John Hurt: Character actor

That weather-beaten visage can portray a world of emotion with the slightest expression, and then there's that gloriously gravelly voice. No wonder John Hurt never really made it in Hollywood; they don't know what to do with him. Good thing too, as far as he's concerned

Before I get on to John Hurt proper, I'd just like to mention a 1990 Belgian film version of Romeo and Juliet in which, according to his cv, John starred alongside a cast consisting entirely of cats. Yes, John is a spectacularly stunning actor, I know. And he's done some spectacularly stunning things. But I feel I have to mention this particular film – at the off – because it's still making me laugh (on the bus, in the bath, when I put my socks on this morning) and unless I get it right out the way, I sort of sense we are not going to get anywhere. So, John, let me see if I've got this straight. It was just you and the cats, right? No other actors at all?

"Nope. Just me," he says, quite happily. "The director [Armando Acosta] got some extraordinary people to do the voices. Vanessa [Redgrave] did one. But only yours truly actually appeared in it."

"Who played Juliet? A beautiful tabby on the brink of womanhood?"

"No," he says. "She was a soft, white, fluffy thing. The director would show me the rushes at the end of the day and say: 'She's stunning, the cat playing Juliet.' I'd go: 'Mmmm'."

"Who were you?"

"A woman."

"A woman?"

"I did ask him why he wanted a man to play a woman and he said: 'I wanted your qualities.' As a woman, I looked like Brenda Blethyn. I had a barge. For some reason I was taking these cats, including Romeo and Juliet, to the New World. A couple of cats jumped into the canal and didn't fare too well."

"Was the film ever shown?"

"Oh yes, it was shown in all the European capitals, with a full symphony orchestra playing Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. People left the cinema saying: 'Well, that tabby was really very special.'"

At this point in the interview I am giggling quite substantially, as is John. You don't normally associate John Hurt with giggling, but he is actually very accomplished at it, goes at it quite hard, until the eyes, which are very small and raisin-ish anyway, squish and squish and squish and squish until they are like buttonhole slits. Very narrow buttonhole slits. Still-stitched buttonhole slits. Of course, John is a stunning actor who has done some spectacularly stunning things: The Naked Civil Servant, Midnight Express, The Elephant Man and even Alien, I guess, although sci-fi films are incredibly dreary to make. "It's not acting. You just have to walk around looking slightly concerned about things." (He hates, he later says, being asked how he acts, as he has no answer beyond repeating Dame Edith Evans's reply, "I just pretend, dear boy.") So it seems mean, starting with one of his stinkers, but he does seem to accept quite a few parts that are obviously below him. For the money? Possibly. But as much, I would suggest, for the sheer hell of it. It may be the mad, reckless, mainstream-loathing Celt in him. And who cares, ultimately? The films may sink as certainly as a cat that's toppled from a barge, but John won't. He may be quite like O'Toole, Burton and Richard Harris in this respect. He has talent he can afford to squander. And the feline version of Romeo and Juliet was, he insists, "an interesting ride".

Eventually, his face settles. Or as much as it's ever going to settle. You wouldn't say John had a "settled" face, ever. You may also say he doesn't do a good line in "settled" generally. Three wives thus far and all that. But the face, particularly, is quite a thing, whether amused or not. Everybody, I tell him, has had a shot at describing it over the years. I've even compiled a list of attempts. Here goes, John.

"Your face is 'wounded' and 'pained', as well as 'full of wrecked Rembrandtian fascination'. It is 'vulnerable', 'melancholy', 'craggy'..."

"Oh, stop," he begs.

"... and 'weather-beaten'. It is 'capable of packing a whole emotional universe into the twitch of an eyebrow'. You've even, you know, been described as looking like a Spaniel, only without ears."

"Who said that?"

"You did, actually."

"I must have been feeling especially sorry for myself that day," he says.

