Jonathan can name his Pryce

The last time Jonathan Pryce was in a big musical, playing Fagin in Oliver, he was rumoured to be on 20 grand a week!

"I wish I had been," he said when I met him three years ago. "I'd still be doing it now. My agent said, 'Don't deny it because next time I do a deal for you I'll say he was earning this last time.'"

That time is now upon us. Pryce is playing Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady at the National Theatre, a role he first sang in a gala concert with Lesley Garrett in front of 18,000 at the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago. The National, unlike the Hollywood Bowl, does not set aside princely sums for its stars, but the prospect of a remunerative West End transfer looms. One of the reasons for his return to the theatre was that, "I wanted to know where I was going to be every night for a year".

He is playing opposite Martine McCutcheon, and when I am ushered into the National Theatre canteen, he is sitting opposite her. She looks every inch the shiny celebrity in her puffa jacket. At 53, he is all but 30 years her senior, as Higgins should be, and wearing clothes on which he has not expended much of the fortune he can expect from the West End. With his grizzled temples, he looks just the right side of knackered.

There is something almost implausible about the way Pryce is now the leading male of the West End musical. It could be the Welshness. He says he has "got as much of a problem speaking received English as Martine has". The English lionise the Welsh only reluctantly. "There are certain voices on commercials that are recognised as being trustworthy. It's rather irritating to me as a Welshman that I have yet to hear a commercial with a Welsh accent." Not even Anthony Hopkins? "That's not proper Welsh," he snorts. "That's Hollywood Welsh."

But it's also that most stars look like stars, or at least act like them. Offstage his is such a crumpled, world-weary look that it never ceases to surprise that he so often plays megalomaniacs. When I suggest that My Fair Lady will be written up as his comeback, he says: "I'd be very flattered if they bothered to notice I'd ever been away." It's hard to square this Eeyoreish tendency with the man I saw strutting his way through The American Dream at the 10th anniversary gala performance of Miss Saigon.

If Pryce doesn't look like a colossus of the musical, it's because for so long he wasn't. He made his name in classy, often classical theatre. His defining role as a young man was in Trevor Griffiths's The Comedians, for which he won a Tony in New York. He was a good Hamlet and a brilliant Macbeth. But then in 1990 he was cast as the engineer in Miss Saigon. He hasn't done a solely spoken role in the theatre since.

"I'd been acting for 15 years up until Saigon and done roles where you bang your head against the wall all the time and which are emotionally quite draining. I don't want to sound pretentious or otherwise I'll give Julie Burchill even more column inches to go on about actors wanking away about how hard their lives are. But when I saw Les Mis?rables, where the music was taking care of the emotional life of the characters, I thought, here's me doing Macbeth and there's these guys standing there obviously having a much better time, and they're getting to me and they are making me laugh and cry. I thought, I'd quite like to do that."

For the past decade, Pryce's career seems to have broken in half. He has sung on stage and spoken on screen. But it now looks as if the two strands of his work are finally coalescing. Onstage he is singing a role that has its roots in a classic speaking part, while there is more music in his forthcoming films.

He plays Mahler in Bruce Beresford's biopic of the composer, Bride of the Wind. And then he'll be seen as two Welsh singers. In Very Annie Mary, from Mad Cows director Sara Sugarman, he is a strict adherent of the chapel ethic who also sings opera. In PJ Hogan's Unconditional Love he plays a glitter-suited Vegas belter who is "a cross between Tom Jones and Barry Manilow". (Manilow also plays himself.) There is a wig involved. Pryce croons a dozen songs. It strikes you that a Pryce compilation could trounce any McCutcheon release. Somehow, though, the journey from chapel to charts would be a self-flaunting too far.