Timothy Spall is good - you don't need me to tell you that, you can see it on screen, all the way from the first Auf Wiedersehen, Pet to the latest Mike Leigh film. He can play thick, inarticulate blokes who do stupid things, and he can play sly, unsuccessful schemers, but he can never play cold-hearted villains because he is too soft-centred. The same in real life. He is a devoted family man - married to Shane for more than 20 years, father of three - and well-respected within the acting profession. The only person who seems to doubt his essential niceness is himself - 'I actually can be a bit of an arsehole' - but he thinks he's improved since leukaemia struck him in 1996. He says he is quieter now, at 45, more thoughtful, 'less voracious'.
He used to be a flamboyant dresser - I remember seeing him around Soho dressed in bookies' check suits and flashy waistcoats, but that's all gone. Today he is drably dressed in a pinstriped jacket, blue shirt and cotton trousers - I imagine he was leaving the house and his wife said 'Better wear a jacket', and he reached into the wardrobe and grabbed the first one. Rumpled doesn't quite cover it: he is the sort of man whose shirt, even while he is sitting perfectly still, can hoik itself out of his trousers and whirl itself into knots. He seems bigger than he actually is - he thinks it's because 'I've got the sort of face that moves around a lot and it looks quite loud even when it's doing nothing.' He reckons he's about 3st overweight, but nowadays he's stopped bothering because, 'If they want me, they want me and they don't say play a fat man, or endomorphic or horizontally challenged or whatever. I mean, I would say that I'm bulky, but I wouldn't say that I'm gross. I don't eat a great deal, but I drink a lot of wine, and enjoy it.'
In fact we are drinking wine now, a rather nice Rhône. He has always refused to have lunch with journalists since one reported that he burped and farted during their meal ('That was a lie'), so he said he'd meet me for tea in a hotel - but tea turns out to mean wine. He is perfectly friendly, but also quite prickly to interview - very quick to detect any hint of being patronised. He gets annoyed if people assume that he is thick just because he left school with only one O-level in art. Or if people confuse him with Barry the dim electrician from Auf Pet - he points out that by the time he first played Barry, aged 24, he had been in the National Youth Theatre, trained at Rada and won the Bancroft gold medal, worked for the RSC and made his first Mike Leigh TV film, Home Sweet Home. So naturally he resented it when people treated him and the other Auf Pet actors 'like a bunch of builders that had struck lucky by being given scripts'. He knew, and they knew, that they were some of the best actors on television, working with the best scriptwriters (Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais) and making what was then a breakthrough series. He is, and always was, a fastidious actor who could detect phoniness a mile off - his youngest daughter won't sit with him when he's watching TV because he moans at the screen so much - 'when I don't believe it's real, when the acting's bad or the script's bad, or it's pretentious or ill-conceived - which is about 95 per cent of the time'. However, when I try to get him to name some bad actors he says firmly, 'I don't believe in slagging people off.'
The issue of class is also slightly touchy, not because he's chippy - on the contrary, he says he realised as soon as he got to Rada that class didn't matter - but because his career to some extent depends on the public perception of him as 'working class'. He couldn't make all those Mike Leigh films if he wasn't the genuine article. And of course he is working class by origin - his father was a postal clerk, his mother a hairdresser, he grew up in Battersea before it became South Chelsea and was rehoused from a slum to a tower block - but he has come a long way. His children are called Pascale, Rafe and Mercedes; two of them went to Haberdasher Aske's (a grammar school); his wife Shane is doing a PhD; they live in a large house in Forest Hill; he has private health insurance; he likes fine wines. Put it this way - if John Prescott is working class then Spall is, too; if not, not. When I ask (rather patronisingly) if his children talk like him, he says, no, they talk this new hybrid accent used by most inner London kids, which includes a lot of West Indian and some Asian vowel sounds - he demonstrates, giving me a lecture on phonetics worthy of Professor Higgins.
He is burstingly proud of the fact that Rafe, 19, has just become an actor - 'He's doing his first job for the BBC even as we speak. He's a tall, good-looking boy, but he's a born character actor. He'll find his own feet - he's hungry for it. When he said he wanted to do it, I was both flattered and terrified. Because obviously as a dad I want to protect him as far as I can, and I just know what a world he's going into. He can't remember when I've had bad periods - well, apart from the leukaemia - but he said, "Oh I know it's not all been hunky dory and you've been up for things you haven't got" - it's part of the whole experience, taking rejection. He knows that. There's enough actors come to our house who don't work for months and months.'
Actually, Spall has had a smoother career than most actors, apart from his 18 months of leukaemia. Before that, his only long period out of work was after the second series of Auf Pet, when he got so desperate he was looking for coins down the back of the sofa and thinking of moving to Skegness. 'I was famous but unemployed. It got very painful and I went a bit mad.' But then he bounced back with Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet (playing Aubrey the restaurateur) and Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky. His career has always been an intelligent mix of films, TV, theatrework, for which he thanks his long-standing agent Pippa Markham. She accepted from the start that 'the standard, the quality and the art matters as well as the money. I've hopefully never done anything purely for the money.' Consequently, there are remarkably few duds in his CV, apart from a sitcom, Nice Day at the Office, which 'wasn't Fawlty Towers but certainly wasn't as bad as the critics said it was' and possibly the recent film The Old Man Who Read Love Stories with Richard Dreyfuss which seems to have disappeared.