I don't have much to add to any of the above, except to say that if, by some miracle, Ian McKellen and Samuel Beckett could have had a child together, that child might have looked rather like John Hurt. Unless he'd been born a girl. In which case the look would have been more John Hurt as Brenda Blethyn.

We meet in his dressing room at the Gielgud Theatre in London's West End, where he and Penelope Wilton are about to open in Afterplay, a Brian Friel two-hander that revisits the lives of two Chekovian characters first encountered in The Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya. It's a moving piece, immaculately performed. It's nice doing publicity when you are in something good, he says, because you don't have to fear that the next question is going to be something along the lines of: "Do you think Tiddles was right for Mercutio?" The play is due for a 10-week run. "Or, as we say, eight weeks and then back for two 'by popular demand'. Should I have said that?" Probably not.

He's been described as a "brave" actor, which perplexed him, he says, until "someone pointed out that, in Hollywood, if you're considered glamorous and scrape your hair back into a bun, that's considered outrageously brave". He's never properly made it in Hollywood, not that he cares. He says he went to LA when he was Oscar-nominated for The Elephant Man and "they didn't know what to do with me. They do like to pigeon hole you. Can you guess the first thing I was offered after The Elephant Man?"

"Macbeth? With mice?"

"More obvious than that, even. Quasimodo! And who do you think did it in the end? Anthony Hopkins, who'd played Treves in The Elephant Man."

He doesn't think much of today's Hollywood films. "Basically, American cinema is just moving picture books, you know?"

His dressing-room is quite an austere place. A bed, a big old-fashioned shaving brush, a cabinet filled with wine glasses which I guess he won't use. He's not the boozer he used to be, he says. "I hardly drink at all now, and certainly not when I'm doing a play." He's given up the fags, too. He used to be a two-packs-of-Gitanes-a-day man, but was told he was heading towards emphysema, "and I thought, I don't want that, thank you very much, having read Tynan's book". I find I'm quite disappointed. John Hurt. So sober and ash-free. How... un-swashbuckling? He'll be telling me he's into Delia next. He is. "She's brilliant. Stick to what she says and it will come out like she says it will." What did you last make? "Her Irish stew with dumplings from The Winter Collection. I highly recommend it."

He's a dapper man, 62 now. He is wearing a cord jacket and lovely soft leather boots from RM Williams on Regent Street. He used to get his boots made, he says, at Lobb, but do you know how much they are now? No. "£1,000 a pair!" I clock the pictures of his two sons, Alexander (12) and Nicholas (10), tucked into the frame of his mirror. "They look quite like me when I was a boy, only more handsome." He separated from their mother, Jo Dalton, who'd been a production assistant on Scandal, in 1994, but we are not to talk about that, because "I'll be dead meat". Jo and the boys live in Ireland as he does now, in County Wicklow, with his current partner, Sara Owens, a music PR. I note that he seems to have lived with one woman or another from the age of 22, when he first got married. Are you good at being on your own, John? "Not bad. Not bad at all." But there haven't been long periods of it? "Not long enough. No, don't put that in. I'll be in hot water again!" At home in Ireland, he reads quite a lot. Scripts, yes (and perhaps not closely enough), but books mainly. "I'm not interested in schlock. If anyone calls me snobbish I don't mind, because I am. I don't see the point of reading rubbish. I'm currently in the middle of Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory, which is dazzling. He has such unbelievable, vivid memories of being a human being at four." What's your earliest memory, John? "Being in my pram, looking at the patterns in the trees, and there being something of a commotion when my older sister took the brakes off."

I'm interested in his childhood. His father, Arnould, was a brilliant mathematician ("all his family got double firsts") and a high-church priest who worked in the Midlands and Grimsby. He thinks his mother, Phyllis, would have liked to have been an actress herself. "Whenever there was anything going on in amateur dramatics she would direct it or be in it. Some of my first plays were parish plays. And I always went to the theatre with her. I remember sitting with her in the Playhouse, Cleethorpes. Or was it the Royal? Anyway, it was Cleethorpes rep company – Rex Dearing and the Penguin Players – and I remember her going through the programme and saying: 'Oh look, she's been in the West End.' It was a huge accolade, to have been in the West End."

