The face that launched 1,000 quips

By rights, Pete Postlethwaite shouldn't be a hugely successful actor: there's that name for a start and then there are those looks. James Rampton talks to the unlikeliest of film stars about his latest small-screen project

Pete Postlethwaite has a decidedly unglamorous, tongue-twister of a name. It's the kind of moniker Monty Python might have invented for a sketch about dour Yorkshire miners. However, he would never dream of trading it in for a swisher, more user-friendly model. "My first agent wanted me to change it," he recalls. "So I changed him instead."

Pete Postlethwaite has a decidedly unglamorous, tongue-twister of a name. It's the kind of moniker Monty Python might have invented for a sketch about dour Yorkshire miners. However, he would never dream of trading it in for a swisher, more user-friendly model. "My first agent wanted me to change it," he recalls. "So I changed him instead."

On this - as on much else - he is defiant. "When I made a breakthrough as an actor, people started to say 'who's that bloke with the funny name?'", Postlethwaite continues. "They advised me to change it, saying it would never be put up in lights outside theatres because they couldn't afford the electricity. But I could never contemplate changing it. It's who I am. It's my mother and father, my whole family. It's where everything I am comes from. I couldn't imagine living my life with another name. It's nice that my career has carried on with this extraordinary soubriquet. Sometimes it makes me think 'ya boo sucks' to all those who said it could never work."

This is not the only area in which Postlethwaite overturns received wisdom. Ensconced in a huge armchair in a posh central London hotel suite, he quite candidly acknowledges that he does not possess classic matinée-idol looks. He is more Easter Island carving than conventional leading man material. But, with an astonishing set of cheekbones that you could hang your coat on and a battered nose which has been on the wrong end of more rugby-boots than he cares to remember, his face defiantly sticks in your mind. Appealingly self-deprecating, Postlethwaite is quite open about his features. "I'm building up quite a collection of remarks about it," he laughs. "It's something you guys and girls in the press can hook onto. I've had everything from 'he looks like he's swallowed a clavicle' to 'a bag of spanners' to 'an unmade king-size bed'."

But, to his credit, he has turned his unusual looks to his advantage. This former sheet-metal worker from Warrington stands out among actors who appear to have spent more time in the beauty parlour than the foundry. He has benefited from the desire for actors to look more "authentic," more like someone you might meet down the pub, more like you and me.

"Whose idea was it that leading men had to look a certain way?" Postlethwaite asks. "In the early days, the powers that be in film and television decreed that in order to keep up the mystique, stars had to look like Alan Ladd. But that went out in the late 1950s when Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay appeared on the scene. Ever since then, writers and directors have been more interested in what goes on in actors' heads than what they look like. It's been a godsend for me. We're individuals; we don't all have the same idea of beauty."

Postlethwaite's, er, lived-in looks have certainly never held him back. His big break came in 1993 when he turned up for the audition for the part of Gerry Conlon's father in In the Name of the Father with a thrift-shop suit and an impeccable Irish accent. He announced to the doorman: "Guiseppe Conlon here to see the director." He landed the part - and an Oscar nomination.

Since then, Postlethwaite has notched up such memorable performances as the enigmatic henchman Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects, the lively Friar in William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, and Danny, the ultra-committed band leader in Brassed Off. After casting him in Amistad and The Lost World, Steven Spielberg was moved to describe him as "probably the greatest actor in the world". Now he is buddies with Jack Nicholson and Tom Hanks, and a recent survey put him second (behind Harvey Keitel) for the title of the world's busiest movie actor.

In all his performances, Postlethwaite exhibits an unforced naturalism. "If someone says to you 'great acting,' then you're in trouble and should go back to being a sheet-metal worker," he says. "It's only working when nobody notices it. It's the beauty of the unremarkable."

Now Postlethwaite has blossomed into a most unlikely romantic hero. Last year, he got his kit off for an unforgettable scene in which he and Rachel Griffiths danced naked under a gushing cooling-tower in Among Giants. "Unlike The Full Monty, you actually did get a 'full monty' in Among Giants," he smiles. "When Garbo first appeared in talkies, they advertised it as 'Garbo talks.' Here you could have said, 'Postlethwaite loves.' At the age of 53, it was great suddenly to get the girl.

"That's one of the things I like about acting. My old drama school principal at the Bristol Old Vic said I had a face like a stone archway. If you see someone like that on screen being sensitive and emotional, you can't go far wrong. Audiences are drawn to someone looking like a granite fell who suddenly shows his vulnerability. A window opens unexpectedly, and they see an ordinary human soul struggling inside. That paradox is startling and emotional. The more a film actor looks like an ordinary person, the more remarkable it is when something extraordinary happens to him."

The actor is once more bringing his extraordinary ordinariness to bear in The Sins, a compelling new seven-part BBC 1 serial by William Ivory, the man responsible for Common as Muck. Postlethwaite dominates the series as Len Green, a professional getaway driver who emerges from a four and a half-year stretch determined to go straight. Each week, however, one of the seven deadly sins tempts him away from the path of righteousness.

According to Postlethwaite, the series will strike a chord because "we live with the seven deadly sins every day. We've all seen someone else's car or wife and thought, 'blimey, I'd like that'. There is a latticework of intelligent writing in The Sins. It has an epic scale, and yet it's set in Willesden among a family we all know."

Postlethwaite claims to find interviews an ordeal. "The eighth deadly sin is journalism, closely followed by the ninth, which is acting," he laughs. "I know it's part of our job to publicise what we've done, but sometimes when journalists ask you to analyse your character it's like asking a centipede which leg it sets off with."

But his is a passionate, engaging presence during the course of our conversation. He reckons he maintains his freshness because he is not caught up in the self-congratulatory bubble of London luvvie-land. He lives in the Shropshire countryside with his partner and two young children. "When I moved there 12 years ago, my agent said, 'Shropshire? You'll never work again.' But since then I've never stopped working."

Postlethwaite is keeping up the momentum and now hoping to realise a long-held dream to direct and star in a film version of Macbeth. He has also been offered a juicy part in the latest Martin Scorsese movie, Gangs of New York, currently being filmed at the legendary Cinecitta studios in Rome. "It's a great project, like Gormenghast on acid," he enthuses. "Scorsese is one of my favourite directors. I'd play '15th Soldier on the Left' in one of his films just to be near him."

But Postlethwaite has become so busy, he's had to turn Scorsese down. And pressure of work last year caused him to reject a $20m offer to star in the Hollywood blockbuster, Gone in 60 Seconds.

Down-to-earth to the last, he shrugs off these missed opportunities. "It's all the same job." He pauses, before adding, deadpan: "Just a bigger trailer."

'The Sins' starts on BBC 1 on Tuesday