Timothy Spall - Biography

Biography:

If ever an actor made it to the top on sheer talent it's Timothy Spall. With no help from natural good looks, he dedicated himself to his craft with such resolve he proved undeniable, conscientiously building himself as a character actor in minor, often controversial productions until the big parts eventually, inevitably came his way. Many British actors have been described as a national treasure, but none comes as close as Spall to actually personifying his country. He's a plucky, skilful underdog, steeped in a rich past, who raised his game under extreme pressure and was ultimately triumphant.

He was born Timothy Leonard Spall on the 27th of February, 1957, in the Lavender Hill area of Battersea, south London, between Clapham Common and the Thames. His father, Joe, was a scaffolder who later became a postal worker while his mother, Sylvia, worked in a chip shop then, having taught herself hairdressing, opened a salon, at first based in the family home. Sylvia was the performer in the family, her own father having been an occasional music hall comedian. Though not a pro, she'd sing in the pub or at parties where people gathered round the piano. Timothy would be the third of four kids, all boys, one of his brothers being Matt, later a founder of the computer games development company Morpheme Wireless Limited, one of the world's best respected developers of games for mobile phones.

Tim would begin his life in a terraced house doomed to be demolished in a slum clearance, the family then being re-housed in a tower block on the Winstanley council estate. Their neighbours would generally be working-class conservatives, the kind of salt-of-the-earth people Spall would play many times in his later career. The family would holiday at Butlin's, either at Clacton or Bognor.

Young Tim was an insecure kid, shy with girls, prone to bouts of extreme nervousness. Once, when his mum entered a talent contest while on holiday, the boy was so wound up he could no longer stand it, deliberately bashing his head on the Artex wall of the chalet so he'd have to miss the finals. This was perhaps a sign of an artistic temperament, but Tim would not be pushed in that direction, instead attending Battersea County School, a fast track into trade that had turned comprehensive in 1968. Eventually, though, his inner leanings would out. He'd later recall one vital Sunday evening when, having walked his grandma back home across the estate, he saw an old man struggling down the pathway. Quite naturally, Tim began to ape the man's tortured walk, to wonder what he felt like, to empathise. This he'd later see as the start of his life in acting.

As a teen, Spall was a cadet in the Third Royal Tank Regiment, based at Clapham Junction, pursuing things military three nights a week. He was the lead drummer in their marching band, went on manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain and had ambitions to drive a tank. He also had a clear and burgeoning artistic side, but this seemed to offer no future. When he left school with a single O-Level in art, he decided to take the practical route and join the army, but was rejected for being overweight. This pushed him back towards art. A big fan of Max Ernst and the surrealists, he considered applying for Leeds College of Art, making money on the side by working at a Battersea fairground. What drew him into acting was a school performance of The Wizard Of Oz. Volunteering his services he appeared before a big audience for the first time, won some big laughs as the Cowardly Lion, and a big cheer at the end. This kind of approval was new to a kid described by his older self as "fat, lazy and useless". Indeed, it was irresistible. He was hooked. When a female teacher recommended that he try enrolling at the National Youth Theatre, he went for it, auditioned and was accepted.

. This would be a life-changer for Spall. He'd later recall how he'd seen Olivier's Richard III on TV in the 1960s, how he'd been "amazed, frightened and turned on". Now, at the National Youth Theatre, he'd quickly realise that stage-acting wasn't simply about dressing up and taking the applause. Further education would be necessary if he was to progress, he'd have to make up for his failure at Battersea County, and so he threw himself into a tough course of cultural self-improvement, reading The Lord Of The Rings and the Gormenghast trilogy, Gunther Grass and Dostoevsky, even Mein Kampf. He'd cross the river to catch up on foreign films, one striking example being Fassbinder's Fear Eats The Soul. His work would pay off. After a year at the NYT, during which he'd appear in a staging of Willis Hall's recent hit Stag Night, he'd apply to RADA and, after the usual painful round of auditions, he'd be taken on, one of the few working-class lads to have made it that far. Just finishing her course as Spall arrived would be Imelda Staunton. In the year above him would be Juliet Stevenson , Anton Lesser and Edward Tudor Pole. In Spall's own class would be Clare Dow and Michael Simkins. Together they 'd perform exercises from Stanislavsky, study realist, contemporary and classical texts, Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy, comedy and improv. They'd train their voices to increase power and give them mastery over unfamiliar accents. There'd be breathing work and body work, tumbling and stage combat, they'd learn the Alexander technique to build strength and alleviate stress, they'd learn to act for the microphone and the camera.

It was tough going, but the "fat, lazy and useless" Spall, honed physically and mentally by the work, was a revelation in his attitude, his work-ethic and his natural talent. Becoming the star of his year, he'd take the leads in Macbeth and Othello and on graduation in 1978 would win the Bancroft gold medal. It was amazing to think that on his first day at RADA, turning up in hand-painted platforms and his mum's jumper and carrying a paper bag containing his ballet tights, Spall had been mistaken for a window cleaner.

For experience, Spall would immediately take a place with the Birmingham Repertory Company, a wise choice as he'd spend the next year in a wildly varied array of plays. He'd play Baptista in the Shakespearian musical Kiss Me Kate, and the ingratiating, socially ambitious buffoon Graziano in Arnold Wesker's The Merchant, a rewrite of The Merchant Of Venice that saw Shylock as gregarious, cultivated and beset by philistines. It was a brave production, using background slide projections of Venice and historically accurate costumes, and it was, of course, hugely controversial, Wesker being rejected many times before putting on this Birmingham premiere. Best of all would be David Edgar's Mary Barnes, another controversial piece where Patti Love would play the artist-poet of the title, suffering horribly from schizophrenia at a time when the condition was not understood, then finding some degree of solace in a commune employing the theories of radical psychologist RD Laing. Love would spatter the audience while finger-painting, scream and attack people and, at one point, enter naked and seemingly smeared in her own excrement. With Spall as mental hospital inmate Laurence, Simon Callow as Eddie and Peter Farago directing, the play would be a sensation and be taken down to the Royal Court Theatre, giving Spall his professional London stage debut. He'd also score a little-seen screen debut in The Life Story Of Baal, a British Film Institute production of the Brecht play, where Neil Johnston would play the dissolute and murderous poet, Spall would be Lupu and Jim Broadbent would take a tiny role as a woodcutter. Spall would soon pop up again in The Who's Quadrophenia, alongside Sting and Phil Daniels, as well as Phil Davis, Ray Winstone and Gary Holton. Early in the movie, Daniels would, as usual, be skiving off work. This time he's in his company's projection room, playing cards with a sweaty and foul-mouthed Spall, a projectionist who'd rather concentrate on the cards than run the corporate film for the impatient managers sat in the screening-room. Spall's only onscreen for about 30 seconds, but still manages to fire off a casually aggressive "F***!" and "Bollocks!". Sadly, though he'd also score a part in ABC's SOS Titanic, starring David Janssen and Susan Saint James plus the great thespians David Warner, Helen Mirren and Ian Holm, poor Tim would hit the cutting-room floor.

