A beautiful life

At 37, Aryan heart-throb Paul Bettany has suddenly gone properly bald. He's totally bald on the middle of his head and pretty bald around the sides. Apart from that, with his fine features, tall, lean frame and excellent disposition, he's nigh-on perfect. Later it turns out that his drastically naked pate is only thus for his portrayal of Charles Darwin in

So Paul Bettany is not even bald, which means he actually is perfect. And even though he is a Hollywood player, with the added allure of a marriage to the ravishing, Oscar-winning Jennifer Connelly, he appears to have made the decision to lead a normal life. He is not precious, guarded, pretentious or even wary. He doesn't moan, complain, hide behind publicists or do a big, fake jolly nonsense of an interview. He is not one of those actors who is only happy to discuss his 'process', which - however good the actor may be - is always excruciating. And by deciding to be a person rather than a movie star, Paul has given himself the best possible chance of happiness and is busy lapping up every golden moment of a happy marriage, a varied career and, perhaps most profoundly for him, father-hood. 'I'm done with being confused,' he says in a neutral English accent tinted with American phrasing. 'It becomes a little inelegant. I'm 37 and it's a little tired. You start to bore yourself.'

Paul lives in New York with Jennifer, their five-year-old son Stellan and her 11-year-old son Kai, from a previous relationship with the photographer David Dugan. The children go to the Brooklyn school that Jennifer herself attended, and the couple have a house in Vermont where they are guaranteed a white Christmas. They met on the set of Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind and both are hugely in demand but tend to work alternately so that the resting one can follow the filming one around on location. Despite his roles in Master and Commander, Dogville, Wimbledon, Firewall, The Da Vinci Code and now Inkheart, they have never been apart for longer than two weeks.

Paul has an older sister, Sarah, who is a full-time mother in Cornwall, but he also had a brother, Matthew, eight years his junior. When Paul was 16, Matthew died, aged eight, after falling off the roof of a tennis pavilion on to concrete. Paul left school, moved to London and scraped together an existence by busking under Westminster Bridge. His parents didn't try to stop him, which confused him at the time but, as he says, he is finished with being confused. 'I don't think they thought much of anything at the time,' he says. 'I think they were having a very hard time mourning the loss of their son and I think they were quite busy enough with that pain. Having children yourself, you start to realise that they were in a whole world of pain. What they went through as a couple must have been just awful. My life is settled and we are all good now.' Eventually his parents' relationship imploded, as many do after the terrible loss of a child. 'My mum has been with someone for ages and they might as well be married, and my dad's gay and living with his partner.' His father, Thane, came out when Paul was in his midtwenties, which didn't bother Paul at all. 'Not in the smallest bit actually,' he says. 'My dad had been a dancer so I grew up in a culture of acceptance about that sort of thing.'

He studied acting at the Drama Centre (alumni include Colin Firth, Anne-Marie Duff and Pierce Brosnan, but Paul gets top billing on their website), nicknamed the Trauma Centre because of its brutal, methodological approach. There was a story, possibly apocryphal, that students were ordered to get naked on their first day. But Paul was unscathed by any of this. In fact, this was a time in his life when he hardly noticed anything, least of all his own reactions to day-to-day life. 'The only way I can describe that time is to say that I felt really autistic because I couldn't think about anything other than what I had lost in life and I couldn't really talk to my friends,' he says. 'I felt a bit like I had this really dirty secret, about life actually being fragile, and they were right at that point of feeling entirely indestructible and brilliant and immortal and all of those things that I am so jealous that I've missed out on.'

Life started to look up. He graduated from drama school and the work began to come in; first a trickle and then a flood. His first stage role was in Stephen Daldry's revival of An Inspector Calls, followed by a year at the RSC. His breakthrough film was the super-violent Gangster No 1 in 2000, but it was his portrayal in 2001 of an alcoholic, mostly naked Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight's Tale that caught Holly-wood's imagination.

The couple were married on 1 January 2003 in Scotland with eight people present. Minutes after the ceremony, they were all drunk and playing Twister in their pyjamas in front of the fire. Stellan - named after Stellan Skarsgard, Paul's co-star in Lars von Trier's Dogville - was born the following August. Paul always refers to his two children; he never calls Kai his stepson. 'That's sort of how it's become in a slow and very normal way,' he says. 'I think he felt I was the funnest of the boyfriends who had come along, but then I think it was a really hard road to hoe for him. Suddenly Jennifer and I fell very much in love and got married very quickly and had a child - another boy - very quickly. It had been Jennifer and him and he must have felt that I was taking all that away from him, but he was really amazing about it and he's as bright as a kid with two heads anyway. I just tried to be really slow and gentle.' It turns out that Kai and Stellan are devoted to each other and when the elder boy goes to stay with his biological father every other weekend, the smaller one is bereft at the temporary loss.

Paul had wanted kids desperately and admits that this need could be tied in with the death of his little brother. 'I think it's all connected and part of life's horribly rich tapestry,' he says. 'It's the only thing that makes any real sense to me. It really concentrates the mind. I find the fresh, pristine possibility of children so beautiful and so moving and so frightening. One worries about f***ing it up. There's stuff it's given me that you're not supposed to seek from having a child, like stability. I really do owe them everything.'

He would love more children. 'But I cannot give birth and I also can't force the issue,' he says. 'Well, I could, but that's called rape and I'm not sure we'd come back from that in our relationship. I think we probably will have more at some point.'

The family live in New York, until recently in a five-storey house in Brooklyn. 'It was a house the like of which I never thought I'd live in,' he says. 'I remember I was like, "I am an immigrant. I'm not moving out of Manhattan." And then Jennifer showed me this house which was like one of the ones they used in The Age of Innocence. But the truth of it is, that unless you have servants or slaves, you spend a lot of time running up and down those five floors. The playroom was at the top and the kitchen was at the bottom and there is also a real faux, crunchy hippie thing that I can't bear going on in Brooklyn.' They have recently moved to a big loft in Lower Manhattan. 'We wanted to get our house on one level. We like spending time together and we would find ourselves huddled in one small room in that house. Now we have a big space.'