Warren Mitchell has made a career out of playing miserable old gits. Most famously there was racist bigot Alf Garnett, the loud-mouthed, bad-tempered, working class Tory voter in Johnny Speight's groundbreaking 60s kitchen sink sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part.
Five years ago he played King Lear, an angry old man having a spot of bother with his daughters. "I know what that feels like," says Mitchell cheerily, confiding that in moments of domestic tension his own family call him "bully bottom". Perhaps Lear's daughters should have had the courage to call him "bully bottom" and told him to stop playing the fool.
Mitchell's latest miserable git is Mr Green, the anti-hero of Jeff Robson's New York comedy Visiting Mr Green. Mr Green is not a happy man. An orthodox Jew, he is elderly, infirm and lives four flights up in a New York tenement block. His beloved wife has recently died, and he hasn't seen his daughter for years. He wants to be left alone. But every Thursday night, Ross Gardiner, a young corporate executive ordered to do community service, insists on visiting him. Soon this odd couple forge an unlikely relationship.
Playing Green is a bit of a stretch for Mitchell. The old man is 86; Mitchell is a stripling at 74. Although, in his food-stained shirt and with his wild haystack eyebrows, Mitchell could easily pass for Methuselah. Mitchell's approach to character owes much to method acting. Halfway through the meal I realise that I'm having lunch with two people, both the fictional Mr Green and Mitchell. One is a bit of a misery guts who complains about the food, the other is a wizened pixie with an Australian suntan, a string of anecdotes and plenty of reasons to be cheerful.
After more than 30 years of playing Garnett, Mitchell is now hitting his prime. There's a lot of acting in the old boy yet. "You don't retire in this business, you just notice that the phone hasn't rung for 10 years," he quips. He's an actor who has always made his own luck, bringing a foolish humanity to the appalling Garnett and scarring the character into the nation's psyche as he reflected all the postwar resentment and prejudice that was swilling around in the nation's consciousness.
He wasn't even first choice for the role: Peter Sellers, Leo McKern and Lionel Jeffries all turned Alf down. But Mitchell recognised the subversive brilliance of Speight's foul-mouthed creation and gave Alf's spleen and foolishness full rein. The fact that Mitchell was Jewish was part of the joke. Although, of course, not everyone got the satire. "There have been times when I've felt ashamed. When I've been doing Alf to a live audience and he says something like 'Enoch Powell had the right idea' or 'Adolf Hitler had his moments,' and somebody in the audience cheers."
Mitchell has no time for actors who complain of being typecast. "Either they never try to play anything else, or they're not capable of doing anything else," he says, in Mr Green mode. Until his 40s, when Alf came along, he was a jobbing actor who regularly turned up as the foreign baddie in series such as The Saint or Dangerman. Alf has been his bread and butter - he still does a touring one-man show called The Thoughts of Chairman Alf - but it is parts such as Lear, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman and now Mr Green that are the jam. He likes it spread thickly, as if making up for lost time.
"I've been lucky, I've worked with all the greatest writers: Shakespeare, Pinter, Speight. Johnny deserves his place with them. It's part of that establishment thing that Johnny and I never got any honours - not that we'd have wanted them - whereas shows like Yes, Prime Minister did. It was good, they deserved it. But it reinforced the establishment idea that politicians are nice people."
Even when he hasn't been wanted, Mitchell has the chutzpah to suggest himself. He persuaded director Michael Rudman to cast him as Willy Loman in the 1979 National Theatre production of Death of a Salesman, against the advice of others who wanted a classical actor in the role. Mitchell walked away with all the best actor awards that year, his shrimp-like, Jewish Loman giving a new spin on Miller's famous loser. When he read in the paper that Jude Kelly was thinking about directing King Lear, he wrote and suggested himself for the part. He thinks it's high time he had a go at Prospero. He doesn't understand actors who get tired of the challenges. "I remember once hearing Anthony Hopkins interviewed on the radio and he was saying how he'd done all the wrinkly tights stuff and was happy to be a big film star. When he was asked what his idea of perfect happiness was, he said it was waking up in the morning and knowing that he wouldn't have to play Lear that night. I like nothing more than waking up and knowing I'm going to play Lear."
Mr Green isn't Lear, but it is a meaty role and one he has already tried out successfully in Australia, where he now lives for a substantial part of the year. He became an Australian citizen in 1989, warms to the people's lack of guilt about enjoying themselves, and says he has used the place quite shamelessly to get to play the roles he wants and feels that he'd never be considered for here. "I'd never have got to play Norman in The Dresser, or be in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? here." In Australia he played Lear 17 years before he got the chance in Britain.
Visiting Mr Green takes him back to his own roots in London's Jewish East End. Like Green's family, Mitchell's grandparents were Russian Jews who fled to Britain in 1910. His grandmother opened a fish and chip shop in Stoke Newington, reasoning that whether times were good or bad people always ate fish and chips. "I've always wanted a fish and chip shop to fall back on," says Mitchell, and he's not joking.
But Mitchell is a million miles away from Green. "Green is an orthodox Jew. I enjoy being Jewish, but I'm an atheist. Green is a fundamentalist and I hate fundamentalism in all its forms. Jews, Catholics, Baptists, I think they are all potty and capable of destroying the world."
And of breaking up families. Green is estranged from his daughter because she has married a gentile. After Mitchell married his wife, Connie, his own father, by no means an orthodox Jew and perfectly capable of keeping a kosher house for 50 weeks then eating bacon sandwiches on the family's annual Clacton holiday, would not meet her for two years because she was not Jewish. "He'd ring me every day and ask me 'Are you eating son?'." Eventually time and grandchildren healed the rift, but Mitchell understands the kind of gulf that people like Green can create.
"I was lucky with my dad. He was so proud of me. He loved being Alf Garnett's dad. I once made a sitcom called Men of Affairs with Brian Rix. It wasn't good. After the first episode was broadcast dad rang me and asked 'How many did you make?' 'Seventeen.' There was a long pause, then he said: 'I couldn't go to the office this morning. I was too ashamed.' "