Having been top man at RADA then outstanding in Birmingham Rep's eye-catching productions of The Merchant and Mary Barnes, Spall was seen as hot stuff in the world of theatre, so much so that Trevor Nunn would, in 1979, bring him in to the Royal Shakespeare Company where he'd join the illustrious likes of Janet Suzman, Michael Pennington, Alan Howard, Billie Whitelaw and Judi Dench. Here his first appearance would be as Peter Simple in Nunn's own production of The Merry Wives Of Windsor, with Bob Peck and Ben Kingsley. Then there'd be Cymbeline, with Jeffrey Dench in the title role and his sister Judi as Imogen, Peck and Kingsley appearing further down the bill, with Spall and David Threlfall as First and Second Lords respectively. Next there'd be the European premiere of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide which had taken the rise out of the Russian revolution and consequently been banned by Stalin. Where Merry Wives and Cymbeline had been staged at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, The Suicide would be played in the smaller The Other Place, and Spall would remain here for a second shot at Baal, this time playing Mech and Bollebol, and Nunn's adaptation of Three Sisters. Three Sisters was in fact an important production for the RSC. Nunn had been pestering RSC star Ian McKellen to form a small-scale touring company under the RSC banner and McKellen had, in 1978, accepted. Three Sisters would be this RSC off-shoot's first production and, employing John Napier's portable stage, would sell out at twenty venues across the nation. When the play was staged at The Other Place in 1979, Spall would take over from McKellen as Andrei, the play being filmed by ITV and screened in 1981, with Spall's three sisters being played by Suzanne Bertish, Janet Dale and Emily Richard.

During this first season with the RSC, Spall would make his TV debut in Peter Durrant's extraordinary The Brylcreem Boys, part of the BBC2 Playhouse series. Here a WW2 sentry with mild frostbite is put into a cottage hospital housing RAF soldiers who've cracked under pressure and are thus seen to have no moral fibre. The most lively of them is Spall's Shorty, a haggard, twitchy, sniffling Londoner with a flight jacket over his pyjamas, who welcomes the newcomer but is most annoyed when he finds he's not the tail-gunner requested. That night the sentry sees why this is as the men form a long block of chairs in the middle of the ward and play out a harrowing bombing mission, each of them reliving their own breakdown. It was immensely powerful stuff with Spall painfully convincing as he stares into space, voicing silently to himself in some weird ecstasy. With his crazed intensity and wolfish smile he recalled the young John Cassavetes and proved himself to be the immediate precursor to two other aggressively ambitious south Londoners about to make their mark - Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. After Mary Barnes he was clearly already adept at lending humanity to the deranged and benighted.

1980 would see Spall return to London with the RSC to reprise Merry Wives at the Aldwych, then The Suicide, Baal and Three Sisters at the Warehouse. The same year at the Aldwych, Nunn would launch his ambitious production of Nicholas Nickleby, with Roger Rees as Nickleby and David Threlfall as Smike, a lavish eight-hour epic adapted by David Edgar and played over two nights, Spall playing Young Wackford and Mr Folair. A huge success, the play would win five Tonys when taken to Broadway, but by then Spall had left the company.

On TV, 1980 would see Spall in a BBC production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Richard Eyre and starring his RSC colleagues Judi Dench and Anton Lesser, Spall playing the accident-prone clerk Epihkodov and, for his comic efforts, being compared to Norman Wisdom. Then would come the high quality Play For Today, The Vanishing Army, with Ian McKellen and Bill Paterson, examining the harsh treatment meted out to British NCOs. Following these, in 1981, would come Spall's final run with the RSC. Having risen to leading man status with the company in Three Sisters, now he starred at the Aldwych in Francis Beaumont's The Knight Of The Burning Pestle, a satire on chivalric romance first performed in 1607. Here a grocer would interrupt an Arthurian-style play and demand that it be more inclusive of the working class. Thus Spall, as Ralph the grocer's apprentice, would become Rafe the Grocer Errant, charged with defeating the evil barber Barbaroso.

Spall would leave the RSC with a great deal more than just memories and experience. He'd also have a new bride. While playing in The Knight Of The Burning Pestle, Spall was renting a flat from a friend and, one evening, a friend of that friend, named Shane, came to see the show. Later that night Tim and Shane would meet, get on well and begin dating. Shane would say later that, as Tim's dad was dying of cancer at the time, the sharing of his grief was their first intimacy. Four months later, Tim would propose and they'd be married, together raising daughters Pascale and Mercedes, and son Rafe, named after Spall's most recent lead character.

1982 would see Spall continue his stage career with Aunt Mary, written by Pam Gems who also penned the hit Piaf. This was another controversial number where Alfred Marks would play the title character, a cigar-smoking bisexual drag queen who, along with a group of transvestites, runs a theatre cafe and literary salon out of a garage near Birmingham. Spall, as hetero poet Martin, would bring chaos to their cosy lives when he appears with his TV producer girlfriend and discovers that Marks and his boyfriend have been secretly writing a series of hits Regency romances. A wild plot would include attempted murder and suicide, a nude bath scene and a polygamous wedding. Besides this, though, he would now concentrate mainly on film, and on TV in particular.

Next he'd appear alongside Gary Oldman in Channel 4's tough drama Remembrance where a group of sailors would enjoy and endure their last night in Plymouth before embarking on a 6-month NATO exercise. Then there'd be the Play for Today, A Cotswold Death, an Agatha Christie pastiche where Spall would be sergeant to Ian Richardson's inspector. He'd also gain a small spot as a policeman in Clive Donner's expensive adaptation of Oliver Twist, with George C Scott as Fagin, Tim Curry as Bill Sikes and Cherie Lunghi as his Nancy. Also featuring would be Michael Hordern, Timothy West and Quadrophenia star Phil Davis. Hordern would also feature, quite brilliantly, in The Missionary, where Michael Palin would return form Africa and be ordered to save fallen women in the slums of London, being seduced by Maggie Smith along the way. Spall would appear as Parswell, the manservant of Phoebe Nicholls, Palin's filing-obsessed fiancee.

. More important, though, far more important would be another BBC play in which Spall starred in 1982. This was Home Sweet Home, concerning the lives of three Hitchin postmen and written and directed by Mike Leigh. Dealing with regret, frustration and painful normality, this would see marriages and friendships slowly disintegrate through infidelity and neglect, Spall playing the lazy, morose Gordon, his refusal to have kids turning his marriage to Kay Stonham into an ongoing slanging-match. Also featuring would be Frances Barber, who'd play one of the street girls in The Missionary and, as one of the family's best friends, would be a regular visitor to the Spall household over the years. Of course, Spall's working relationship with Leigh would prove to be immensely fruitful.

Spall's next TV outing would be the BBC's harrowing Guests Of The Nation, set in the early 1900s, where he'd play one of two British soldiers captured by Irish paramilitaries. Over time they get friendly with their captors and the Irish locals, but then the order is given for their summary execution, Spall delivering a heartbreaking and futile appeal to his new "chums". Onstage there'd be a return to the National Theatre when he joined the cast of Saint Joan at the Olivier. Directed by Ronald Eyre, this would see him as the Dauphin, alongside Frances de la Tour and Cyril Cusack. The same year, 1984, would see another production at the Olivier when he appeared in Machiavelli's Mandragola. Filled with songs and robust action, this would see the young Callimaco, played by Nicky Henson, fall for the wife of an aging lawyer and hire Spall's artful trickster Ligurio to help him win her. The plot they conceive is for Henson to pretend to be a doctor with a potion that can make the so-far barren wife conceive. Problem is, the first guy to sleep with her after she takes the potion will die. Henson, naturally, volunteers for that fatal mission.

