The secret life of Rupert Graves

We met originally at one of those film award ceremonies at which, unlike the Oscars, the main tension concerns not who'll win the prizes, but who you'll sit next to.

Fortunately, Rupert Graves's irreverence could break the ice at the bow of the Titanic. A funny, warm, self-deprecating gossip, the 38-year-old actor was delightful company. His friend James Wilby, whom, as he put it, he had "tongued" all those years ago in the movie of EM Forster's Maurice, had been placed on another table, but if Graves resented having to get sloshed with non-celebrity strangers, he hid it. Besides, he was obviously in love with the person on his left, a young, oriental-looking woman, whom, he said, he had married just before Christmas, after a long previous relationship.

He was about to leave for New York to star with Billy Crudup in a Broadway production of The Elephant Man but would soon be seen in Britain as young Jolyon Forsyte in ITV1's Forsyte Saga. When I saw a preview a month later, I realised this was something special, perhaps the must-see event that would put Graves back on the track to real stardom from which he had somehow strayed since his early fame in Eighties period dramas such as Maurice, A Room with a View and A Handful of Dust. Fly me to New York, I begged.

So here we are eating fish in my mid-town hotel, which he has walked to in the rain during an early evening break in his Elephantine rehearsal schedule (noon to 10.45pm daily). Graves, who has grown a goatee beard and is dressed shaggily in pullover and coat, looks pleased enough to see me, but for a while I fear that, with the tape recorder whirring, this will be a case of never glad, confident evening again. He seems slightly, well, shifty.

I say how favourably Granada's production compares with what I have seen of the BBC's landmark 1967 version. "I know. It was so slow, wasn't it? It was kind of dreadful, actually. We couldn't get away with it now. We forget how much production values have changed on TV. But then, of course, they had the added benefit of being shocking.

They brought sex into it, which we are all so used to now."

Although Jolyon takes up less space on page and screen than his bleak cousin Soames, he is at the moral centre of John Galsworthy's tale. Whereas Soames imprisons a wife in an unhappy, proprietorial marriage, Jolyon, in his thirties, leaves his wife and daughter for her exotic nanny, Helene. In far distant St John's Wood, he brings up two children with her and divides his time between a City job and painting. He is not prepared to suffer in a state of Victorian hypocrisy about the unbreachable sanctity of the family. This makes him superior to most of the Forsytes, but, equally, no saint or genius either.

"I was trying to make him like William Morris, part of his movement [Arts and Crafts]; back to nature, Shaker-style and all that," says Graves. "And I thought it would be quite an interesting idea to make him quite a bad artist, a fantastic theorist but who painted actually rather old-fashioned, boring watercolours while thinking he's making such a rebellious statement to his family. In the back of my mind I had Prince Charles."

The production was filmed during six months, mainly in Liverpool and Manchester. Towards the end, however, he got a telephone call to say his widowed father had suffered a stroke while travelling in Sri Lanka. As when his mother became ill 10 years ago and he returned to nurse her, Rupert immediately knew where his duties lay and flew out. Not only had he to find a hospital for his father, but he had to recruit nurses, buy blankets, even hire people to wash him. From then on he filmed at weekends and spent the week in Sri Lanka. Initially paralysed, his father, a music teacher, is now much recovered and will return to Britain next month.

And somewhere amid this nightmare Rupert found time to get married? There is a conversational hiatus. "Well, can I keep that quiet, actually?"

What? His marriage? "Yes. Well no. It's a shame, a bloody shame, but it's my ex, that's all."

He met Yvonne, a designer of stained-glass windows who has since trained as a gardener, in a cafe in his home town of Weston-super-Mare in 1987. They lived together for 13 years in Stoke Newington, where he helped bring up her two daughters, aged 10 and 14 when they met. Eighteen months ago, however, while playing against Michael Gambon in The Caretaker in the West End, he met Susie Lewis, the show's production co-ordinator.

"No, no, it's perfect. It's lovely. It's the happiest thing I've done in my life and all that. But ..."

It's messy? "It's messy." He must have compared himself to Jolyon and the choice he made. "Um, yes. I mean, yes." He pauses, laughs. "He goes all reticent."

Come on, I say, he's not ashamed of himself. "No, I'm not ashamed of myself. No, but the thing is, my ex-girlfriend, who I lived with for a long time, doesn't know that I've married and I was kind of trying to wait longer to tell her, just to give more space, and time."

But people know, I say. His agent even told me how happy he was with Susie. "Oh, I know. I understand."

He's going to have to tell her? "Obviously, I will tell her. No, I'll phone her. I mean, I've got to tell her anyway."

Blame me. "I will. I will. No, honestly the reason is that it was messy and it was horrible and it would be - it will be - difficult, but I'll tell her."

After all, he wouldn't have left Yvonne lightly. "No. It was absolutely the right thing to do. Our relationship had been going wrong for a long time and it was wrong for her and wrong for me to carry on with it. And marrying Susie's the best thing I've ever done. Ah, stupid," he sighs, exasperated with himself.

