How Ed became Jack the Dripper

Has Ed Harris, whose obsession with artist Jackson Pollock became the stuff of cinema legend, finally exorcised the demon?

It would be a laughable euphemism to call Ed Harris's film Pollock, his searing portrait of the controversial American painter Jackson Pollock, a labour of love. From the time when Harris's father, noting the eerie physical resemblance between his son and Pollock, the first American art star, gave him a biography as a present in the late 1980s, Harris went from being interested, to intrigued, to obsessed.

Indeed, Harris's obsession with Pollock, the godfather of American Abstract Expressionism, who embodied the seminal period in the late 1940s when the centre of the art world shifted from Paris to New York, has already become the stuff of cinematic legend.

It wasn't just the 15 years Harris spent immersing himself in his subject, preparing the script and working with the screenwriters, to whittle a 900-page book down to a 267-page first draft and then to a 114-page shooting script, and raising the money for the film. It wasn't even transferring his nicotine addiction to the untipped Camels Pollock preferred, or the 30lb he put on halfway through the shoot to play the artist in his last, broken days.

In the early 1990s Harris began to teach himself Pollock's freeform "drip-pour" painting technique, which had earned the artist the nickname of Jack the Dripper. He even built a painting studio on the lower reaches of his hillside Malibu property so that he would have enough floor space to work on larger canvases.

Not that he was trying to paint like Pollock - "It's preposterous to think that I could ever paint as he did" - but so that, through the physical act of painting, he might try to understand, on a visceral level, Pollock's creative process, his own creative process, even the creative process itself. And, when the time came, to transfer that understanding to film, particularly in the remarkable painting scenes, which have the deceptively easy choreographic purity of Fred Astaire dance sequences.

Was Harris successful? On the most important levels, yes. Harris himself is very proud of the film.

"For the most part, I was glad that people got it. I didn't want to make an abstract film about an abstract painter; I wanted to make a film that was accessible, and when we were editing I realised that it did work."

On the whole, the critics agreed. And Pollock went on to win Marcia Gay Harden a best actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife, and a best actor nomination for Harris. But the film never seemed to catch fire at the box office, taking only around $10 million. Harris finds it hard not to blame the American distributors, feeling that they were too keen to spend money on trying to win Oscars than finding the right cinemas for the film.

Only now, nearly a year since the film's release in America, is Ed Harris beginning to emerge from the paint-spattered, whiskey-drenched, manic-depressive with whom he cohabited for so long. But not completely: Harris, with his high cheekbones, his piercing blue eyes, his cowboy jaw, and his shy, awkward, brooding manner, still has an air about him - "attractively wounded" was how the New York Times described it - which he will always share with the man whom he made his celluloid alter ego.

Harris and I are sitting in a small living room at the top of his house, which is perched high in the canyons behind Malibu. He's wearing faded blue jeans that match the colour of his eyes, an untucked red and white check shirt and a baseball cap. He's unshaven. There's something preternaturally deliberate about him, as if his heart beats at half the usual pace. He slowly taps, taps, taps one of the untipped Camels he still smokes against a fingernail, until finally he takes a match, leans forward and strikes it against the side of a beautiful, and presumably valuable, wooden chest beside him.

Ed Harris is clearly one of America's most effective and forceful stage and screen actors. And since his breakthrough role as astronaut John Glenn in The Right Stuff in 1983, he has also become one of Hollywood's most recognisable faces, in films like Places in the Heart, The Abyss, Glengarry Glen Ross, as mission controller Gene Kranz in Apollo 13, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, The Rock and The Truman Show in 1998 which also won him an Oscar nomination. Next year he will be seen with Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman in Stephen Daldry's adaptation of The Hours.