Before these runs at the Olivier, though, would come Spall's first taste of real fame.

This came with the hit TV show Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, created by celebrated comedy writers Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, and also Franc Roddam who'd earlier directed Spall in Quadrophenia. The first series, screened between November, 1983, and February, 1984, would see Spall as one of a disparate band of British workers who escape strife-torn Blighty to find a job on a construction site in Dusseldorf. Also in the gang would be Kevin Whately, Pat Roach, wideboy Gary Holton and Jimmy Nail's Oz, a big lunk who's always getting the guys into improbable scrapes. Spall himself would play motorbike-loving electrician Barry. Lonely, deluded, earnest and tragi-comic, his misery compounded by a Black Country accent straight out of Tipton, he'd be the butt of many a joke for being boring and over-pessimistic.

. After his run at the Olivier, Mandragola taking him through to October, 1984, Spall would appear at the Almeida once again, this time with his friend John Sessions in Man Equals Man. His next screen appearance, oddly given that he was now in his late twenties, would see him as a schoolboy. This was LWT's Dutch Girls where teacher Bill Paterson would take a group of public school sixth-formers on a hockey trip to Amsterdam. The boys, naturally, are more interested in smoking pot, drinking beer and getting laid than bullying-off, all except a shy and moody Colin Firth, who's really looking for love. All of them look jealously on team goalie Spall. With his tie down and cap skew-whiff, he's a naughty schoolboy direct from the Beano, but public school has not drained his sense of independence and, despite his leather jacket and checked trousers, he's confident enough to be a big hit with the girls at the disco. Following this would come a Hollywood debut with The Bride, like Quadrophenia directed by Franc Roddam and starring Sting (Phil Daniels would also feature). This was a rewrite of The Bride Of Frankenstein, with Sting creating monster Clancy Brown then, disgusted by his creation's appearance, having another go and creating the perfect woman in the shape of Jennifer Beals. Beals is intended for Brown but rejects him, causing Brown to go insane and slaughter Sting's helpers, doctor Quentin Crisp and an Igor-like Spall. Back on TV he'd reunite with Ronald Eyre for the BBC play a Crack In the Ice, co-starring Bryan Pringle, Peter Postlethwaite and Freddie Jones and set in St Petersburg in 1839.

Between February and May of 1986 another thirteen episodes of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet would be screened. This time the boys would reunite to work on Spall's house, then on a country mansion, then move on to Spain, the usual chaos interrupting the luckless Spall's plans to get married. Again the series would prove hugely popular, but Spall now found himself in an unenviable position. He was famous, sure, but unemployed with a wife and three kids to look after, and a '70,000 tax bill.

Worse, he'd been so convincing as Barry that most producers and casting directors, ignorant of his high-calibre thespian background, thought that he was really just a dim Brummie who'd lucked out. Fans shouting "Barry!" at him in the street brought an extra edge to his frustration. He actually thought of packing it all in and leaving London.

. His problems would last through 1986 and 1987, work coming only in dribs and drabs. April, 1986, would see him back at Birmingham Rep in Heavenly Bodies, once more directed by Peter Farago. Here he'd star as Dion Boucicault, one of the great personalities of Victorian theatre, whose sensational dramas saved him more than once from bankruptcy brought on by his lavish lifestyle (he was also, as a pioneer of copyright laws and the royalty system, a hero for playwrights). He'd then move up to Edinburgh where he'd perform in Screamers at the small Playhouse Studio Theatre. This told the tale of a gay hairdressers' in the 1960s where Spall would play the unattractive chief charge hand at the Cut And Cum again salon, taking in hand young apprentice Dominic Keating. Sad and nostalgic, it was also intense and very funny. Onscreen, the same year would bring Ken Russell's gloriously over-the-top Gothic, concerning that famous literary occasion in 1816 when Byron, Percy Shelley, Shelley's fiancee Mary Godwin and John Polidori convened at the Villa Deodati, and Frankenstein and The Vampyre were conceived. Gabriel Byrne would play Byron, with Julian Sands as Shelley and Natasha Richardson as Godwin, with Spall as Polidori, a needy soul squirming as he watches the others indulge in group sex and, attempting to seize their attention, drinking leeches and impaling his own hand on a nail, then claiming to have been attacked by a vampire. He was also painfully guilt-ridden by his own sexuality, though that wouldn't stop him, it was heavily implied, nipping off for some forbidden nookie with his hero Byron.

1987 would be harder still. There'd be the BBC's controversial musical comedy Body Contact, where a London cabbie would help a dancer in her quest to destroy her gangster ex-lover, with Joely Richardson, sister of Spall's recent co-star Natasha, taking the lead. There'd be the short The Nihilist's Double Vision, based on a story by Martin Amis and co-starring Graham Stark, Clive Mantle and Caroline Quentin, where a difficult projectionist would cause havoc in a cinema. And there'd be a bit of voiceover work, but Spall was down and on the verge of being out.

Thankfully, the following year would see his career begin to turn around on every front. Onstage he'd hook up with Mike Leigh again for Smelling A Rat at the Hampstead Theatre where Leigh had been a fixture throughout the 1980s. A black comedy farce, this would see Spall as Vic Maggot, second-in-command of a pest control company called Vermination.

With the boss on holiday, Vic and his wife Charmaine check on his place, not realising that the boss has returned early and is hiding in the bedroom wardrobe. When the boss's son turns up, Spall and the missus hide in another wardrobe and everyone's freaked out by what they see and hear. Spall's Maggot would be a brilliant creation, an idiosyncratic working-class upstart with verbal pretensions, who loves words but often gets them comically wrong. Leigh would say that Spall worked well within his collaborative working system as he was a young actor who'd go out and actively seek new material he could bring to the rehearsal room. For his part, Spall liked Leigh's Dickensian habit of giving epic lives to small people. Beyond this, they shared a RADA/RSC background.

. On TV, Spall would see more success with Michael Simpson's well-received adaptation of RC Sherriff's WW1 drama Journey's End. Here Jeremy Northam would lay Stanhope, the former public school golden boy broken by life in the trenches and rocked by the arrival of Mark Payton's new recruit, a junior who hero-worships him. Spall would make the most of the prime role of Trotter, a cheery, chubby lieutenant who shows Payton the ropes, relishes the rations and hides his fear behind a facade of jokey good humour. He'd also play a smart sleuth intellectually duelling with Raskolnikov in a drama-documentary about Dostoevsky. There'd be movement, too, on the big screen. In Agnieszka Holland's truth-based To Kill A Priest, Christopher Lambert would play a charismatic pastor standing up for the rights of the Polish people. This sits badly with the Communist authorities, of course, and they enlist local militiaman Ed Harris to sort it out. With comic ineptitude, Harris and his thuggish followers - Spall and Tim Roth - track Lambert, kidnap him and then savagely beat him to death, Spall and Roth coming over as psychotic Keystone Kops. The drama would then centre on Harris's betrayal and prosecution. Also featuring would be Spall's former co-stars Cherie Lunghi and Peter Postlethwaite. The year would end with another twisted comic turn in Dream Demon, where he'd appear alongside his third leading lady from the Redgrave clan, this time Jemma, as well as his old mucker Jimmy Nail. Here Redgrave would be set for a big society marriage to a swinish Falklands hero, but would be tortured by bizarre and bloody dreams as well as pestered by tabloid hack Nail and his slimy photographer Spall. They'd hassle her with their rude and impertinent questions until she's rescued by eccentric American Kathleen Wilhoite who kicks Spall in the balls. From then on, Spall begins to show up in Redgrave's horrible dreams, calling her "dog meat" and gradually disintegrating into a vile and gory mess.