In the past six years, he says, he has spent only two in London, an attendance record that did not help things with Yvonne. Until now, he confesses, he has liked the idea of not being settled. If he now has children, he knows they will bring greater responsibility even than helping raise someone else's.

"If they are your own children, I imagine there is some primeval connection with them. I found it very easy to be very level-headed with Yvonne's, giving them all the wisdom I had. But if it was my own child I would be ..." He impersonates Donald Duck in full splutter at Huey, Dewey and Louie. The funny voice is a good sign. A cloud seems to have lifted. The Graves I met at the Evening Standard Awards is restored.

Rupert Graves profiles are often written in a tone of regret, as if he has betrayed early promise. Compare, they suggest, the irresistible rise of Hugh Grant, who also got an early break on Maurice. The meanest of these was a tabloid spread a decade back that suggested he was washed up when, in fact, he had deliberately put his acting on hold to be with his mother, who was dying from bone cancer.

What has been ignored is his career's bold recovery in recent years, if not so much in films - although he has continued to make movies such as Mrs Dalloway - as on stage and television. As well as Pinter's The Caretaker, he has been in Noel Coward's Design for Living in the West End, starred with Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh at the Almeida and taken Patrick Marber's Closer to Broadway. Unlike movie directors, theatre directors, he points out, have never pigeonholed him as a toff (which, of course, as a comprehensive school boy from Somerset, he never was). On TV, he has featured in the BBC's Take a Girl Like You and Blonde Bombshell and Channel 4's Longitude, each glossy, literate, prestige-chasing productions.

"I'm really pleased with myself. I've not had any training. I came from Weston-super-Mare, the same place as John Cleese, but I didn't have an education. I knew nothing about acting except that early on I knew I wanted to do it, and I've managed for 20 years to do things without doing them just for the money. Very, very occasionally when I've been really strapped for cash I thought I'd better do a job for money - maybe about four times in 20 years, every five years or so on average. And the rest of the time I've done pretty much as I've pleased in jobs that have interested me. By those standards, which are the standards that I judge myself by, I feel happy. The amount of work you need to do to become a very successful celebrity is something I'm not prepared to do."

I mention Hugh Grant. He says he is a very good actor. But also one, I say, who remained a celebrity even when the films he made were execrable. "Well, it's worked for him. He's got what he wants. He's got a huge amount of money. He could make you and me his bitches just like that."

For someone who left school with one O-level, he regards his own earnings as quite impressive, and they would be greater if a friend from Weston-super-Mare, with whom he entrusted his early investments, had not lost the lot. His website boasts that if he was paid for how much work he did in a year "he would be a millionaire many times over". Another way of putting this is that he has no instinct for judging what will be a commercial, or for that matter critical, success.

"But it's only when your fame dwindles that you start appreciating the expectations other people have. They get angry with you for not sustaining the image they had of you." Which was? "Well, I did Maurice and I did a couple of gay plays and I think it was because when I was young I was pretty and I was a pin-up for a lot of gay people. It's interesting when you're in your thirties and you're not the same pretty boy that you were when you were 21. I think people's anger at themselves getting older is projected on to you because you become a symbol of that.

"I'm a middle-aged man now. I mean, someone, not working on the show but around the show, said something to me the other day. And I just said, 'Well, that might be upsetting to you, but it doesn't upset me. Just because you don't want to f*** me any more, it doesn't upset me.'"

And homosexuality is not his thing? "I've swung between two per cent and 38 per cent gayness, I think, something like that, in my life."

Has he ever had a gay relationship? "Um, yes, one. I realised I wasn't gay because the only way I could really enjoy it was to close my eyes and imagine a woman. But I had issues to sort out and I felt like experiencing stuff."

He was a secret heterosexual? "It's true. I was a closet straight. I think I wanted to be gay because I thought it was arty and interesting. And also I was phenomenally shy with girls."

He explains that as a teenager he was dirty and spotty. Given that the prettiness of his twenties sent out the wrong signals to men, I suspect he is happiest looking the way he does now, which is still young.

"I just think the older I get, actually, the better I feel. It's given me the strength to say, 'If I get older and you don't like me any more, f*** you!' I'm kind of happy with that. Much more happy, much less vulnerable. As a young actor I felt like prey because I didn't know the business. I have much more confidence to be obnoxious now. The choice of being obnoxious, or not, is a lovely gift and it only comes with age."

The view may at present be a little different in Stoke Newington, but most of the time Graves chooses not to be obnoxious, which means he is using age's gift responsibly. He also taking greater charge of his life, an example being that he not merely gave up smoking but, having gained two and a half stone afterwards, has worked it all off in the gym. Assuming, as I pray, he has made that difficult phone call, there is a serious possibility that Rupert Graves is growing up.

? The Forsyte Saga starts on 7 April on ITV1.