Shine on Mr Sheen

Best known as Kate Beckinsale's ex, Michael Sheen's fortunes look set to change. With a move back to the London stage and five films due for release, he's heading for greater recognition. Here he talks to Annabel Rivkin about fame, fatherhood and breaking up with Kate...

Michael Sheen meets me in the bar of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn where he has just finished his first day's rehearsal on Michael Grandage's Caligula. He is dragged away from a table of pint glasses and actors by a publicist who presents him to me and then melts away. Theatre is Sheen's natural habitat, he even looks like a proper actor. He smells of fags and beer, and apart from a set of suspiciously Californian teeth, looks broke. He blinks at me blankly, as though we're on a disastrous blind date.

Sheen, though widely hailed as one of the most exciting actors of his generation, is most famous for his eight-year relationship with - and recent split from - Kate Beckinsale. The couple met in 1995 while doing The Seagull together and the attraction was instant. Both are conspicuously intelligent - she went to Oxford and he is a natural intellectual. She publicly declared that he saved her from a 'hospital for the criminally insane' and that perhaps he might have married her if she had only 'stopped being annoying for a while'.

Having famously lost her father, Richard Beckinsale, as a child and suffering from anorexia as a teenager, it seems fair to assume that Kate is quite high-maintenance, although Sheen certainly seemed to be a stabilising presence. The effect on him is less easy to gauge - this is the same soft-spoken Welshman who punched Jeremy Northam, Kate's co-star in The Golden Bowl, for being rude to her.

As their relationship progressed, she was increasingly in demand for commercial film projects - including the Hollywood war epic Pearl Harbor - he for prestigious theatrical ones. They moved in together and in 1999, when he was in a highly acclaimed Amadeus at The Old Vic, their daughter Lily was born.

'No matter how much you have loved another person, you've never felt the way you do about your child,' he says. He'd begun the interview by talking rather stiffly about his acting philosophy, sitting very still and fiddling with a ring he wears on his right hand, but as he talks about his daughter, Sheen's mood relaxes and he suddenly becomes animated. His voice - Welsh accent firmly and committedly intact - is wildly resonant. 'You have an overwhelming emotion in your life that is totally uncomplicated and totally unconditional. She's the funniest person I know. We landed at Heathrow recently and Kate handed over Lily's passport to the relevant person who said, "You've travelled a lot for a little person." She looked straight at him and announced: "I'm an international spy." '

Anecdotal mode suits Sheen - he's happier telling stories than talking about himself.

The family moved to LA in 2000. 'Kate was working more and more in America and I wanted to try and get a film career going. I never felt pressured into being there.'

So he lived in the Sunshine State and seemed, for a while, to disappear. It appeared to the outside world that he was happy to take a back seat, bring up baby and smile at the increasingly glamorous Kate's film premieres. I put this to him and, naturally, he bristles. 'I've got five movies coming out this year,' he says flatly. 'That's what I was doing in LA.'

But all the filming and travelling wasn't cementing their relationship. 'Being apart so much is always tricky,' he says levelly, 'but that's how it was from when we were first together.'

Their split was announced in March but this man doesn't strike me as a heartbroken wreck. Even in the early days of their separation, when her people were saying it was temporary, Sheen was clear that it was 'final and complete'. He's obviously very discreet but I have to ask about the separation. 'Ask away,' he says almost breezily and relaxes back into his chair with the confidence of one who is absolutely certain about what he is prepared to say.