Spall's last movie of the 1980s would be Crusoe, a big bold rewrite of Defoe's classic, also featuring Jimmy Nail, where Aidan Quinn would play a self-centred slave trader in the early 1800s, shipwrecked and trapped on a desert island populated by unfriendly natives. Spall would appear at the start as the ship's curate, nervous, seasick and doomed.

The 1990s would see Spall becoming far more prolific as the work began to come his way. He'd begin with a part in LWT's Stolen, a testing piece where Art Malik would have two children with a British girl then, having split with her, attempt to take the kids back to Pakistan. Following this would come a meatier role in the BBC's Broke where Spall would find his business floundering and his rage and frustration boiling as he's turned over by a rich friend. Film 4's sumptuous 1871 would see him running a Parisian theatre at the time of the Paris Commune, trying to make a fortune by putting on patriotic shows during the Franco-Prussian war but then threatened when Napoleon III's troops move in the crush the subsequent revolution. There'd also be the live-action The Tale Of Little Pig Robinson, also featuring his Quadrophenia cohort Toyah Willcox, where Spall would play the titular porker, "pignapped" by Edward Fox's wicked Barnabas Butcher.

More important would be Spall's two big budget cinema efforts of 1990. First would come Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart, based on the filming of The African Queen, where Eastwood would play a John Huston figure, more interested in shooting elephants than his movie. Spall would play Eastwood's bush pilot, Hodkins, helping to hide the shoot's tough nature from the cast, overawed by the starry company and looking on as the grandeur of the elephants overcomes Eastwood's desire to dominate them, his expression lending weight to Eastwood's final change of heart. A more prominent role would be found in Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky, based on the novel by Paul Bowles, where married couple John Malkovich and Debra Winger, along with friend Campbell Scott, would travel to north Africa in search of the exotic. Amongst the ex-pat community they meet the vile travel writer Jill Bennett and her pudgy, alcoholic son Spall, a thief and all-round cad who acts as a catalyst as the three main characters gradually dig deeper into Africa and are lost in the vast and unforgiving desert.

The Sheltering Sky would give Spall his first eye-catching role in a big-budget movie. His next picture, though infinitely smaller, would see him leap into the British public's affections, a position he would never relinquish. This was Life Is Sweet, another collaboration with Mike Leigh. Here Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent, a man crammed with crazy get-rich-quick schemes, would attempt to raise healthy, happy Claire Skinner and the withdrawn, cynical Jane Horrocks, a girl hiding a painful secret.

Spall, meanwhile, would threaten to steal the show as family friend Aubrey, swaggering around and spouting hipster lingo as he opens a new bistro he believes will make his fortune. Unfortunately, he's wholly misguided in his estimation of public tastes and his prune quiche and tongue in rhubarb hollandaise do not draw in the punters as he imagined, leaving him heartbroken. As it sounds, it was both funny and deadly dramatic, a big popular and critical success.

. Spall would stay with Broadbent and Horrocks for his next outing, the BBC's Nona, an Argentinian farce where Les Dawson would play the 101-year-old harridan of the title, draining the family with her endless demands. In their efforts to please her they're pushed to bankruptcy and even prostitution and, in desperation, eventually try to marry her off to an unsuspecting tobacconist who thinks he's getting a pretty young girl. Following this there'd be an episode of Boon where Spall would play a local reporter told by his vengeful boss to harass a female lawyer and her daughter, getting beaten up for his pains and eventually digging up the story that brings his wicked paymaster down (Boon himself, Michael Elphick, had been another to earlier appear in Quadrophenia). Then would come the very first episode of Dawn French's Murder Most Horrid, where French would play a traffic cop mysteriously promoted to inspector and ordered to investigate when a planning officer's head was found set in concrete, Spall playing a bemused pathologist. Beyond this there'd be Wam! Limited, another BBC production, where Spall would play Mozart, magically transplanted to the present day as a computer tycoon fascinated by sound and big wigs. Naturally, there's a big gap in Western music that he would have filled had he stayed in his own time. Directed by Anthony Garner, who'd earlier helmed Spall in A Crack In The Ice,, the tale would also involve espionage, and geese.

1991 would also see Spall return to the stage for the first time in three years, when he joined Polly Adams in Gogol's The Government Inspector at the Greenwich Theatre. A broad satire of Russia in the 1800s, it would see Spall star as a feckless fellow from the big city who, on arriving in a small town, is mistaken for the official of the title and is thus wined, dined and heavily bribed.

1992 would bring much work in narration and voiceover, as well as parts in corporate videos. There'd also be a prime spot in Rasta poet Benjamin Zephaniah's caustic short Dread Poet's Society, where Zephaniah would find himself sharing a railway carriage with racist and philistine car spares salesman Spall. Keats, Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley would then arrive from the past as a drug-fuelled battle of rhymes ensued.

After this there'd be a couple of episodes of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles directed by Monty Python's Terry Jones, one set in Barcelona, then a weird entry to the series where Sean Patrick Flanery's Jones would find himself in Prague amidst a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare and would, indeed, meet Kafka himself. The shows, involving an anti-German spy ring, would later be hacked, reassembled and released on disc as Espionage Escapades. Next there'd be an episode of Red Dwarf where the main characters would awake to find they're actually normal people who've been playing a virtual-reality game called Red Dwarf. Spall would appear as a Brummie attendant shepherding customers into the gaming capsules, criticizing the characters' efforts, explaining their lives and selves, and hilariously calling them twonks for missing the planet of the nymphomaniacs. He'd remain with the BBC for Roots, the second part of Arnold Wesker's famous Ronnie Kahn trilogy, screened to celebrate Wesker's sixtieth birthday (Spall having appeared in Wesker's The Merchant back with Birmingham Rep). The play would be directed by Simon Curtis, who'd recently worked with Spall on Nona, and feature Christopher Eccleston, Imelda Staunton and Spall's Life Is Sweet co-star Jane Horrocks.

