Michael Grandage: 'I'd no idea I was able to direct'

A little over 10 years ago Michael Grandage was playing the improbably named Channing Hardy in the BBC sci-fi drama Bugs. Then came six long months in the West End's second longest runner, The Woman in Black. It was the final straw in an acting career that had spanned 12 years but never quite hit the heights. He walked away. "I hit my 30s and was not happy about the kind of work I was getting. I was more unemployed than employed and knew that I couldn't go on like that for another 10 years. So I started to look for something else," he says. "I had absolutely no idea that I could direct."

Fast forward to this week and the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse has just walked away from the Evening Standard Theatre Awards with an armful of awards. He took home Best Director (for the third time) for Othello, The Chalk Garden and Ivanov as well as awards for their leading actors, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Margaret Tyzack and Penelope Wilton – confirming the 46-year-old as the theatre man with the Midas touch. "It must be so boring to be Michael Grandage," sighed the ceremony's compère, Richard Wilson, as the director tripped, beaming (he beams a lot), off the stage, "Success, success, success..."

You can't argue with the success. But boring? Not a chance. Grandage puts the theatre into running a theatre, creating dramas off-stage that are almost as exquisitely orchestrated as his beautifully pitched productions – which regularly earn five stars across the board. In the last year or so his gripping Frost/Nixon has transferred first to the West End, then to Broadway (and eventually to film, though directed by Ron Howard), while his casting of Ewan McGregor as Iago provoked a box-office frenzy which saw tickets changing hands for £2,000 on eBay. Then, in September, came his most audacious move yet – a year-long season at Wyndham's in the West End for which he pulled off a spectacular quartet of casting coups. First came Kenneth Branagh's career-resuscitating Ivanov, next week Derek Jacobi dons his yellow stockings as Malvolio in Twelfth Night. And in the new year Judi Dench will appear in Madame de Sade and Jude Law will play Hamlet.

Not bad for the son of a sweet shop owner ("retail and wholesale", he points out, proudly) who "used to sell tickets sometimes" around Penzance as a teenager. Does he ever get star-struck? "I must do..." he says with a mischievous smile. "But star-struck suggests that you can't move forward and do your job. I love being in a room with people whom I have long admired. I just pinch myself with delight." One of his favourite parts of the job is the wrangling with stars over timetabling and roles. "You start up a dialogue with actors and then just don't let it go. You keep having the dialogue until someone comes in to land". Does anybody ever say no? "Christ, yes! There's a book to be written about the people who could have played certain parts and didn't."

That's as maybe, but in the six years since Grandage took over the reins from Sam Mendes, he's cemented the coolly minimalist Earlham Street theatre as a place where actors are queuing up to work. Whereas Jacobi and Branagh were both "old friends" he'd worked with before, Dench ("seems gorgeous so far") and Law ("we've been meeting for a year on and off, trying to find a play...") approached the theatre themselves.

They were, no doubt, attracted by the sweet smell of success for – and he'd prefer it if you whispered it – Grandage has never really had a flop. "Don't say that!" he wails, head in hands. "God! The moment I say yes to that, I'm doomed, aren't I? One of the things I spend my life doing is keeping one step ahead to make sure that whatever success we're having, we try and keep having."

If further proof were needed of this success, you need only ask why he chose to expand into Wyndham's – a theatre three times as large as the Donmar. "As I was talking to Ken and Judi, I suddenly saw something that, for all it should be a good news story, turns into a bad news story if the majority of people can't get in." In other words, what keeps Grandage awake at night is not how to sell tickets but how not to sell out of tickets. Which hasn't stopped him charging off-West End prices (from £10 to £32.50) in the heart of commercial theatreland.

Indeed, he's a rather canny business operator, persuading his stars to perform at the same ensemble rates as his spear carriers and working 40 nights a year at fund-raisers and dinners to whip up the £2.5m needed to keep the theatre functioning. At first nights, he glides around the whitewashed theatre bar in his trademark dark shirt, greeting critics, sponsors and family alike with an easy warmth.

He must be, I think, the best connected man in British theatre. But, pleasingly, there's nothing slick about Grandage. On a lunch break from rehearsing Twelfth Night with Jacobi, Victoria Hamilton and Indira Varma, he's jovial, gossipy and relaxed. "I'm completely feeling it's on course," he says, noisily slurping soup. "Everybody has been doing this play for 400 years. Nothing new can be done with it, so don't pretend. Just do it. Find the location that you think is wonderfully satisfying, talk to your collaborators about creating that world and then get it to the rehearsal room and tell the story of the play as if it's never happened before."

