Super Cooper: Dominic Cooper's Hollywood education

For someone who has achieved a lot over the past five years, Dominic Cooper comes across as pathologically self-deprecating. There are few 31-year-old actors who can claim a West End and Broadway hit with the Alan Bennett play

But Cooper seems intent on deflecting any kind of praise. 'Have I achieved that much?' he asks, shrugging his shoulders and looking highly sceptical. 'I'm not so sure.'

Nonetheless, since his star-making turn as the rakish Dakin in The History Boys, Dominic has barely been off the radar. He starred as Willoughby in the BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, Charles Grey to Keira Knightley's Georgiana in last year's film The Duchess, and proved his improvisational mettle as a shifty mortgage broker in this year's BBC drama Freefall. Not for nothing is Cooper currently being hailed as one of the finest acting hopes of his generation.

He's in LA for a few days, rehearsing for his forthcoming movie (the Stephen Frears tragi-comedy Tamara Drewe, adapted from the Posy Simmonds comic strip), before heading off to Toronto where his latest film, the Nick Hornby-scripted An Education, is showing at the film festival there. We meet at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills for a quick lunch and, after ordering the lobster sandwich, Cooper engages the waiter in some aimless chit-chat - a conversation the waiter seems reluctant to end. Cooper's insouciant charm is ideal for this city, and with his slight but well-built frame clad in jeans, hoodie and sneakers, and heavy stubble grazing his face, he's clearly perfected the LA look.

'People often ask me if I would like to move out here permanently,' he says, 'but although I love it in small doses, I really don't believe that I need to move to LA for my career.'

It's a situation that may change, however, given his rapidly growing profile. An Education received a rapturous reception at this year's Sundance Film Festival and sees Cooper back in Dakinesque mode as Danny, a charming yet unscrupulous businessman. Set in 1961 and based on the memoir by the journalist Lynn Barber, the film follows the story of 16-yearold Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a diligent student whose dreams of gaining a place at Oxford are suddenly upended by the arrival of the dashing - and much older - David (Peter Sarsgaard). The boredom of Jenny's suburban life rapidly gives way to late-night suppers and smoky clubs as David introduces her to the delights of metropolitan London with the help of Danny (Cooper) and Danny's girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike).

Carey Mulligan, the film's 24-year-old lead, 'was wonderful to work with,' says Dominic. 'We've known each other for years, having met one another at various read-throughs.' But Cooper plays particularly well off Rosamund Pike. 'Danny's girlfriend Helen is just wonderfully stupid - really thick and really slow,' says Cooper with relish. 'You see him mildly tired of it at first and then he just becomes more and more reluctant to tolerate her stupidity to the point where he's just crazed. He knows a lot about art and music and culture and he has a certain charm and charisma. My father would have been about the same age as Danny around that time and I suppose I kind of played him a little bit like my dad.'

It's clear that in spite of a complicated family history, Dominic Cooper remains close to both his mother Julie, a nursery school teacher, and father Brian, an auctioneer. 'They love coming to see me in shows,' he says, 'and they're just fantastically supportive and proud and uninterfering. Mum's a keen theatre-goer and watches all the shows, although she wasn't so keen on seeing me carted off in a body bag every night in Phèdre.'

Cooper's parents divorced when he was five and in an interview last year he revealed that as well as his older brothers Nathan and Simon, he also has a half-sister, Emma, from an extramarital affair by his father and a half-brother James, from his father's second marriage. Another sister died in a car accident aged five (before Dominic was born).

Growing up in Greenwich, Cooper insists that his childhood was 'lovely, great fun, although if I'm grateful for the way things are now, it's because I remember spending countless family holidays, sweating in a windowless van travelling to the South of France.' He attended the Thomas Tallis School in Kidbrooke and fell into acting quite by chance. 'I was terrible academically,' he admits, 'but I had fantastic teachers and great friends. At the time, school was much more about socialising for me than it was about learning about history and grammar.'

Cooper talks fondly of the time when, aged 15, he would go along with his friends to The Venue, 'a rather grubby club in New Cross, where the only way I could get in was to go dressed as a girl. My girlfriend used to bring a skirt and tights that I could change into, and then she would put make-up on me. Once I was inside, I could turn back into a man.'