. With TV work flowing his way, Spall was free to return to the theatre, and did so in some style. In May of 1992 he went back to the National Theatre to appear in Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme at the Lyttelton. Here he'd play the title role of Monsieur Jourdain, a shameless vulgarian dead set on buying himself both gentility and social status. Come July he'd moved to the National's Olivier Theatre for Robert Lepage's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a controversial piece that hearkened back to Spall's early theatre career. Importing tons of mud, Lepage would turn the Olivier stage into a real quagmire, the only significant prop being a rusty bedstead centre-stage., while the actors would don just teeshirts and the bare essentials. Jeffery Kissoon and Sally Dexter would play Oberon and Titania, with trained acrobat Angela Laurier as a deeply strange Puck, contorting herself into weird, inhuman shapes. Spall, meanwhile, would play Bottom as a Cockney buffoon, aiming for slapstick laughs. With the actors slipping and sliding on the mud, and even falling over when in their more abandoned moments, it was an extremely tough run and, though it received mixed reviews, was intensely memorable. At the National at the same time, Spall's recent and future co-star Jane Horrocks would be making her big breakthrough in a new hit, The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice.

1993 would really reveal Spall as a performer of depth and character. First he'd reacquaint with his friend Jimmy Nail for an episode of Nail's Spender involving jail, corruption and car bombs. He'd then pop up alongside Tracey Ullman and another Python, Michael Palin, in Ullman's HBO skit show A Class Act.

There'd be more incarceration in December when he played a cellmate of Rab C Nesbitt, driven to suicide when he's forced to spend time with Gregor Fisher's heroic drunk. There'd also be a spectacular turn in For One Night Only, a series that would see famous faces return from the dead to tell their life-story in cabaret form. Alongside Liz Smith, who'd appear in many, many of his productions, Spall would really push the boat out as Margaret Rutherford. The year would also bring his own TV series in Frank Stubbs Promotes, where he'd play a big-dreaming promoter, just starting out on his own and utterly unable to accept he's a very small fish in a very big pond. There'd be seven episodes in 1993 and another six the next year, each one seeing Spall attempting cheap and ludicrous publicity stunts to boost the performances of the usually useless actors, sportsmen and entertainers he's briefly representing. This was typical Spall fare, both funny and touching as he brought humanity and dignity to a character most actors of his status wouldn't touch with a barge-pole.

. With Frank Stubbs Promotes a moderate success, Spall would move on to another TV hit with Outside Edge where two odd couples would be brought together by village cricket. Robert Daws would play the pompous team captain, a Big I Am bolstered by his efficient wife Brenda Blethyn. Spall would be Daws' only friend, Kevin Costello, a chubby scruff with a Renault 4. Spall, though appearing to be a beer-swilling oik, is also well-read, a great cook and an erotic guy, sharing a messy bohemian love-nest and a very active love-life with a bright, brisk and sexually demanding Josie Lawrence. Based on Richard Harris's 1982 stage play where Jonathan Lynn and Maureen Lipman had played the Spall and Lawrence characters and Paul Eddington and Prunella Scales the other couple, the show would hit home with the public, spawning 22 episodes between 1994 and 1996. He'd also appear in African Footsteps, a documentary that took him back to Zimbabwe, where he'd earlier filmed White Hunter, Black Heart. Spall's other series of 1994, Nice Day At The Office, would not fare so well. Here Spall would play a loud-mouthed, big-headed, lager-guzzling lout, bored senseless by his job and seeking to entertain himself by winding up officious security guard John Sessions, earlier Spall's onstage co-star in Man Equals Man. Although the show would cover much of the same ground as later hit The Office, it was not as well written or executed, and so died a death after just six episodes. It made little difference to Spall. With Outside Edge still running and a reunion with Mike Leigh on the cards, for him it was looking good.

Secrets & Lies would not just be a reunion with Leigh, but also such Leigh stalwarts as Brenda Blethyn, Alison Steadman, Liz Smith and Phil Davis. The film would see Blethyn star as the neurotic mother of Claire Rushbrook, living in a council house and only just getting by.

She hasn't spoken to her brother Spall in years due to his stuck-up and disapproving wife Phyllis Logan, and much of the action is based on Spall's home life. A wedding photographer, he's keen to make everyone happy, difficult with Logan and impossible during a particular period of every month. Despite the warring, the emotional links between these people are strong, and so the emotional ante is high when black girl Marianne Jean-Baptiste shows up and is revealed to be Blethyn's secret daughter, sparks flying and tears flowing at a family barbecue where Spall's good heart is put through the wringer.

. Brilliantly played by all its cast, Secrets & Lies would be a big hit for Leigh, raking in nominations at awards ceremonies across the globe, including five for Academy Awards. It should have been a high spot in Spall's career; instead it became the worst period of his life. In May, 1996, just as he was set to fly to Cannes with the rest of the Secrets & Lies cast, Spall went to see his doctor. He'd been tired for weeks and had some odd bruises that wouldn't go away. Luckily the doctor spotted a serious problem and, within three hours, Spall was admitted to University College Hospital where he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. While Mike Leigh and Brenda Blethyn were collecting their awards - the toast of Cannes - Spall was undergoing his first dose of chemotherapy. For months it was touch and go. He battled with potentially fatal chest infections and was told he might need a bone marrow transplant. On several occasions he had to prepare mentally to die, imagine the pain of his wife and kids, and their life without him.

Thankfully, he made it through and was released from hospital in time for his 40th birthday in February, 1997. He'd invite his medical team to the party. Straight away he began rehearsing a play at the Royal Court, but a bad blood test caused him to drop out, fearing a relapse. Fortunately, the test results proved to be wrong, he was in the clear, but still he took six months off to recuperate. By the time he returned to full-time work , Secrets & Lies had hit big all over and the offers came in a torrent, even from Hollywood. He would never struggle for work again.

During and just after his illness, of course, there'd be few releases to mention. 1996 would see him amidst the wildly starry cast of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, released just after Secrets & Lies. Branagh would, unusually, film the complete version of the play, picturing Denmark as a late 19th Century military state, with Spall and Reece Dinsdale as the conspirators Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Also in that aforementioned cast would be Kate Winslet, Spall's RSC peer Judi Dench, Julie Christie, Gielgud, Jacobi and Mills, and Richards Briers and Attenborough, as well as American superstars Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal.

Spall's only release of 1997 would be the very first episode of Showtime's mildly erotic and very silly vampire series The Hunger. At least Spall's episode was directed by Tony Scott, who'd helmed the original movie back in 1983.

. Spall's only other public appearance in 1997 would come in June with the premiere of Caryl Churchill's This Is A Chair, directed by Stephen Daldry for the Royal Court Theatre at the Duke Of York's in St Martin's Lane. Featuring Linus Roache, Amanda Plummer and Andy Serkis, as well as former Spall co-star's Liz Smith and Ray Winstone, this was a strange and compelling piece concerning the increasingly surreal nature of modern life. Headlines would flash up before scenes of domesticity that seemed wholly unrelated, the political being approached through the personal, Spall, as Leo, arguing about infidelity.

Life was now changing for Spall. Throughout the 1980s and early '90s he'd been something of a fixture in Soho, strolling the streets in his checked suits and flashy waistcoats, frequenting the Colony club, the French Pub and the Coach & Horses. Often accompanied by his close friend, writer and journalist Dan Farson, he loved to talk about great books and music, wanted to be in company, to devour and celebrate life. On Sundays at home he'd host a big lunch and a "dance up" for his brothers and friends like John Sessions and Frances Barber. Leukaemia had come as a terrible shock, curbing his wilder tendencies, but had also brought great benefits, wiping away his natural melancholy and hypochondria, and drawing his friends even closer around him, Jimmy Nail even offering to pay for legal action against tabloid newspapers pushing too hard for pictures. And, as said, the work was now flooding his way.

