And being the second son was lucky because no one expected anything of me

And being the second son was lucky because no one expected anything of me.”Born in 1948, Irons grew up in Cowes, Isle of Wight It was an “idyllic” childhood full of boats and ponies. He attended Sherborne School where his academic career was undistinguished. He did well at rugby, and the officer training corps and in his last year dazzled in the school play.His grades weren’t good enough for university, so he spent a year working for a charity run by two priests in Peckham, southeast London. You can’t helping noticing how the female historians on the show get a bit fluttery around him.

Tall and elegant, he cuts a fine figure in jodhpurs – a cigarette dangling from his fingers The voice is very English – deep, gravelly. Even the beard (grown for his role as a 74-year-old general in Embers) gives him gravitas. “I usually dress so scruffily that most people think, ‘That looks a bit like him, but it can’t be him’,” he laughs.An ex-public school boy, Irons seems a natural conservative (apart from the castle and a family home in Oxfordshire, he has a house in Notting Hill) But actually he’s quite left wing. In his Emmy acceptance speech last month, he blasted Margaret Thatcher for dumbing down British TV. At the 1991 Tony Awards, he became the first celebrity to wear the red Aids ribbon.

And in Who Do You Think You Are?, he is touchingly keen to track down his great-great grandfather, a Chartist who, according to family legend, rode into the house of Commons on a donkey.”What I did find from studying my close relatives – in the last three generations – is that I was trying to get away from that middle-class, conventional Victorian-ness. But on the show Irons comes across very well: enthusiastic, practical and just the right side of batty – as he bombs around the country on a motorbike, his two dogs riding pillion.Irons is no flirt What he does have is charisma in buckets. He famously guards his privacy – not surprising when the Daily Mail is comically obsessed with monitoring the state of his marriage to the Irish actress Sinead Cusack and sneering at his castle (which they insist is painted salmon pink, even though the local council have upheld his claim that it’s a traditional shade for the area). At the age of 58 and a veteran of more than 60 films, Irons is sanguine about moving over to play character roles “None of my movies has made a lot of money,” he laughs.

“The studio can look up on computer what my past five films have made.” You sense he acts to live, rather than lives to act. He rides, sails, and for the past few years has been restoring a medieval castle on an island in West Cork.He’s also recorded an episode of the BBC’s series, Who Do You Think You Are?, tracing his family tree back to the 18th century Getting Irons was quite a coup for the BBC. Surprisingly he has played few romantic leads – preferring to work with auteurs such as David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, Louis Malle and David Cronenberg. “He has such a magnetic quality on screen, and he has a kind of melancholy about him,” says Michael Radford, who directed him in the recent movie version of The Merchant of Venice.When we meet, Irons has just completed an acclaimed run in Christopher Hampton’s Embers (Irons’ first play in the West End in 18 years).