He has been particularly busy for the past few years, working almost nonstop since his illness. When I met him, he'd just finished filming a new three-part drama for Channel 4 called Bodily Harm: 'You can call it a drama or a very black comedy - if nobody laughs, we'll call it a drama.' Before that, he'd done the new series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and the new Mike Leigh film All or Nothing. As with all Mike Leigh films, Spall never saw a finished script and didn't know whether his character would be a bit part or the lead, but he was wildly excited after the first screening and rang me to say, 'I think it's an amazing piece of work, incredibly raw emotionally. It starts as if he's gone back to his old style and then segues into the warmth of his later films.' But when I ask if it could be another Oscar-winner like Secrets & Lies, he doesn't sound too sure - but maybe that's because Secrets & Lies holds mixed memories for him.
He was about to fly to Cannes with the rest of the Secrets & Lies cast in May 1996 when he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. He'd felt very tired for weeks, and had these strange bruises on his skin which wouldn't go away, so he went to the doctor. He was sent for blood tests and within three hours of the result was admitted to University College Hospital - his 'bungee jump into hell'. While Mike Leigh and the others went up onstage in Cannes to collect the Palme d'Or, he was having his first dose of chemotherapy.
The doctors gave him a 60:40 chance of survival and told him that 'we can get rid of the cancer with chemotherapy - it's just keeping you alive while we do it that's the hard part, because your immune system is shot.' And there were some very touch-and-go moments when he developed chest infections. At one stage, they thought he would have to have a bone-marrow transplant, though (despite the tabloid reports) he never did. His main memory of the illness is 'waiting and waiting and being incarcerated. Not being able to leave your room and waiting for results or waiting for your temperature to come back to normal, waiting, waiting, and preparing yourself for facing the possibility of, well, dying. I had to prepare for it a few times.'
Throughout it all, his main worry was his family: 'The one horror - well, there were so many horrors - but the worst horror was what they would do if I did go. I'd made provision with life insurance and I knew they could survive financially - but how they would deal with my not being there. And thinking of the kids, the one truly unbearable thing that used to give me the screaming abdabs - and I didn't share it with anybody at the time - was how they would feel when I died. Because when you're the victim, you just get on with it, it's your job to survive, but the feeling of projection of their sorrow - that was the only thing I couldn't bear. The rest was bearable. And I remained totally ridiculously sanguine all through it - because that was the way I dealt with it. The thing about illness, real illness, is it sort of lets your imagination off the hook, and when you get really ill you stop worrying. It's when you get better, or when you're only slightly ill, that your imagination is working.'
Meanwhile his family and friends were having to cope with the press. The tabloids got wind of his illness when he failed to show up for the Palme d'Or, and then went sniffing round the story - 'I had cameramen trying to take photographs of me when I had no hair, and pictures of my children coming out of school, and there were a few people doorstepped - I got a bit paranoid for a while.' Jimmy Nail, his good friend ever since the first series of Auf Pet, paid for lawyers to take a couple of newspapers to court, and to write to all newspaper editors saying, 'Lay off.' But it has left Spall with a certain bitterness towards the press.
He was out of hospital in time for his 40th birthday party in February 1997 and invited all his medical team as well as his actor friends - he remembers the delicious sight of real nurses dancing with television doctors. He had started rehearsing a play at the Royal Court when he had another bad blood test, which they thought meant a relapse: 'I was forced to think it might not work out.' In fact it was an anomaly in the test, but he decided to stay off work for another six months - 'It's the only time I've ever put my ambition on hold. I thought: I'm just going to get better.'
Luckily, Secrets & Lies meant his career had been suspended on a high, so as soon as he was available, the job offers came pouring in, including some from Hollywood. He used to say he wasn't interested in Hollywood, didn't fancy it, couldn't see the point. But that's all dramatically changed now - he loves Hollywood, can't wait to do more work there and, when I met him, was just off to Los Angeles to sign with a Hollywood agent. What changed him was making two films there - Rock Star with Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston, and Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise - and loving it.
So why was he so dismissive of Hollywood before? 'I think it was the typical thing of "I'm obviously never going to work there, so I might as well pretend I don't want to." I'd been up for American films before, but I got to the stage of thinking: "Oh I can't be arsed." I don't want to have to go and convince people I'm good enough to play a locksmith in a poxy period piece, you know? Hollywood people rarely come here - they cast from over there because there's enough English actors in LA. But then I got this Rock Star script and I read it and I said: "I really like this, I think I could do something with this part", so I said could I speak to the director. So he rang me up at home one night and I said I had a few suggestions to make the character more interesting - I thought in for a penny, in for a pound - and the offer came through, and three weeks later I was out there in Hollywood and all the things I'd suggested, they'd put into the script! So I thought: "Oh this is good!"'