After years of interviewing actors, I've built up a theory that is probably completely rubbish but I'll forward it anyway. Do some actors become actors because they never felt loved for themselves as children? So they make a career out of pretending to be other people, in the hope they'll be loved that way? And the more intensely they feel these things, the more intense their performances? I ask John if his mother was loving. "I think she was, although she wasn't very good at showing it. Neither was my father. It wasn't their forte. And we weren't a physical family. I'm the only physical one of the lot of us really." Certainly, he was a disappointment to his father on the academic front. "I was never that interested academically and was hopeless at maths. I was doing well if I got double figures in a test, you know?" We discuss the mystery of logarithms, geometry, angles. I say I'm so spatially dyslexic that if it's uphill I assume it must be north, hence my rather abysmal sense of direction. He says that is something he can understand perfectly. "Look at Hampstead. That's uphill and north!" We laugh again. "And Highgate!" he adds. I didn't expect Mr Hurt to be so... jolly?

He was dispatched to a Catholic boarding school – "St Michael's School, Oxford Court, near Sevenoaks, Kent", he recites – at seven, which can't have helped him in the feeling-loved stakes. It was very high church, which he rather adored. "I loved the ritual. The more asperges, incense, gold, silver... and the mass was always said in Latin, facing east. None of this facing-the-audience stuff. Great processions around the grounds, and there were 80 acres. It was so high church it made papacy look positively puritanical, if you want a nice little piece of alliteration. Did I believe in God? One hundred per cent. I'd never known anything else. There wasn't a telly and I wasn't allowed to listen to the radio. I didn't question it. Of course it was all true. I remember Stephen Shepherd, who used to teach art, saying he was an atheist. I looked it up in the dictionary and it said an atheist didn't believe in God. I thought that extraordinary." What do you believe now? "I get more and more Socratean. It's a wise man who knows that he knows nothing."

The school was predictably ghastly. You know, bullying, beatings, the headmaster stealing the boys' sweets, "particularly if they were chocolate". But there was drama, too. At nine, he was cast in the school's adaptation of Maeterlinck's The Bluebird "and I was just suffused with the pleasure of being in the right place". I put it to him that perhaps, in a way, he has followed in his father's footsteps. He agrees. "I do see acting as a branch of the same profession. Have you ever seen a preacher? He has to make you believe." He went on to Lincoln Grammar, another all-boys school. Did you know anything about girls, as a teenager? "No. Absolutely nothing. I had my older sister, of course, but she wasn't letting on. I was fortunate, though, as at one stage I was taken up by an older lady, shall we say – she was all of 33 – and was given the tour, which saved a lot of further embarrassment." I've promised not to ask about his marriages. But you can see how a need to be loved, coupled, perhaps, with a fascination for women as something of an exotic species, might lead to quite a few.

Anyway, time to go, nearly. We have a brief chat about art (John attended St Martin's School of Art before winning a scholarship to Rada). He thinks Saatchi has destroyed British art almost entirely. "There is no way you can claim that what he promotes is art. It's an image, yes, but that's advertising. Art is understanding." We touch on his favourite directors. "David Lynch," he says, "is the great man of cinema." And we touch on how rich he might be, if only he'd been better with his money. "I've always lived according to the philosophy that he who has the money should cough up. Unfortunately, everyone agrees when you are coughing up, but they don't always agree when they have the money." And then we part. Parting is, indeed, such sweet sorrow. Or, as it might have been said in the 1990 Belgian version: "Ro-meow, Ro-meow, wherefore art thou Ro-meow?"

'Afterplay' opens at the Gielgud Theatre on Thursday. Booking: 0870 890 1105