Kevin Spacey: An enigma, even as he steps on to the political stage

Leading actors, according to Kevin Spacey, "always play the good guy. I'm attracted to characters in some kind of moral crisis or moral decay." Does that explain, perhaps, why he is spending so much time these days with his newest best buddy, Bill Clinton?

This is not an entirely flippant question. Clinton may not be a man in moral crisis exactly (unless, of course, you ask members of the American Christian right), but he is certainly a politician whose gravitas and considerable personal charisma are coloured by the alluringly naughty smirk of an overgrown schoolboy just waiting to be caught red-handed for his indiscretions. That smirk got him into no end of trouble when he was president, and he still has it now.

Spacey himself, meanwhile, has his own complicated relationship with the limelight. On the one hand, he is one of Hollywood's hottest properties, part of a trend (along with his co-star from LA Confidential, Russell Crowe) of accomplished character actors who have somehow sidled their way to centre stage and now vie for the best-actor Oscar virtually on a yearly basis.

On the other hand, there is a part of Kevin Spacey that is forever the sardonic, oval-faced, wildly un- predictable bombshell. He is a performer who can be either disarmingly understated or grotesquely over-the-top in a way that leading men simply aren't supposed to be.

Perhaps this ambivalence about playing the hero-protagonist gives him something in common with the former American president. Or perhaps they just like each other's sense of humour. Either way, their friendship has taken a peculiarly public turn. In Blackpool this week, Spacey was at Clinton's side as he gave his enthusiastically received oration to the Labour Party faithful. The two of them were also seen popping into a McDonald's for a quick dose of real life, away from the pomp of the party conference.

And that's not all: at the end of last month they were in Africa together, raising awareness about AIDS and pledging money from the newly- formed Clinton Foundation to try to combat the disease's lethal spread across the African continent. Contrary to appearances, Spacey wasn't following in the footsteps of U2's lead singer Bono – all fired-up idealism pitted against the in-bred caution of his politician-companion – but seemed content to lend his famous name and face to proceedings and say a few well-chosen and well-spoken words while leaving the bulk of the politicking to Clinton.

As is his well-worn habit, Spacey chose largely to be an enigma. It wasn't hard to see why Clinton might be interested in him: after all, the 42nd president of the United States has always loved the company of Hollywood stars, and has taken extraordinary political advantage of his ability to charm them every bit as much as they charm him. But what was in it for Spacey?

If he had his reasons for gallivanting round the world as an ad-hoc goodwill ambassador, he certainly wasn't sharing them. Just once, in Rwanda, he gave a hint of his outlook on global events. "It has become increasingly difficult in the US," he said, "to raise funds and awareness for anything outside of the fight against terrorism. So, it is very important we keep trying to keep people focused on the other important problems in the world." Are these words the kernel of a new political activism? There is just too little there to be sure.

We have learned plenty over the years about Kevin Spacey the actor, without gleaning too much about Kevin Spacey the man. And that is exactly the way he has wanted it. As he put it with characteristic bluntness in a 1998 interview: "It's not that I want to create some bullshit mystique by maintaining a silence about my personal life, it is just that the less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen. It allows an audience to come into a movie theatre and believe I am that person."

Spacey's heroes have always been actors like Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy or Jack Lemmon – performers who made their work look effortlessly easy without projecting a great deal of their own egos. "I never knew [anything] about Spencer Tracy," Spacey said on another occasion. "I didn't know a thing about Henry Fonda. I believed that they were the people they were acting. I don't want to know anything about the actors I see on screen except their performance."

We've never been privy to the sort of information about Spacey that most movie stars consider it their virtual civic duty to divulge: whether he is married or unmarried, in a relationship or out of a relationship, even – a subject of much unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable gossip a few years ago – whether he was gay or straight. (His date on both occasions when he was nominated for an Oscar was his mother.)

We have learned about his troubled childhood and his apprenticeship in the New York theatre only in glimpses. We know he is suspicious of the star system and the Hollywood publicity machine. We know he sees his craft as a vocation, the actor's job not being to play the prima donna but to serve the material at hand.

