Thank goodness for plain actors

British thesps who prove Minnie wrong

Minnie Driver snootily snubbed Dame Judi Dench in a recent interview with an LA newspaper, it was reported here yesterday.

Dame Judi would "melt into the crowd in a second," Driver said, having first cast aspersions on the Oscar winner's shape and size - thereby implying that older, less instantly attractive British actors simply can't hack it in Hollywood. Perhaps Driver (who's not exactly Penelope Cruz herself) might care to consider the case of Ian McNeice.

His name isn't well known, but I bet you recognise the face. According to People Magazine, he looks like a cross between Orson Welles and Jabba the Hut. He has the double chin and impish mug of a naughty walrus. He is Tweedledum made flesh, a cherubic toby jug, and a shoo-in for any production of Dickens.

In our dismal stargazing fixation with extreme pulchritude, you might think - like Driver - that there's little room in the firmament for the likes of McNeice but you'd be wrong, for this is one of the most prolific British actors working in America.

"I have been stopped all over the world," he says. "And people ask, 'What have you been in?' They don't know who the hell I am. But they know I'm an actor. I'll go down a list of films and they'll say, 'No. No. No.' And eventually you go, 'Well I don't know!' The other gorgeous one is, 'God, you were so good in Cracker'. And I just say, 'Thank you.' Compared to Coltrane, I look like Britney Spears."

Mostly, McNeice plays shady MI5 operatives, sinister solicitors, dodgy types in three-piece tweed. In the forthcoming movie From Hell, Hollywood's reworking of the Jack the Ripper myth with Johnny Depp, he's the sozzled police surgeon who examines the Ripper's victims. Essentially, he's the first choice to play the British professional at his most untrustworthy.

Obviously that extends to Nazis as well, British actors being weirdly credible in this area. There's a whole table of them in BBC2's top-flight new drama Conspiracy. Alongside Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci, McNeice plays one of the architects of the Final Solution at the infamous Wannsee Conference, where senior Nazis sipped brandy and plotted genocide. He gives a terrific performance as Gerhard Klopfer, Martin Bormann's right-hand man.

"My Nazi is flamboyant and I wanted it to be that way," he says. "Klopfer just doesn't give a damn. I took the bull by the horns and went for it. We got the chance to go to Wannsee to do the exteriors. We stood in the room where this meeting took place and there are these huge pictures of the people we are portraying. Klopfer looks nothing like me. He's thinner and balding. What was extraordinary was he died in his bed at the age of 85. That horrific individual weathered the whole deal."

Conspiracy has already won Branagh an Emmy. Until they introduce a Best Old Pro In A Walk-On category, McNeice won't be the awardwinning type, however. "I don't have a problem with the beautiful people," he says, "because every now and again I can watch at very close range Cameron Diaz get out of a swimming pool, for example. I get fringe benefits."

McNeice is all over British television as well, from Edge of Darkness through to the forthcoming adaptation of the Tony Parsons novel Man and Boy. Unlike Minnie Driver, he much prefers English actors to Americans. "Definitely. They're real people. The thing that really saddens me in America is that as soon as the film is finished, even when you've had a ball, other cast members are really not interested in making contact. I've been very disheartened."

His big break in America was as second billing to Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. But he's not a fan. "It would be interesting to know why everybody was there at 6.30am ready to go and at 9am you'd still be waiting and by 11am you'd be ready to go. You realised after a while it was because Carrey wasn't showing up. He's only got to turn around and his picture's made God knows how much money, and so his power is immense. I've noticed this a lot with Americans. I don't have a problem. I know it's going to put another five weeks on the end of the movie so, quite frankly, it's putting pennies in my coffer."