Star earned only pounds 13,000 from pounds 50m blockbuster

The Full Monty's haves and have nots...

OH HOW life laughs at us. It's all very well to star in the biggest British box-office hit of all time, but it's apparently still very important to read the small print.

Robert Carlyle, the actor who played the leader of the strippers in the record-breaking film The Full Monty, earned aboutpounds 1.8m last year - making him the seventh highest earning British actor. Meanwhile, his fellow "stripper" Steve Huison received only pounds 13,500 for getting his kit off and grows his own vegetables on a Yorkshire allotment to save cash.

Huison, who played loser Lomper in the hit comedy, said yesterday at the launch of the video of the film, that filmgoers assumed the stars had made a fortune out of the movie. While it had taken almost pounds 50m in the United Kingdom alone, Huison said he had received only pounds 13,500.

Yesterday he said his latest project was "the allotment".

"That's not a film, it's a piece of land. It's that time of the year you've got to break up the soil and get your potatoes in.

"It's not about gardening it's about growing your own veg and saving money, you know. I'd be a fool if I didn't try to save money.

"Let me get it right - we haven't got a fortune out of it. We got the basic Equity weekly rate for it and that was all we had -- pounds 1,500 a week it works out at for nine weeks."

He said he had heard rumours about bonus payments following the massive success of the film, but so far he had seen no more cash.

"I don't believe anything until I see it in my hand," he said.

However, in the best of dramatic tradition, Huison, who lives in Shipley, West Yorkshire, said he was not bitter. "I've had a good time over the past six months, I've gone on a lot of free trips and I've met a lot of interesting people."

Huison said he was hoping to go to Los Angeles for Oscars night on 23 March but it would depend on whether he was working.