Still truly, madly, deeply

Michael Maloney, by rights, should be better known.

He has played some magnificent historical figures like Lewis Carroll, Benjamin Britten and William Blake. The world has seen the Maloney Hamlet, Romeo, Macbeth; he has bounced between the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company; he has been in four of Kenneth Branagh's films; played William Boot in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop and the luckless Evans in Scott's last Antarctic journey.

Yet he hasn't quite broken the face-name recognition factor. It still comes back to Anthony Minghella's weepie Truly, Madly, Deeply - a film which seems to have entered the national unconscious. He is still recognised for the loose-limbed Mark wooing Juliet Stevenson and seeing off ghostly Alan Rickman.

But things could have been different. He apparently passed on the more wholesome "I" character, Mar-wood, in Withnail and I. And he hooked up in the early days with Minghella and Branagh, two of our more conspicuous exports, and worked on four projects with each of them. Both are still friends of his, but Maloney accepts that market forces rule in Hollywood and box-office names get the rich pickings.

Not that he is moaning. Not a bit of it. That was then and now is now. Anyway, fame does not mean happiness, or talent. And fate could still be waiting in the wings. Alan Rickman, Nigel Hawthorne and even John Gielgud were greatly admired in the theatre before the film world picked them up and ran with them.

Maloney is happy to be working. For all the historical parts, he thinks of himself as a contemporary actor, and, sitting in the Royal Court bar sipping his tea, he feels as if he's come home. He is a small, neatly packaged man, dressed smart-casual in grey, his hair cropped close to the skull, emphasising those brown eyes and his mobile brow - both of which join in the conversation.

When I ask him what he does when he's not working, his face fills with horror. He has always wanted to be an actor since his first acting experience in Macbeth, where the witches got all the laughs. Humiliated by that, the next time he opted for Bottom - "and I got the laughs".

Earmarked for Oxbridge, he baled out of school at 16 and for the next two years, until he went to drama school, worked as a stage hand. Working all night, sleeping on the stone floor under the stage, he saw the greats at work - Nureyev, Geraint Evans, and all the major ballet and opera companies.

Maloney's life is his work. Even to the point of classifying it as an addiction. "It's when your life is out of control. In order for your personal happiness to exist, you have to have a certain ingredient. For me, that's work; that's not another human being, that's not love, I love my work." It certainly tends to take him over and he finds it difficult mixing his commitment to acting with commitment to another. He'd like to be like Daniel Day-Lewis or Robert De Niro, living the part. "I would prefer to veer towards their type of dedication, but as yet I haven't gone that far."

However, in Minghella's television serial, What if it's Raining?, Maloney was a divorced father, enacting the heartbreaking desolation of visiting days. "During that time my relationship completely fell apart. I'm convinced it was because I was living a person who had been deserted." He sort of willed it. And he still lives alone.

So when choosing scripts, would he take on a part like Hannibal? His eyes widen and light up. No one sane would pass on something like that but he does recognise the need to live in the real world. "You must make partitions for yourself, and I'm pretty sure that Anthony Hopkins leaves that character in the dressing room and goes out to have a nice supper - and it won't be of human beings."

Now, in Kevin Elyot's Mouth to Mouth, Maloney plays Frank, a gay, sick man visiting an old college friend, Lindsay Duncan. It is a dark but funny play. Hidden among close, intimate relationships, there are destructive secrets; intimacy doesn't necessarily equal honesty. "It's about misdirected love - all those people who cannot have their love reciprocated. Each character has a secret that they feel they cannot disclose to the person they should."