Timothy Dalton is shaking off the bonds of 007

Former Bond star Timothy Dalton can afford never to work again - so why is he returning to TV and growing a moustache to play a supermarket manager? He talks to Maureen Paton of The Telegraph.

Timothy Dalton is in basking pussycat mood. He's the kind of saturnine-looking performer who suits amoral characters, most notably in recent years the Miltonesque Satan figure of Lord Asriel in the National Theatre's adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

Yet, despite the wildcat eyes that made Dalton a ruthlessly unblinking James Bond, there's not a whiff of danger about this well-preserved 62-year-old as he peers over avuncular spectacles in an achingly trendy London restaurant and leans chummily forward to make a point in the rolling Welsh vowels of his Colwyn Bay birthplace.

Until, that is, I make the mistake of asking if his only child, eight-year-old Alexander, wants to follow him into a business that Dalton, the grandson of vaudevillians, describes in his blokey way as "much better than working in the bloody pickle factory". The feral green eyes glower. "I've no idea. Please do not talk about that," he snaps. "I've never liked talking about my personal life, ever. Ever since I was 20, I've lived in a kind of public arena; and there have been stalkers, blackmailers, death threats, physical violence and threats to friends of mine, colleagues of mine, to myself. Real malicious mischief has been threatened on not just family but to people I work with. There are a lot of weirdos out there, so I'm not giving anybody anything to hang on to. Everybody gets this if they're relatively famous."

Yet he insists that he tries not to take his fame too seriously. "Don't ask me about my career - I've forgotten most of it," he jokes. True, much of it has been characterised by a bewildering, revolving-door variety. Dalton's devotion to the theatre and such idols as Olivier meant that his film career lacked focus until 007 came along in his forties with The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill. If Dalton had not immortalised himself as the fourth - and, at 6ft 2in, the tallest - Bond, credited with saving 007 from the self-parody of the Roger Moore years, an alternative career in charming villainy could have been carved out by the 20-year-old who played opposite Katharine Hepburn in his first ever film role as the crafty young King of France in The Lion In Winter.

He has been lucky with his leading ladies ever since: Hepburn was followed by Mae West (who was all of 86 when Dalton played her husband in Sextette), Ava Gardner, Joan Collins, Glenda Jackson and, most notably, Vanessa Redgrave, who became his partner in real life for 14 tempest-tossed years.

His current project, Geraldine McEwan's latest Marple mystery, marks Dalton's return to British television after 14 years and reunites him not only with Patricia Hodge, his co-star in His Dark Materials, but also with McEwan for the first time since they did a television play together 35 years ago.

"No one asks me to come over here and do things," complains Dalton, who is based in west Hollywood with Alexander and his mother, Dalton's Russian-born wife Oksana, but still keeps a house in Chiswick, west London. "My last project here was Lynda La Plante's television thriller Framed in 1992, and she called me up personally instead of the producers because they thought I only did movies and would be bound to say no. But Marple is the kind of show I normally never get a chance to be part of. If you're a boy, you always want to be in a western; and any actor I know would like to be in a horror. This mystery whodunnit sort of fits into those genres."

At one time there was speculation among his circle that Dalton might give up the vagaries of the business for his beloved fishing, but he insists that was never true. "Occasionally the business gives you up, but I don't think you ever give it up; I love it. On one level, I would prefer never to hear the words James Bond again, but on another level, it is part of my blood and my life. And it's the only movie in the world that offers a British actor the chance of international recognition. Without question it coloured my career for the next 12-15 years and hugely enhanced my earnings. Now I could afford never to work again, but I need the excitement of challenge. The idea of doing nothing is total anathema to me."

Which is why Dalton, an avid Little Britain and Man Stroke Woman fan, has grown a moustache to play a shady supermarket manager in the forthcoming horror comedy Hot Fuzz, the follow-up to Simon Pegg's acclaimed zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead. "Comedies don't come along every day and this is completely off the wall," Dalton says. And there's certainly more than a hint of parody, too, about the rictus grin he wears as the two-faced politician Sir Clive Trevelyan in the Marple drama, The Sittaford Mystery. As Dalton observes, "If you are playing a politician, people assume you are playing the villain."

Yet for years his cleft-chinned good looks worked against him. It would have been a real act of imagination to cast him as a baddie in Bond, the dark angel, instead of the hero who has to fulfil so many impossible movie-going expectations after the template had been set by Sean Connery.

"Roger [Moore] was brilliant, but the movies had gone a long way from their roots; they drifted in a way that was chalk and cheese to Sean," says Dalton diplomatically. It was he, as the fourth Bond, who played it straight and re-rooted them. "And I think Daniel Craig will as well," he says. "I think he's going to be terrific, he's got danger and vulnerability."

But it was also Dalton's peculiar misfortune to play Bond at a time when the wildcat was almost neutered by the Aids scare in the late '80s. That meant screen sex was off the menu, for a start, which frankly defeated the point of James Bond. "I think most people thought it was a pity that I wasn't allowed to grapple so much with the ladies," Dalton concedes with a purr. "And he wasn't allowed to smoke; I think I managed to get a few puffs in, which they then cut out."

But now, with the freedom of his advancing years, he's back doing what he does best: a star turn as a mesmerisingly shifty cove. "No one would force me into a leading young man role at my age, and amoral characters are always more interesting and easier to play," he says. "Those characters are much more like real life. Nobody's pure, we're all a mixture. That tension between good and bad is what defines us; it's what we call morality."

'The Sittaford Mystery' will be shown on ITV1 (UK) on April 30.

Thanks to `brad clooney` for the alert.

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