But that's pretty much it. The only real certainty is his extraordinarily accomplished list of credits, and the emotional wallop that many of his finest performances have carried: his ruthlessly ambitious salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross, in which he played opposite his hero, Jack Lemmon; his disingenuous snitch with a limp, Verbal, in The Usual Suspects; his embodiment of Hickey in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh on the London stage; and, of course, his Oscar-winning turn as Lester Burnham, the newly empowered suburban dad who gleefully throws over his old life but ends up losing everything in American Beauty.

Strangely, since his moment of Oscar glory in 2000, his acting career has suddenly seemed much less focused, his roles less well chosen. There is no comparing his earlier triumphs with dogs like Pay It Forward, K-PAX and The Shipping News. Of course, such dry patches can befall any actor, but it is nevertheless tempting to jump to a couple of conclusions: one, that the system has got to him at last, that the Oscar hype has paralysed him, that he is a victim of his own success; and two, that his focus these days is straying increasingly away from his film work towards more public ventures. Could the emergence of Spacey the Friend of Bill mark the decline of Spacey the withering presence on stage and screen?

In politics, as in acting, much of what we know about Spacey is the record of his performances. Quite how he came to be friends with Clinton remains a mystery, but we do know that in the final weeks of the Clinton presidency he helped make a tongue-in-cheek, home video-style film in which Bill bemoaned the fact that his family had fled the White House coop – Hillary to the Senate campaign trail in New York state and Chelsea to college in California. Clinton consoled himself by brandishing an Oscar and giving a mock-acceptance speech in his bathroom mirror; Spacey then popped out of nowhere and politely asked to have his statuette back.

Later, in the tumultuous aftermath of the 11 September attacks, Spacey popped up again, this time as host to an all-star benefit concert for the victims and their families. His emceeing was nowhere near as remarkable as his unexpected, and unexpectedly passionate, rendition of John Lennon's "Mind Games". He belted the song out with such growling conviction that you had to wonder if he was trying to launch a second career as a singer or, more likely, if he had been bowled over by Lennon's imprecations for peace with the force of a new religion.

Spacey is the oddest of candidates to become a public figure, precisely because he gives so little of himself away. "The bottom line," he insisted once, "is my private life is nobody's business. Which can get me into more trouble than if I babbled all over the place. In this day and age, if you're not a public freak, people assume you're a private one."

A freak is perhaps not the best way to describe public perceptions of him (although there was a time, after he played the psychopathic serial killer in David Fincher's Seven, when the occasional stalker would let him know he needed saving from himself). Rather, he comes across as someone not unlike one of his more rounded screen characters: intelligent, knowing, understated, sardonic, occasionally biting, sometimes explosive. When he accepted his best-actor Oscar for American Beauty, he said, in a line dripping with laconic wit: "This has definitely been the highlight of my day."

That's a line you can only hope to deliver successfully if you have had your share of setbacks, and Spacey's early life was far from easy. His father was a freelance writer of aviation manuals and kept the family moving around the country as he hopped from job to job. Kevin was enough of a tearaway to set light to his sister's tree house; in response, his parents enrolled him in a military academy in southern California where he was promptly expelled for getting into a fight and throwing a tyre at one of his fellow students.

Acting became his passion in high school, and shortly after graduating he moved to New York. He dropped out of the Juilliard School for the performing arts to go to work for Joseph Papp, the legendary Broadway producer, and slowly found himself bit parts on stage – in between some astonishing odd jobs that included selling cable-television subscriptions door-to-door and collecting old tin cans for recycling.

It was not until he hit 30 – in 1989 – that the acting work became regular enough for him to be able to relax. Fonda and Tracy, he likes to point out, also got their breaks relatively late, as did Jack Nicholson. Like them, Spacey has a wisdom and a depth to his screen persona that younger, more superficial leading men cannot hope to emulate. Could this seriousness as an actor be the basis for a new, more public career? Perhaps the world would be reasonable in asking the real Kevin Spacey to step forward first.