Vinnie, yob culture's pin-up

I wonder how much this reputation was deliberately fashioned and how much of it was just him losing his temper. "It was not just losing my temper. It was a multiple of things like passion and adrenaline. I am very much an adrenaline person and you get carried away with events, if you know what I mean. But I spent a lifetime on the terraces watching football, watching Watford and Tottenham, and the worst thing for a supporter is looking at a player and thinking, 'He's not trying.' The first thing I was going to do was run, cover every blade of grass."

So when he went on the pitch he was full of determination and drive? "Drive, adrenaline, passion." And anger? "If there was a player you'd had grief with before and you knew it was going to be a bit of a tough match, yes."

How often did he lose it on the pitch? "Many a time. Loads of times."

His most famous foul remains his wedding tackle of Paul Gascoigne in 1988. The image of the big man grabbing Gazza's testicles went around the world and back into Jones's home as an oil painting.

"That game was such a haze to me. It was such a misty game because I'd had a right row in training," he says. "I was told to do man-to-man marking and I took it to extremes. I played brilliant but I went to extremes. I was so pumped up."

Was the squeeze playful? George, his mate, has a seizure. "Playful! He is not that way inclined. It is all or nothing with Vinnie."

"The only thing I do playfully is draughts."

But in his 1998 autobiography, Jones maintains he can be playful. The night in 1996 he locked his mouth round the nose of an innocent Mirror reporter called Ted Oliver, he did it "completely in jest". Unfortunately, Oliver's nose bled for two hours and made front-page news. Alarmed at how seriously the world, and his employees, The News of the World, took it, Jones walked into the woods at the back of his home in Hertfordshire to "where the bluebells grew in the spring", gun in hand, intending to shoot himself. God intervened in the form of a dog: the frolicking of Tessie, his Jack Russell, lightened his mood and saved his life.

The story looks pat in print but he becomes inarticulate and stuttering when I bring it up. If you take depression to be anger turned inward, you can believe the impact it would have in this case. Among many current projects, he is writing a loosely auto-biographical film but it will skip the suicide episode. "I don't really like talking about it so I can't write about it. I don't want to go there. But," he says, recovering, " I do need to go to that table, because I am starving." Vinnie, his driver and George brutally attack the fusilli which has arrived by room service.

Two years after the Oliver incident, he assaulted a neighbour in a dispute over a garden stile. Jones bit Timothy Gear's head, kicked him and stamped on his face (Would he now shake Gear's hand? "Would I bollocks!") and doomed himself to spending the night before filming his first scene in Lock, Stock in a police cell. He was sentenced to 100 hours' community service, later extended to 140. He doesn't bullshit me about the nobility of painting OAPs' kitchens. It was a humiliation. "Brings you down to earth with a big bump."

Does his temper frighten him? "Yeah. Afterwards. If you have a punch-up and you batter someone or something and you know you're guilty, inside it kills you."

Actually, I think he fears it might kill Tanya. Although his wife looks as radiant as a model she is a frail woman, a heart transplantee who lives by a regime of drugs and checkups. She doesn't need extra frights. "That killed me as much as the 140 hours' community service. Seeing her face when they handcuffed me, knowing I couldn't cuddle her. That was horrible. I mean, family stand by you right or wrong. I know Tanz will love me for ever, but she always says, 'Now you've got to bloody stop this. You've got to calm down.'" But he mustn't - not on screen. Going bonkers there earns him the affirmation he has craved ever since he was declared a lost cause at school. Just as some artists fear locating the source of their inspiration lest it dries up, I sometimes feel Jones is reluctant to delve too deeply into the origins of his temper. George, who has been "done for GBH and things like that" himself, proffers a sociological explanation: "When you grow up with not much knowledge, you don't know how to use words. So you use your fists."

I don't buy it. I am sure there was a culture of youth violence in the Hertfordshire village where Jones grew up - his childhood seems to have been divided between urban gangland and the country pursuits he shared with his builder-cum-gamekeeper father - but most people outgrow it. Besides, Jones is too witty to be called inarticulate. Maybe something inside him was just wrongly wired. He says that as a child he was hyperactive and never sat down for a meal. He blames this for being shorter than his friends back then but perhaps the aggression compensated for the lack of inches. In any case, it boiled over when Glenda, his mother, frustrated by her husband's infidelity, walked out on the eve of Vinnie's 14th birthday.

"They always said, 'When you are older you'll understand', and you do. But at the time all you see is your mum walking out with her bags. You beg her not to go. You can only forgive them when you are old enough to understand. Until then there is no forgiveness. I was very angry about it for years. I was upset for years. You learn to act tough and all the rest of it."

Was that when he became the local tough guy? "No, not really. I mean, there's a lot tougher people where I'm from than me. I've never used a knife, never glassed anyone, never tried to stab them."

At 16 he rowed with his father and was floored by a right-hander. Vinnie packed his belongings in a bin liner and left, not speaking to Peter for three years. He took a job as a pot washer at a public school, living above the kitchens with two alcoholics. "It was a horrible time, a shit time," and it ended only when he had a motorbike crash and his mother was summoned to the hospital and took him home. "Those days were miserable, desperate."

"But I'll tell you something, it was a good learning curve," says George.

"Look at it this way, I won't be thinking about it when I'm walking up that red carpet tonight."

I'm sure he didn't. In the Zero G of American celebrity, Jones floats in the same world as his costars in Gone, Robert Duvall, Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie. Even in socially stratified Britain, where he has always, anyway, been able to hold a conversation with anyone so long as it is about fishing, shooting or gundogs, he is accepted. "Instead of being the beater, now I am one of the guns."

It must nevertheless be a terrible thing to know that what won you this status, your vile but colourful temper, could still undo you. He says it won't because there are fewer tensions in his life. But he is an innately volatile man. When I ask when he last cried he admits it was yesterday and the news of Aaron's injury comes tumbling out. The eight-year-old hurt himself falling off a bouncy castle. Jones sobbed for an hour. The man's emotions leap about on the end of a fraying lead. He may be one of Hollywood's big guns now - and good luck to him - but he is kidding himself if he thinks his beating days are behind him. The wrong fight, and it could be his career that is gone in 60 seconds.