Moreover, he found that people in Hollywood knew who he was because they'd all seen Secrets & Lies. Practically on day one Mark Wahlberg's bodyguard came up and said: 'I just want to tell you something, sir. I went for an audition and Mark told me to do your speech from Secrets & Lies, so I did and I got the part!' Spall was delighted. And then a sound recordist told him he'd got the video of Life is Sweet to watch that weekend - that's the wonderful thing about Hollywood, he says, 'Even the crews are so knowledgeable, they see everything, they watch films for recreation.' So anyway, he was made to feel welcome and respected, and he got on well with Mark Wahlberg. Also he took his family out there, and they rented an old house in Laurel Canyon and had a great time.
Then when he did Vanilla Sky, he was dead impressed with Tom Cruise - 'He is a very charming, incredibly well-mannered, old-fashioned American boy, and very very solicitous of your wellbeing' and again had a good time. But when he returned later to do studio work, he felt a bit lonely and homesick: 'I couldn't get hold of anybody. I mean, Tom was charming, and Cameron Crowe, but I didn't feel right being there and I sat around a lot waiting to be used, and then I did get pissed off - it was just me being a moany old actor wanting to get on with it. My love affair did start to wane a bit. And also I just think sometimes there's times to be in places and then there's other times when it's wrong. I don't know if that's a spiritual thing beyond my ken - I might be talking balls - but I do think sometimes: "I shouldn't be here now."'
ANyway, he hopes to return to Hollywood to work, but not to live - he says London will always be home. He used to be a great habitué of Soho but that's all finished, partly because his old Soho friend and guide, Dan Farson, is dead. Farson was a writer, journalist, art reviewer, but most of all a Soho denizen, part of the Colony Club, French Pub, Coach and Horses furniture - part of their history, too, because he'd been there an awfully long time. 'I really loved him,' says Spall. 'We were chalk and cheese, but every time I'm in Soho I miss him. But Dan had his own personal life [he was gay] and I had a young family so I couldn't live that life - I mean, I was going home to be Dad and pulling myself together so it wasn't a period of insanity, it wasn't like from the palace to the gutter in the same day.'
Oh good, I said, because, seeing him around Soho with Dan Farson, I used to wonder if he was in danger of becoming an alcoholic - in fact I wondered if leukaemia actually saved him from that fate? Spall's face goes through the peculiar contortions that indicate deep thought before he answers: 'I don't know if that's absolutely accurate and I don't recommend leukaemia as a technique for taking stock of the way you live, or losing weight, but it definitely made me stop chasing my tail. I tended to chase my tail, like a dog going round and round, before. Because I felt voracious - I just wanted to experience things. And if I liked a piece of music or a book, I'd want to quaff and celebrate it. There was a certain indestructibility and some mania for life and understanding that had to go hand in hand with quaffing and talking and being with other people. I don't do that any more. We had the Bodily Harm wrap party the other day and they were all people I'd loved working with, but I was thinking I'd rather be watching the telly back home. I thought, maybe it's age, or maybe I just don't feel the same necessity to gobble up the world as much. Maybe it was to do with feeling there was something missing before...'
Before his leukaemia, he used to talk in interviews about what he called his 'melancholia'. His wife Shane told Dan Farson that 'he was melancholic when we met and his father was dying of cancer. Sharing that grief was our first intimacy.' She said that, without her, she thought he might kill himself, but that being with her meant 'he can indulge in melancholia because he's stable'. His friend John Sessions also talked about Spall's melancholia - 'a sense of the sadness of the world, of ambitions rarely fulfilled'. But it was obviously something he tried to fight against, and just before leukaemia struck him in 1996, Spall told an interviewer: 'I try not to be too melancholic. It's an indulgence if you let it last longer than 15 minutes, so I try to keep it to the occasional tear in Sainsbury's.' Now, he says, his melancholia has gone; likewise his hypochondria. Now he's just happy to be alive. He was careful for many years to say he was 'in remission' rather than cured, but he feels now, six years after his diagnosis, he can put it in the past. 'And I can shout at people in traffic without thinking: "This is bad karma - my next blood test is going to be a bad one!"'
So did anything good come out of his leukaemia? 'Yes - survival! And I met a whole lot of fabulous people I would never have conceived of meeting. But I think you're just grateful for anything that broadens your knowledge and understanding of a) the world and b) what it is to be alive. To be in real extremis and to get through it - I don't like to talk about it because the more you talk about it, the more it must sound false - but as an actor I know I can now understand what suffering is and I know that it's not always how it seems. The simple banality of things that happen to people when they're ill are more important than the things that make the headlines. And I delight, and always have done as an actor, in discovering more and more how complicated the ordinary is.'
· Bodily Harm will be shown 14 and 15 October on Channel 4. All or Nothing is released on 18 October