all, part of the human condition. I think people made assumptions because of the parts I've played that I was arrogant, forceful and confident and in my experience everything was not such a breeze. But it's farewell to that kind of talk. I know how to deal with it now."

Not that there haven't been moments of anxiety. Asked to take over the role of Tom from Michael Gambon, whom he admired enormously, in David Hare's Skylight in 1997, he initially refused ("Michael's voice can peel paint at 60 feet"), but having been persuaded by Hare and the director Richard Eyre to give it a go, he made a considerable success of it.

Nighy is a great admirer of Hare, Pinter (he has been in Betrayal, A Kind of Alaska, Mountain Language and Silence) and Stoppard (he played Bernard Nightingale, the obnoxious academic, in the original production of Arcadia at the National). He is passionate about the way Blue/Orange is "built so beautifully". He claims he had scant education, having left school with a couple of O-levels, but he was always fascinated by language.

"When I went down to the Employment Exchange with my mother at 15, I said I wanted to be an author," he says. "My mother placed her foot very firmly on mine under the table. They said that they didn't think they had any jobs for authors, but they got me one as messenger boy at The Field magazine. One of my duties was to change the editions in all the fancy hotels. I thought it was very glamorous."

He was soon invited to train as a sub-editor, but instead he set off for Paris at the age of 16 to write a novel. "I never wrote a word. But I'd read everything by everyone who'd been in Paris in the Twenties ­ Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway. Their prose used to make me gasp."

Eventually, he found himself at the Guildford School of Dance and Drama. A stint at the Liverpool Everyman followed, with actors like Julie Walters, Pete Postlethwaite and Jonathan Pryce, and Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale among the writers. "When I arrived, I didn't know what Right and Left meant," he says. "I got a crash course in community politics."

In a distinguished career that has included many modern classics and Trigorin to Judi Dench's Arkadina in Chekhov's The Seagull at the National, there has been a distinct lack of Shakespeare. Will we ever see Bill Nighy as Prospero or Lear?

"No, you will never see my Lear ­ or anything else in Shakespeare. Not that anyone's asked me much. The ludicrous trousers have a lot to do with it. I'm a lounge-suit fetishist." Nighy twinkles affably, thinking back, no doubt, to those sartorially flamboyant roles in Stir Crazy and Blow Dry.

Is he looking forward to the new run of Blue/Orange?

"We've never done it eight times a week before and we thump it out, give it real welly," he says. "Everyone's delighted with what they've done to the theatre: it's just like the boxing-ring effect at the Cottesloe. The other two are a couple of assassins ­ they never give up. They're half my age ­ but I'm glad to say they come off in pieces as well at the end."

During the run yet another film will be released. In The Lawless Heart Nighy plays a farmer, "still with the hair, just a bit shorter. Nobody seems to be interested in seeing me without it."

'Blue/Orange' is currently previewing and opens on Monday at the Duchess Theatre, London WC2. Bookings: 020-7494 5075