Kiefer's story

Just three years ago, Kiefer Sutherland's life was at rock bottom. His second marriage to model Kelly Winn was falling apart, he was scraping by on bad B-movie roles and television shows. For one of the leading lights of the Nineties Brat Pack, it was all pretty humiliating.

So, when the script for a risky new programme called 24 landed on his desk - which at least gave him the guarantee of a few months' work, Sutherland admits he "jumped at the chance. "But," the 36-year-old actor explains with characteristic honesty: "If someone had suggested that I make a TV series 12 years ago, I think I'd have laughed in their face."

He was to play Jack Bauer, a counter-terrorism agent in Los Angeles, who has just one day to sabotage a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate. The twist was that each of the 24 episodes covered an hour of that day.

Fast-forward a few years and Sutherland is experiencing a phenomenal revival in his career. The realtime cult drama, now in its second series, after pulling in millions of British viewers a week, has catapulted Sutherland back into the Hollywood mainstream, earning him a vast fortune, as well as a best actor Golden Globe in January.

Now he's back on the big screen, too, in the tense psychological thriller Phone Booth - directed by Joel Schumacher - which sees him cast as an unhinged sniper holding new bad-boy-on-the-block Colin Farrell hostage.

Once the archetypal face of New Hollywood in films such as Young Guns, Flatliners and A Few Good Men, Sutherland had dramatically fallen from grace after a clear run of straight-to-video films.

"I didn't realise I'd gone away until I started reading about it in the papers," he says, smiling wryly. "I knew I hadn't made any major hits recently but it's not like I'd died."

So in the mid-Nineties, with his career at a virtual standstill, Sutherland spent two anonymous years as a cowboy on the rodeo circuit. "I needed to get away," he admits. "I was doing awful work and justifying it on the basis that I had bills to pay."

Sutherland's chosen event was roping - charging out on horseback to catch bulls - and although his sabbatical bagged him the US Team Roping Championship twice, it left him so far out of Hollywood favour that even with his name he found it almost impossible to get back.

He is loath to admit it, but his failed relationship with Julia Roberts played its part in his downfall. Although the story is well-documented - just days before the couple were due to marry in 1991, Roberts jilted him after he was allegedly spotted with a dancer in a late-night bar - it's only now that Sutherland feels able to talk about the subject publicly in any depth.

Although Julia has since clocked up a long string of highly publicised failed relationships (and her marriage to cameraman Danny Moder is now the subject of feverish gossip), the effects on Sutherland's career and personal life were devastating. "In fairness," he says, "you can't announce your plans to wed and court the media on the level we did, then call it off five days before it was supposed to happen and not expect a total tidal wave to knock you on your ass."

He admits that their rather hasty decision to get married was a last-ditch attempt to save the increasingly brittle two-year relationship.

"The memory of when something is going well will make you go to any lengths to make it work," he explains. It was Julia, he says, who first came to the realisation that marriage was something of a "desperate idea". He "completely respects" her decision to pull out.

"I loved Julia very, very much. Afterwards, there were days when I'd say to myself, you were engaged to the number one actress in the world and now it's over. You blew it, you blew it all." Speculation surrounding the pair taking drugs did not help. "I know for a fact that Julia never touched drugs on any level," says Sutherland. "And I was really angry that the media was allowed to say that and go unchallenged. But when a celebrity says, 'I don't do drugs', it just makes them sound guiltier and you end up caught in this terrible position."

To make matters worse, Roberts fled to Ireland after the split with Jason Patric - one of Kiefer's best friends. "Julia broke my heart," Sutherland said at the time. "When I get hold of Jason I am going to tear him limb from limb. That snake pretended to be my best friend and all the time he was really after my girl."

The months following the break-up were awash with stories of Sutherland's descent into bad-boy petulance, his penchant for boozing and bar fights. Things came to a head when, in 1991, he was picked up by police in LA with his good friend Gary Oldman after a drink-driving incident.

"When I was younger I thought getting in a fight meant I was cool," is all Sutherland will say.

It had all begun so differently. Sutherland got his first acting break at 17 when he won the leading role in the prophetically titled Bad Boy. But, it was his mother Shirley, daughter of Canada's first socialist leader Tommy Douglas, and not his film-star father Donald, who inspired him.

"My mother was a fantastic theatre actress. I remember seeing her do a performance of Virginia Woolf when I was 13 and some time in the second half I completely forgot it was my mother. I remember thinking, 'That's an amazing power to have'."

Born in London, Sutherland spent his early years in LA until, aged four, his father left his mother for Jane Fonda and his mother moved the family to Toronto, where they lived for 10 years.

Although Kiefer saw his absentee father Donald sporadically, this didn't stop him making the same mistake with his own daughter Sarah, now 15, when his short-lived first marriage to actress Camelia Kath ended. "I missed a lot of the really important stuff when my daughter was growing up," he says sadly, recalling how he preferred his career to his paternal responsibilities.

He was just 16 when he decided to leave home to head to New York to pursue a career in acting. Did it help, having famous parents?

"The main benefit was that I learned that it is hard to accomplish anything unless you know and believe in what you're going for. I learned that through my father on a very intimate level," he explains. "But nepotism will only take you to the beginning and give you a shot, it'll never get you the job."

It didn't help when his career was in the doldrums. One senses how grateful he must have been to be considered for the lead role in 24, at a time when, "offers were not exactly pouring in".

His friend Stephen Hopkins was directing the pilot for 24 and approached Sutherland about the role of Bauer. "I said, 'Run this by me again. You're gonna pay me to do this, and if no one picks it up, no one will ever see it?' Which, to me, means I can make it and if it sucks it's not going to harm me in any way. I was like, okay I'm in."

So, is he surprised by its phenomenal success? "Yeah. But to be honest, I always am. The fact that any of my movies became successful was always a shock. Because in doing 10 hits I'll have made 40. Sometimes you get four number-one films in a row, and then 10 nothings.

"And I still couldn't tell you why one selection of fantastic movie people works when another grouping of equally fantastic actors, directors and writers doesn't. Except that, when it works, you're really grateful."

Phone Booth opens nationwide tomorrow; 24 is on BBC2 on Sundays at 10pm.