A law unto himself

Jude Law is big in America. As big as any British actor since Archie Leach left Bristol and changed his name to Cary Grant.

Law banked $10 million for joining Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger on Cold Mountain, Anthony Minghella's Oscar-randy Civil War epic. He has just finished shooting the Michael Caine role in the remake of Alfie, and is planning to turn a similar trick in a new version of Sleuth.

Next year we'll see him as Errol Flynn in Martin Scorsese's Howard Hawks biopic, The Aviator - more like an act of succession, you might think, than a casting decision. Then there's the film of Patrick Marber's Closer, with Julia Roberts, and the movie adaptations of Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever and Lemony Snicket's children's book phenomenon, A Series Of Unfortunate Events.

'There was an opportunity that existed to either absolutely ignore and perhaps miss the wave for ever or surf it,' he said in an interview with Matt Wolf in the Observer. 'And I thought, I'll just go with the wave. Suddenly, I liked the idea of making five to six films back-to-back, which I've never done. I suppose I wanted to sort of change the game a bit.' Weirdly, he claims that the birth in September last year of a third child by his freshly divorced wife, Sadie Frost, has given him the freedom to pursue this furious activity. The recent arrival, he says, has made his children 'their own sort of team, so suddenly it felt like my responsibility was to myself. I suddenly felt like I could afford to change the rhythm of work.'

Law might be every Hollywood mogul's new best boy, but over here he seems to have become just another one of those people whom the celebrity magazines love to bait. Five years ago, he was only too happy to be photographed strutting from a party or a premiere in the company of his wife, or coconspirators from their Natural Nylon production company - Jonny Lee Miller, Ewan McGregor, Sean Pertwee. People smiled indulgently when they saw him whipping around Soho on his silver microscooter. That, however, was before his marriage hit the kerb.

Since then, his coverage has been dominated by reports of his daughter's unfortunate consumption of a class-A drug in Soho House, innuendo about his relationship with Nicole Kidman, and unsympathetic accounts of his new romance with Alfie co-star Sienna Miller. Instead of reporting on the quality of his acting, showbiz hacks have muttered about the quality of his parenting. 'It's like being followed by snipers,' Law told Wolf. 'In London, you feel in some strange way on show.'

David Thomson, author of The Biographical Dictionary Of Film, recently spent an evening in the actor's company. 'I think he feels that Britain doesn't get a lot of what he does,' he reports. 'Meanwhile, his international stardom does build. In Cold Mountain he plays an old-fashioned hero, but keeps a lot of his intensity and does very good work. How the film as a whole will do is not clear, but I think he could easily get an Oscar nomination and a lot of credit. I still think he's a big star in the making. At the same time, there is a chance that he could be another Terence Stamp, with a cult following, but not on the common pulse.'

The cosiness of an actor's relationship with the public has a lot to do with the kind of roles he plays. It would have been easy for Law to play to his looks and choose parts that would make audiences fall in love with him. Instead, he has specialised in supporting roles that have allowed him to flaunt a pantherish sexual ambiguity. He was a chilling Lord Alfred Douglas in Wilde, a snake-hipped gay hustler in Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, an android sex toy in AI: Artificial Intelligence, a crippled Adonis in Gattaca, the apex of a murderous bisexual love-triangle in The Talented Mr Ripley, a sadist in Road To Perdition. If, like his friend Ewan McGregor, he had chosen to play a series of heterosexual heroes, would the broader public feel more comfortable with him?

Aside from his vampire in The Wisdom Of Crocodiles, Cold Mountain has given him his first starring part and he has described it as 'a kind of watershed for me as far as stepping up and acknowledging the role of carrying a film.' It's also his straightest role yet: a wounded confederate soldier who treks across a continent to find his sweetheart, Nicole Kidman. 'We've rarely seen Jude in love, or in an ardent relationship with a woman,' says Anthony Minghella. 'One of the great joys of the film was seeing how much he could dignify that kind of role and how absolutely plausible he is as a soldier and a lover.'

The soldier part, certainly. Minghella's picture sees Law hacking away at a mass of Yankees, dispatching a rapist with an axe, and blowing Ray Winstone's brains out. But as a lover? The film keeps Law and Kidman separate for most of its enormous length - and when they're together, they have about as much chemistry as double maths. 'They were definitely not having an affair,' declared the woman in the seat next to me, noting that their one sex scene appeared principally to be the work of body doubles.

Cold Mountain may not win Jude Law an Oscar, but his immediate future offers other certainties. Lucrative work, and lots of it. Freedom from the long lenses of the British paparazzi. Freedom from having to make bland statements about his marital happiness. Perhaps that's why, in his latest film, he seems most at home when he's alone, a lost figure in the empty American landscape. Whether his success there will rekindle our affection for him back home is the real million-dollar question.