A Miller's tale

Has it really been eight years since a grinning, peroxide-blond Jonny Lee Miller pointed at us from billboards and bus stops across London in the classic poster campaign for

Between that breakthrough performance as Sick Boy opposite Ewan McGregor in the coolest Brit pic of the Nineties and this month's starring role at the Almeida Theatre in a new adaptation of another cinematic landmark, the Danish Dogme hit Festen, 31-year-old Lee Miller has had more than his fair share of professional peaks and troughs and tabloid attention.

The son of actor-turned-TV producer Alan Miller and grandson of Bernard Lee (hence the extra middle name), who was M in 11 James Bond films, he had performance in his blood, made his first TV appearance aged 11 and left his Kingston-upon-Thames school at 17 to pursue his acting career. After the inevitable spells of unemployment and temporary jobs (porter at the Hard Rock Cafe, usher at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane), he turned up in several episodes of EastEnders and had his first significant film role in the 1995 cyber thriller Hackers, falling in love with his co-star, the then little-known Angelina Jolie.

Within a year of Trainspotting's release, he had married Jolie, given a subtly moving performance as shell-shocked First World War soldier Billy Prior in Gillies MacKinnon's Regeneration, and won praise from Julie Christie as 'one of the best' actors around when they worked on the adultery drama, Afterglow.

By 1999 his marriage had ended - very amicably (he and Jolie remain 'very good friends' who still go travelling together) - and he was dating former All Saints singer Natalie Appleton and hitting the London party circuit. He quickly tired of the attention and, today, currently single, he is relieved to be out of the celebrity spotlight that shines so fiercely on his close friend Jude Law.

Intrusive coverage of Law and his children, the eldest of whom is Lee Miller's godson, infuriates him. 'To say that people deserve it because they're famous is just absolutely ridiculous,' he says during his lunch break at the Almeida's rehearsal rooms, the nervous energy of an intense morning's work on Festen still evident in his restless body language. 'Being photographed outside a nightclub doesn't bother me. But when people buy pictures from photographers who are outside your house all day, which really messes up your kids, it's kind of sad, really, and pointless.'

He and Appleton were still an item when his career hit the buffers. His double act with Robert Carlyle in Plunkett & Macleane was meant to deliver hip-hop highwaymen action, but critics scoffed and audiences steered clear, Mansfield Park was overshadowed by earlier, better Jane Austen adaptations, and his lead role as a corrupt Scottish hack in the leaden adaptation of Iain Banks's novel, Complicity, never reached cinemas south of the border. Worse was to come.

Dracula 2000 was a bloodless flop and The Escapist, an inept revenge thriller, deservedly went straight to video. The London gangster 'comedy' Love, Honour And Obey, starring Lee Miller, Law, Sadie Frost and the other acting members of their overhyped production company, Natural Nylon, was hugely disappointing.

'I was really into The Escapist script, but it changed a lot while we were making it,' he says by way of defence. 'That's beyond my power. Frankly, all I can do is my job. The same happened with Dracula 2000, which stinks as a movie, but the script I signed up to was brilliant.'

He is stoical about these stinkers 'because you'd go nuts otherwise', and has no desire to follow the actor-producer route that would give him control over rewrites, not least because of his experience on the one Natural Nylon project for which he did assume that dual role - a biopic about legendary British war photographer Don McCullin. 'We had Don on board and a really good script, with me playing Don, but we just couldn't raise the finance.

'I found that very disappointing, and thought, "I don't want to play this game."'

Last year, the prolonged losing streak finally ended with the closure of Natural Nylon and two superb performances in BBC dramas as 'a really nasty piece of work' in The Pardoner's Tale, one of the modernised Canterbury Tales, and in the title role of the two-part costume drama Byron, which rescued the poet from the 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' cliche.

Like Regeneration, it showed that Lee Miller excels playing thoughtful men of obvious charm who are uncomfortable with their lot. This gift explains why Festen director Rufus Norris chose him to play Christian, the restaurateur who decides to disrupt his father's 60th birthday dinner with shocking revelations of childhood abuse.

Lee Miller hadn't seen Thomas Vinterberg's award-winning 1998 movie when he read the adaptation by David Eldridge, the 30-year-old author of such fine plays as Summer Begins and Serving It Up. 'I just read it as an incredibly powerful and very upsetting and disturbing story. I didn't watch the film because I wanted to do a couple of weeks' rehearsals and not have that influence. Then I watched it and it's absolutely fantastic. But David's take on it is very different, more intimate.'

He expects that the Almeida production 'will be slagged off by people who say, "Oh this bit's not like the film",' and returns to the line: 'All I can do is my job as an actor, and that's the way I like it.' He's not in danger of taking himself too seriously.

As he heads back to rehearsals, I ask who he plays in the next Woody Allen film, Melinda And Melinda. 'An obnoxious out-of-work actor. Something of which I have experience and may have experience of again,' he replies, chuckling. 'The irony is not lost on me.'

Festen, previewing from Thur 18 Mar, first night Thur 25 Mar, Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, N1 (020-7359 4404).