He began 1998 alongside Martin Clunes and Sylvia Syms in ITV's Neville's Island, a survivalist farce where four guys on a corporate team-building exercise found themselves trapped on a small island in the middle of Derwent Water. Though essentially a comedy it had aspects of a thriller, and even a horror flick, with most of the best lines going to a mercilessly sarcastic Spall. Following this would come a BBC treatment of Our Mutual Friend with Paul McGann, Keeley Hawes and Anna Friel. Based on Dickens' darkest novel, this concerned adoption, love rivals, social climbers and disappearing wills as fortunes rose and fell, with Spall playing Mr Venus, an "articulator of bones" who sells skeletons and stuffed animals. Deeply melancholy and pining for someone to share his dusty life, he even sells a leg-bone back to a man with one leg, and would win his first BAFTA nomination for his efforts. More high profile would be Still Crazy, written by Auf Wiedersehen, Pet's Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Here keyboard player Stephen Rea (who'd earlier appeared with Spall in Life Is Sweet) would attempt to reassemble his band Strange Fruit, a hit glam band from the Seventies.

Bill Nighy would be the burned-out singer, Jimmy Nail the brusque guitarist and Spall the dim but loveable drummer Beano Baggot. Also featuring would be former cohorts Phil Daniels, Frances Barber and Phil Davis, as well as Billy Connolly. Following this would be the arty but fascinating The Wisdom Of Crocodiles where Jude Law would play a vampire whose craving is only satisfied by the blood of one who loves him. Having seduced and killed Kerry Fox he goes after the bewitching Elena Lowensohn, with Spall's police inspector hot on his trail.

. 1999 would be another good year, bringing a second BAFTA nomination for his work in Stephen Poliakoff's well-received Shooting The Past. Here a renowned British photo archive, run from a country house, would be threatened with closure when American Liam Cunningham buys the property. Lindsay Duncan would run the collection, aided by Billie Whitelaw and Emilia Fox, but its beating heart would be an eccentric and fiery Spall, whose sheer passion would draw us into Poliakoff's exploration of what photographs and the past mean to us. Also featuring would be Andy Serkis, who'd co-starred with Spall in This Is A Chair, and Serkis would now pop up in Spall's next feature, Topsy Turvy, yet another collaboration with Mike Leigh (so too would Leigh regulars Jim Broadbent, Alison Steadman and Leslie Manville). This would cover the creation and production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, with Broadbent as Gilbert and Allan Corduner as Sullivan. With the composers having suffered their first flop in ages, a hit is needed and rehearsals are fraught, particularly for Spall who plays actor Richard Temple, a G&S regular set to play The Mikado himself. He constantly worries that he's over the hill, and that his big song in the new show will be cut. Yet again he would be BAFTA nominated.

Topsy Turvy would be another hit for Leigh and Spall, winning Oscars for Design and Makeup. Spall would then move on to another period piece, The Clandestine Marriage, where he'd play a late 18th Century landowner, nouveau riche, living with his bitchy sister Joan Collins and hoping to gain acceptance into polite society by marrying one of his daughters off to Tom Hollander, the son of impoverished aristocrat Nigel Hawthorne. Unfortunately, Hollander and Hawthorne both prefer Spall's other daughter, played by Natasha Little, who's already secretly married a lowly clerk who made her pregnant. Confusion, naturally, reigns.

Now recognised worldwide as a performer of range and high calibre, Spall could pick and choose his parts, moving easily between arty shorts, indie movies, Hollywood epics and, of course, British television. He'd begin the new millennium with a filmed adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Rough For Theatre II, where Spall and Jim Norton would discuss at length whether Hugh O'Brien should jump to his death. By the time they decide, he's already gone.

Next there'd be a reunion with Kenneth Branagh for the ambitious Love's Labour's Lost, concerning four sets of lovers and reworked by Branagh as a 1930s period musical. Spall would play the Spanish court attendant Don Armado, rivalling Nathan Lane for the love of Stefania Rocca's Jacquanetta, and his big number would be I Get A Kick Out Of You which he'd perform with comic flamboyance and truly dodgy Spanish accent. The sequence would see him first in uniform with a sword, then in a park in boater and slacks, then in a dressing-gown with champagne, then in a bi-plane, all the while professing his romantic obsession while torturing his subaltern by kneeing him in the groin, burning him with a cigar and shooting him in the face with a champagne cork. It was brave of Branagh to have non-singers like Spall, Alicia Silverstone, Natascha McElhone and Emily Mortimer perform in a musical, and Spall did not let him down.

. Following this would come the short Hands Up! where Spall would play a depressed writer brought back from the brink by an encounter with a young boy at the beach. The kid insists that Spall join in his games and so the pair enact a gunfight on the sand, Spall revelling in his own drawn-out mock death. There'd be more period drama with Roland Joffe's magnificent Vatel, where he'd reunite with former co-stars Tim Roth and Julian Sands. Set in 1671, this would see Sands as Louis XIV, being entertained for three days by a debt-ridden prince who hopes to be made head of the army against the Dutch. To impress the king he entrusts his loyal steward Gerard Depardieu with the arrangements. Nothing less than spectacular luxury will do and Depardieu proves ingenious in his organisation, as well as his political and sexual intrigues. By his side would be the faithful and busy Spall.

Spall would join more old friends - this time Jane Horrocks, Phil Daniels and Imelda Staunton - when he lent his voice to the Aardman animation Chicken Run, where Mel Gibson's American beefcake fowl would help some chickens escape slaughter, Spall and Daniels playing two scavenger rats acting as procurers. Spall would then take another lead on TV in The Thing About Vince, a three-parter where he'd be a hypochondriac construction boss who, after an innocent fling, gets kicked out by his wife and has to move back in with his model railway-loving parents, Peter Vaughan and Sheila Hancock. Basically he's cursed with terrible luck, always fertile ground for Spall.

2001 would begin in Patrice Chereau's Intimacy, based on stories by Hanif Kureishi. Here Mark Rylance would play a former musician who's dumped his wife and his life and now works in a bar. Once a week he meets Kerry Fox (Spall's co-star in The Wisdom Of Crocodiles) for rough anonymous sex, neither knowing anything about the other, but one day he follows her home and discovers she's a theatre actress married to amiable cab driver Spall.

Lonely, angry and emotionally destructive, Rylance now attempts to wreck the marriage, forcing Fox, then Spall to act. It was raw, powerful stuff. Next would come The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, directed by Australian Rolf de Heer who'd earlier helmed the extraordinary Bad Boy Bubby. This would be set in an Amazon community sharing jungle space with a jaguar. Spall would play the blustering mayor, licensing a hunter to kill the animal's cubs and forcing Richard Dreyfuss's reclusive eco-warrior into action.

