Rowan flawed by perfectionism

There is a great anecdote doing the rounds about Rowan Atkinson which perfectly illustrates the kind of chap he is.

Known for being obsessively private, the story goes that he is so sketchy about the details of his personal life that most of his friends were unaware his wife was pregnant until she was at the hospital giving birth.

Another journalist tells the tale of the time he asked Atkinson how many children he had, only to be told it was too personal a question.

The 48-year-old may recently have been revealed as Britain's richest TV star with a fortune of around £60 million, but we know virtually nothing about him.

There have been no glossy photoshoots welcoming readers into his beautiful homes (in Chelsea and Waterperry, Oxfordshire - we do know that much) and no lurid accounts of misbehaviour.

"I firmly believe in drawing the dividing line between work and private life," he says. The only things we know about him are the comic characters he plays, and the trick, one supposes, is to figure out just where the characters end and Atkinson begins.

In Mr Bean, his most famously bungling persona, Atkinson created "a child masquerading as a grown-up - I'd say he was probably akin to me as a nine-year-old", and in Blackadder, Atkinson's Edmund was a verbally dextrous know-all who surprised us by looking rather dishy in the second series.

"Ah yes," he says, smiling slowly, "the series when I deceived everyone into thinking I was half decent-looking." And wasn't he? "I thought I looked like the Yorkshire Ripper."

His latest incarnation is as Johnny English, the hapless secret agent of the Barclaycard ads, who proved so popular that Atkinson decided to make a feature film based on his antics. Atkinson as Johnny is his usual comic self, his movements and mannerisms a sight to behold.

So does Atkinson resemble Johnny more than any of his other creations? "He's a more three-dimensional character and has a greater range of feelings, so yes, I would hope I'm more like him."

Johnny English is a kind of poor man's James Bond, a penpushing junior intelligence worker drafted in to protect the safety of the crown jewels from the thieving machinations of French criminal Pascal Sauvage (John Malkovich), while his love interest is played by Aussie babe Natalie Imbruglia. Surely Atkinson had fun making the movie? He looks glum.

"Inasmuch as I enjoy anything, yes. I find work very stressful and I'm always convinced that whatever I've just finished working on has never been as good as it could have been. I drove Peter [Howitt, the film's director and writer of Sliding Doors] mad because even if we'd done a good take, I was convinced we could do a better one. All I can say in my defence is that being like that isn't particularly fun for me either."

Certainly there is nothing physically comical about him when we initially meet. Tall, rangy and immaculately attired in matching blue shirt, jumper and trousers, his movements are elegant, his sentences carefully constructed.

It is only when the questioning becomes more personal that Atkinson slowly becomes more Mr Beanish, his legs adopting that familiar pigeon-toed stance and his childhood stammer emerging very gently. He seems shy too, addressing many of his answers to some unknown spot on the facing wall.

Surely, you feel, the success of Bean: The Movie (it took more than £165 million at the box office) has meant that Atkinson needn't be so harsh on himself. "Well, it was a bizarre commercial success and knowing it made that amount of money does relax me slightly and suggests we did something well. But at the end of the day, I can look at the film and think it was okay, but not great; not a fantastic piece of work.

And I'll probably feel the same about Johnny English. The English Patient took eight years to make, but at least they could say they ended up with a great work of art. With this," he shrugs, "I'm not sure what we ended up with."

If this all makes him sound rather morose, that wouldn't be fair. "I'm just a perfectionist, which is good in some ways because it makes you strive harder, but it's not something of which I'm particularly proud. I would agree with anyone who suggests that perfectionism is a disease, not a quality."

Does this search for perfection seep into his private life? "Well, no, I don't like to take it home with me. That's why I'm so keen on my sports cars [he is an avid racer] because they are a simple, boyish interest. They relax me." Interestingly, Atkinson came to acting by chance. His father, Eric, ran a 400-acre farm in County Durham and was strict enough, apparently, not to allow a television in the house till Atkinson was 12.

At school (he attended Durham Choristers School, as did Tony Blair), he was, by his own admission, "an average sort of student who was hopeless at sport
the one thing that gave you status", but he soon discovered a talent for acting.

"Every child at school tries to find the thing at which they excel and when I performed, I found I could not only do it, but that it impressed people to an extraordinary extent. In an indirect way, I suppose, it was my defence mechanism against being ignored."

After studying engineering at Newcastle University, Atkinson went to Oxford to do an MSc, but there he met the writer and director Richard Curtis (with whom he created Mr Bean) and was convinced that acting was the right career.

"I take my acting far more seriously than I would ever have taken a career in engineering because acting is so personally exposing. You invest a lot of yourself in your work and if people don't like it, you feel they won't like you as much either." And does Atkinson need to be liked? "I think everyone wants to please people and be liked."

In 1976, Atkinson, Curtis and musician Howard Goodall headed north to appear on stage in Edinburgh. The show was a runaway success, but Atkinson rejected stardom, turning down numerous TV offers before making his screen debut in 1979 with Not the Nine O'Clock News. Then came the hugely successful Blackadder and Mr Bean series, while his film CV includes roles in Never Say Never Again, Four Weddings and a Funeral and the recent Scooby-Doo.

The only real blip on his career radar was when he took a one-man show to Broadway in 1986 and it closed in three weeks with one critic describing it as "stunningly predictable".

"Bizarrely, given my perfectionism," he says, "I try to be quite sanguine when things don't go so well. Bad reviews don't send me into a tailspin if only because I fall short of my own ambitions all the time."

Personally, his life has gone fairly smoothly too. Atkinson's first serious relationship was with actress Leslie Ash - a surprisingly glitzy pairing for a man so determinedly unglitzy. Their on-off relationship eventually fizzled out in 1984.

But it was on the set of Blackadder that he met and fell in love with make-up artist Sunetra Sastry, whom he married in

1990. And yes, to answer the journalist's question, the couple-do have two children - Ben, nine, and Lily, seven. His life now, he says, is determinedly unshowbizzy.

"I used to go to premieres but I didn't enjoy them, so now I tend only to go to premieres that star close friends or that I'm involved in. I can be a bit shy, but I think these days I'm less diffident."

So what to make, then, of Rowan Atkinson? He is without a doubt one of the finest comic actors we've got - a tortured genius certainly, "but believe it or not, I am quite content with my life". And as tricky as he is to interview, you can't help but respect a man who eschews the current celebrity trend of disgorging everything about his private life in order to maintain his privacy.

So would Atkinson encourage his children to do the same, should they venture into showbiz? "Well now, that is a personal question," he smiles, "and I'm afraid I can't really comment."

Johnny English opens nationwide on 11 April.