So this will be a classic Donmar Shakespeare – a swoon-inducing cast, unfussy sets and a focus on text and performance over auteur-style visions and whizzbangery. It will also, probably, be a huge Christmas hit, though Grandage claims to take each production as it comes, shaking off both praise and criticism (when it comes) with a surprising lack of sentimentality.

"Let's just say that Twelfth Night opens and gets one-star reviews across the board. How do I go into Madame de Sade, with Judi Dench, only eight weeks later if I can't move on? That's one of the key things – the ability to move on. In life as well. Have the row, but don't sulk – that's what I say. It's good to have a personality like that in the profession." Does a good director need a Teflon coating? Grandage looks horrified, his spoon poised dramatically mid-way to his mouth. "Not Teflon! The whole point about theatre is you've got to have this huge heart, ready to receive and compute. You can't have any body armour at all."

There are, apparently, "300" things which make a good director but he can't/won't put his finger on the key to his own success. "My mum doesn't even know quite what I do when I say I direct things," he shrugs. "I don't think a lot of people know what you actually do." His adoring actors, though, are a little more forthcoming. Branagh tells me that on the Saturday night before they moved into Wyndham's he took an 11pm call from the director. "He was excited and emotional about the paint finish on the Ivanov set. In good art, God is in the details, and Michael isn't far behind him – with a fine-tooth comb."

Jacobi calls Grandage a "benign dictator", which seems to me a very good description. Behind the roars of laughter, the twinkly demeanour and energetic inquisitiveness, you sense that Grandage works from an absolutely rigorous knowledge of the text and within a genially managed but rigid structure. "I don't know how you'd bring design, composition, lighting, acting, play [he plucks each element out of the air with a precise little pinch], all into one area if your mind isn't in some way interested in control. It's got so many negative connotations but it's a very positive thing in the case of putting on a play."

Acting, on the other hand? "That's an awful job to do if you're a control freak". It was an RSC touring production of Twelfth Night – starring Bob Peck as Malvolio and Ian McKellen as Sir Toby Belch – at the Carn Brea leisure centre which inspired the 16-year-old Grandage to pursue a career in acting. He graduated from Central in 1984 and carved out a commendable career, appearing in Trevor Nunn's RSC Othello as Rodrigo opposite McKellen, Imogen Stubbs and Willard White. On television he appeared in odd episodes of House of Eliot and Cadfael – where he first met Jacobi. "He says he remembers it but he doesn't at all. I was just some bloke playing the king." The "awful, naff crap" he was being offered on television, combined with "real anxiety" about going on stage every night led him to directing.

His first play was at Colchester's Mercury in 1996 – where he met his partner, the designer Christopher Oram. They have worked together ever since. "We have to make sure we don't do our job together in too many shortcuts, though. I'll say, 'Shall I come to your studio today?' even though we both know it's just outside the room where we both live. You have to afford yourselves proper time otherwise everything gets short-changed – your life and your career."

Within three years Grandage had taken over the mantle at Sheffield Theatres. He arrived at the Donmar in 2002, armed with a trusty band of collaborators, a love of the European repertoire and a magic touch with casting. He is most drawn to "flawed" plays – The Vortex, The Chalk Garden, Caligula – even risking Ivanov, Chekhov's most juvenile work, which served as his Wyndham's opener. It is a play obsessed with mid-life crisis. Did he relate to it? Grandage guffaws. "No! I'm putting it off a bit longer. I related to a man in his forties who, when he was a 20-year-old, had a different perspective on life."

He's committed to the Donmar for another five years and is now confronting his first Hamlet, after Branagh dropped out last month. "I wasn't planning to but I am now and it's all rather exciting. There is a little bit of a gulp factor about doing a Hamlet. I have to read it now..." he giggles. In 2010 he'll fulfil a decade-long ambition to direct his first opera – Britten's Billy Budd with Mark Elder conducting – at Glyndebourne.

He shakes off, with a little shudder, the speculation that he is the man most likely to succeed Nicholas Hytner at the helm of the National. "When you've just said yes to a whole five-year period and the director of the National has said yes to another five years as well, it's so utterly premature to talk about it. In five years, I'll be 50 and I might want to do something very different, like I wanted to do when I was 30 – change career even." Let's really hope he doesn't.

'Twelfth Night', Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2 (0844 482 5120; www.donmarwestend.com), 5 December to 7 March