. An incredibly busy year for Spall releases would continue with a reunion with Stephen Poliakoff for Perfect Strangers, again with Lindsay Duncan, Life Is Sweet's Claire Skinner and Anton Lesser, as well as Michael Gambon. This would see a family gather at a posh London hotel, a chance to meet the relatives and peruse the family tree. Gambon, the black sheep, doesn't care much for this familial bonhomie, but his son Matthew Macfadyen is interested and becomes involved with iffy cousins Spall and Toby Stephens, long-kept secrets gradually being revealed. Spall would have a heyday as the spivvy Irving, claiming to be something "in property" and gadding about in an outrageous Hawaiian shirt, revelling in his role as the dodgy cousin. He'd had more fun with Vacuuming Completely Naked In Paradise, which Danny Boyle shot cheaply on digital alongside Strumpet for the BBC, both works being filmed in just twenty days. Vacuuming would see Spall as an old school hoover salesman, constantly on the job, obsessed with winning a sales award called the Golden Vac. Living his part to the full, he's manic, brilliant and vile, drinking and raging, bullying and cajoling, even pretending to be in love with a lonely lady to push her into a purchase. Then his boss, who hates him, lands him with a rookie partner, a move he hopes will damage Spall's sales. For the fourth time, Spall would find himself up for a BAFTA.

Based on a book by Stephen Fry and directed by The Full Monty's Peter Cattaneo, Lucky Break would see a gang of prisoners putting on a play by warden Christopher Plummer, using the staging as a front for a mass escape. James Nesbitt and Still Crazy bandmate Bill Nighy would be heavily involved, with Spall playing Nesbitt's put-upon cellmate, only kept going by his love for his young son. His scenes would be more serious than the rest of the comic action, at one point getting decidedly heavy. Spall would now move on to two big Hollywood numbers. The first of these would be Rock Star where Mark Wahlberg, the singer in a heavy metal tribute band, would be invited to join the real thing, Spall playing the group's droll road manager, acting as Wahlberg's mentor, explaining the sacrifices that must be made, one of them being Jennifer Aniston. Even bigger would be Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe's remake of Alejandro Amenabar's brilliant Open Your Eyes.

Here playboy publisher Tom Cruise would be horribly disfigured in a car crash with crazy lover Cameron Diaz and find himself in an unreal world where he's been jailed for a murder he can't remember. Spall would appear as Thomas Tipp, Cruise's loyal business associate, trying to maintain Cruise's position in the company despite the machinations of a mutinous board of directors. The year would end with Spall rejoining Jane Horrocks and Alison Steadman when lending his voice to the short Raymond Briggs animation Ivor The Invisible.

. 2002 would be another productive year, beginning with a further alliance with Mike Leigh. This was All Or Nothing, featuring Sally Hawkins and, once again, Leslie Manville. Here Spall would play a minicab driver, with his nagging partner Manville trying to raise two fat kids on a housing estate, becoming ever more distant and desperate, their lives and those of their neighbours being spoilt by poverty, pregnancy, drugs and abuse. Soon, though, when their son has a near-fatal seizure, they're jolted into a realisation of how far they've drifted from one another, and how little they have beside their family. Following this would come Joe Wright's Channel 4 black comedy Bodily Harm, again with Manville, where Spall would play another character beset by appalling misfortune. This time he'd be an affable, upbeat broker who gets sacked from his job, finds wife Manville has got it on with the local sleaze-bag and then has his mum and dad forge a suicide pact, all in one day. A perennial teenager, refusing to grow up, Spall must now deal with the breakdown of his entire life. There'd also, after a sixteen year gap, be a third series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet where corrupt politician Bill Nighy (earlier the star of Still Crazy) would plan to demolish the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge and sell it off, the lads having to take off for America when Native American businessmen want it for an Arizona casino. Then, 22 years after Trevor Nunn's famous adaptation with the RSC, Spall would return to Nicholas Nickleby, another major production featuring youngsters Romola Garai, Anne Hathaway and Jamie Bell as well as former co-stars Christopher Plummer, Jim Broadbent, Nathan Lane, Phil Davis and Juliet Stevenson. Here Spall and Gerard Horan would play the kind and philanthropic Cheeryble brothers, a kind of Dickensian Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who give work to Nickleby when he flees from the horrible Squeers and seeks his fortune in London.

Another classy production would be 2003's My House In Umbria, directed by Richard Loncraine and based on the novella my William Trevor. Here Maggie Smith would play a romance novelist living in Italy, who's caught up in a bomb attack on a train and invites several of the survivors back to her villa to recuperate. Thus the lonely Smith becomes mother to a new family, a position threatened by the arrival of Chris Cooper, strict uncle of young Emmy Clarke.

Spall, meanwhile, would play Quinty, Smith's driver, who's been with her since her early (and now secret) days as a madame and, Puck-like, nips between the characters, trying to keep the peace and also protecting his mistress's emotional and financial interests. After the short puppet comedy Last Rumba In Rochdale, where he'd be joined by Peter Kay and former co-stars Anna Friel and, yet again, Jane Horrocks, Spall would move on to the Australian crime comedy Gettin' Square, where Spall, David Wenham and Sam Worthington would all be ex cons trying hard to go straight. However, their lives are thrown back into turmoil when Spall invests in the tacky Texas Rose restaurant and his accountant comes under investigation, the film being topped and tailed by a messy robbery.

. Spall would end 2003 with The Last Samurai, another Tom Cruise vehicle on which he'd spent some eight months, most of them passed in rare inactivity. Here Cruise would play a damaged and embittered Civil War soldier hired to protect US business interests in Japan against Samurai rebels attempting to uphold the decency and honour of Japanese traditions, eventually recognising the worth of the rebels' cause and joining them in their doomed struggle. Spall would be used as narrator - he really does have a beautiful voice - and throughout for emotional impact. An ex-pat welcoming Cruise to Japan, he'd later take photos as Cruise worked with the Samurai and would be present at the final catastrophic battle, and when Cruise persuades the Emperor to draw back from a destructive alliance with the Americans, the importance of each moment being expressed without words, simply through his eyes and expressions.

204 would begin with more voice-work, this time an animation named Bosom Pals, based on the portly ladies and gents created by artist Beryl Cook (Alison Steadman would also feature). Then would come perhaps the most widely viewed work of his career when he was cast as Peter Pettigrew, otherwise known as Wormtail, in Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. A relatively talentless peer of Sirius Black and Harry's dad, Pettigrew was a spy for the evil Voldemort, having betrayed Harry's dad and framed Black, then hidden out by turning himself into a rat and becoming Ron Weasley's pet. Weak, treacherous and generally reprehensible, toadying to Voldemort and Severus Snape and always seeking to murder Harry, Pettigrew would allow Spall to pull out all the stops over the course of several movies, making him one of the franchise's more memorable characters. Of course, he'd already worked with much of the star-studded cast - Gary Oldman, Maggie Smith, Julie Christie, Jim Broadbent, Michael Gambon - and would soon work again with many of the rest. There'd quickly be more epic fantasy when Spall took a role in Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events, where Jim Carrey would play the homicidal Count Olaf, attempting to adopt and then murder the young heirs to the Baudelaire fortune.

Spall would play a banker, the executor of the will, who unknowingly places the children in danger of their lives. Narrating would be former Spall co-star Jude Law, with another, Billy Connelly, appearing as the kids' crazy uncle.

. As well as these two huge movies, 2004 would bring a further nostalgic step back into the past with a fourth series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. This time the guys would find themselves working for the British Embassy in Cuba, and Spall would be the star of the show. By now a rich man, he's devastated when his Russian wife Tatiana leaves him, his big house in Dudley is found to have subsidence, and all his investments come under threat. In therapy, he feels he has nothing left and so joins the lads on their latest jaunt, only to be kidnapped and held by guerrillas in Laos. There's further complication when Tatiana claims she's pregnant after a brief reconciliation. Poor Barry's got plenty to moan about this time.

Despite his celebrity, Spall would not change the habit of a lifetime and steer clear of controversial subjects. In Gwyneth Hughes' Cherished he'd play the husband of Sarah Lancashire, a woman arrested and imprisoned when three of her babies suffer cot death. Devoted to his wife, he'd sink into drunken despair as the fight for her freedom appears unwinnable.. Next would come another TV drama, Mr Harvey Lights A Candle, where he'd play a depressed widower, a teacher separated from the world by his grief and known to the kids as Mr Happy. A chaotic school trip to Salisbury Cathedral, though, would see his unruly charges learn some pertinent life-lessons and Spall return to the land of the living.

As well as another burst of Harry Potter in The Goblet Of Fire, 2005 would bring Spall a full-blown cinematic starring role in Pierrepoint, amazingly shot in only four weeks. Based on the career of England's best-known hangman of the 20th Century, this would be a testing part, Spall needing to exhibit deep pride in his painful job, righteous anger when his victims are disrespected, sweet affection for lover then wife Juliet Stevenson, genuine exuberance in dealing with his friends, then total mortification when he's forced to execute his best mate. It was a strange film, extremely violent in its many deaths, and macabre at points, but it was also compelling and deeply moving, Spall yet again lending his character a humanity that made him so much more than a monster. It was once said that Spall specialised in "Grand Guignol pariahs" and, though such roles are the exception rather than the rule in his CV, he is very, very good at them, undoubtedly due to his consistent efforts to find real feelings in each person he plays, no matter how unsympathetic they may be. He reaches, he's said, for their "full peculiarity".

His sympathy for the afflicted would become clear in 2006 when he first narrated the TV documentary Teenage Tourette's Camp, then appeared in Mysterious Creatures., again written by Gwyneth Hughes and co-starring Brenda Blethyn from Secrets & Lies. Here Spall and Blethyn would play a middle-class Birmingham couple whose 32-year-old daughter has a form of Asperger's Syndrome. The girl's terrified of germs, hates her father and is compelled to shop, Spall feeling forced to steal from a post office to fund her binges and being jailed. The illness itself was covered, for sure, but notions of family love and breakdown were also dealt with, most poignantly when Spall and Blethyn consider a suicide pact. Equally hard-hitting would be The Street, a gritty look at a Northern backstreet written by Jimmy McGovern. With Jim Broadbent and Jane Horrocks also featuring, each of the six episodes would focus on a different denizen of Bold Street, plot-lines involving a car accident and its effects, a kid mixed up in drugs, an abusive relationship and a teacher falsely accused of exposing himself to a child. Oddly, Spall's episode was probably the weakest, quite sentimental as cabbie Spall, picking up a Nigerian migrant, sees the man rejected at his destination and so takes him back to his own family.

. 2007 would see Spall back on the big screen in Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts, set in Edinburgh in 1926, where Guy Pearce's Houdini launches a competition for psychics, the winner being whoever can tell him his mother's last words. Con-woman Catherine Zeta-Jones would then try to seduce him to find out the information she needed to succeed, Spall playing Pearce's suspicious manager. The film was passably interesting to most, but not in the opinion of Harvey Weinstein who basically binned it, handing it to his Third Rail distribution company. A far better fate awaited Spall's next Hollywood production, the excellent Enchanted. Beginning as a Disney cartoon, this would see princess Amy Adams find her prince but be banished to the real world by evil sorceress Susan Sarandon. Now set in real life but still playing out like a Disney musical, Adams would struggle with life in New York City and her prince would toil to find her. Spall, meanwhile, a devious servant of the wicked witch, comes up with a series of ingenious methods of disposing of Adams, only to bungle every one.

Spall's next effort would be a remake of EM Forster's A Room With A View, the most famous production of which had featured Daniel Day Lewis as well as a host of Spall's former co-stars - Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Julian Sands and his Potter cohort Helena Bonham Carter. Here Elaine Cassidy would play the socially repressed heroine Lucy Honeychurch, who rejects the insufficiently well-bred George Emerson and becomes involved with the unspeakable cad Cecil Vyse, only to regret her choice.

Spall would play young Emerson's father, eccentric and decent, aware of Lucy's feelings and her plight and seeking to smooth the path of true love. George would be played by Spall's son Rafe, now finding his feet in the thespian world. Rafe had made his stage debut some ten years before, playing Fat Sam in a school production of Bugsy Malone. Though his father was initially concerned that acting might be too insecure and painful a route, Tim would eventually encourage him to follow in his own footsteps and join the National Youth Theatre, and then shared his own agent. Soon Rafe, though continually advised by his father, would be standing on his own two feet.

. There'd next be more period drama with a five-part BBC production of Oliver Twist. Twenty-five years earlier, Spall had played a copper in the George C Scott version, now he would star as Fagin, a grotesque but very human creation. Tom Hardy would appear as the beastly Bill Sikes, with Sophie Okonedo as Nancy. Also on the bill would be Anna Massey, who'd appeared with Spall in the Cherry Orchard back in 1980, and Edward Fox, who'd pignapped him ten years later. 2007 would end with another of those Grand Guignol pariahs, when Spall joined Johnny Depp, as well as his Potter co-stars Alan Rickman and Helena Bonham Carter, in Tim Burton's gruesome musical Sweeney Todd. Here Depp would seek bloody revenge on Rickman, the judge who deported him and stole his wife, Spall playing Rickman's beadle buddy, a kind of minor lawman, very camp and vain, suspicious and vicious, who brutally thrashes Rickman's young rival for the love of Depp's daughter and thus earns extreme retribution.

2008 would bring another raft of roles. First would come Jackboots On Whitehall, a satirical spoof using Action Man-type dolls. Here the Germans would invade England during a re-imagined WW2, only to be seen off by the Scots. Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson and Rosamund Pike would also lend their voices to the production, as well as former Spall co-stars Pam Ferris, Richard Griffiths and Alan Cumming. Next it would be back to ITV for Gunrush, where Spall would play a driving instructor, a simple man who take the law into his own hands when his daughter is shot dead in a supermarket. Then would come more Potter with The Half-Blood Prince, Spall also later appearing in the two-part finale, The Deathly Hallows. He'd also reunite with Jim Broadbent for The Damned United, covering the stormy 44 days managerial legend Brian Clough spent in charge of Leeds United, Martin Sheen playing the mercurial Clough and Spall his more level-headed professional partner Peter Taylor.

In 2000, Timothy Spall was made an OBE for his services to drama. As one of Britain's finest character actors, a world-renowned veteran of musicals, comedies, epics and kitchen sink dramas, he deserves a great deal more recognition than that. This situation must, and surely will, change soon.

Dominic Wills