The only way to interview Harwood is with a pen in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Since the advent of the smoking ban, if you choose not to smoke with him, the ebb and flow of the interview suffers as Harwood constantly excuses himself to "have a fag": he is what the comedian Bill Hicks would have referred to as a "two lighters a day" sort of smoker.

I armed myself with a pack of 10 before meeting Harwood, in the knowledge that smoking was something that came much more easily to him than answering the questions of a journalist and perhaps during a fag break, I would find the writer at his least guarded.

The pack of 10 disappeared in, well, a puff of smoke, and within the hour Harwood was persuading me to smoke from his unending supply.

The words "really, I couldn't" are treated with disdain.

"Yes you can, I'm a pusher," Harwood says several times in his deep throaty voice and laughs at his own joke.

Harwood was last in Yorkshire in May this year to see the new play by his old friend Donald Freed, Patient No 1, which premiered at York Theatre Royal. Harwood travels with a few essentials – his stunning wife Natasha, a limitless supply of cigarettes and, for the fortunate audience who will see him at the National Media Museum tonight, a bountiful supply of wonderful stories. When we meet in York no sooner are we in our seats than this stream of tales begins.

"I loved watching Wolfit up close. I would stand in the wings and watch. You see I was his dresser," says Harwood, more than a little unnecessarily. Of course, Harwood was Wolfit's dresser. After emigrating from South Africa in 1951, Harwood attended RADA, and in 1953 joined Sir Donald Wolfit's company.

"Myself and Harold (Pinter) were interviewed by him for his company on the same day. It was December 7, 1952, two years to the day since I arrived in England from South Africa."

It was in the famous actor-manager's company that Harwood watched Wolfit up close and found inspiration for his play The Dresser, which went on to become an Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe winning movie and made the writer's reputation and career.

It was also the start of a lifetime filled with anecdotes.

"The funny thing about Wolfit was that he always took the curtain call with the same degree of exhaustion," says Harwood, the printed word doing little justice to the way in which the raconteur delivers his anecdote. "Whether it was Touchstone, or Lear or whatever, he would always come back on stage looking absolutely shattered.

"There's a wonderful story about how one afternoon he was playing Touchstone for the matinee and Lear in the evening. A woman who had been in the audience in the afternoon went to the box office and said, 'I have tickets for tonight, can I have my money back?' The box office asked if everything was all right and she said, 'Yes, but I've just seen how tired Mr Wolfit was and I don't think he'll be able to play Lear tonight'."

Over the space of a couple of hours Harwood tells several stories and drops names without ever seeming like a name dropper.

"I have a motto which I pass on to everybody. Never forget the distance you've travelled. The minute you forget where you've come from, you forget who you are," says Harwood, which makes you realise he is genuine when he talks about how lucky he feels to have become friends with the people he has worked with.

"I knew all the leading actors of the 20th century rather well. Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson – Guinness was my neighbour – Redgrave. It is extraordinary. I lived in a one-room flat when I came to London. Gielgud remained a god to me. I was very intimidated by Guinness. Sir Ralph was very avuncular."

The story that is perhaps most impressive is Harwood's own.

The cousin of Antony Sher, he came to London to pursue a career in acting, but realised his fortune would have to be found elsewhere.

He says: "I loved dressing room life and green room life and stories and listening to old actors, but I was never a very good actor and I was never going to become a leading actor. I realised when I saw Peter O'Toole and Albert Finney and I thought, 'Hello, this is new and this is not what I am and I never will be'. Peter O'Toole was mesmerising. I saw him in Bristol and you could not take your eyes off him. When I saw Albert in Luther, I knew then everything had changed."

The acting world's loss became a gain for all of us.

In 1959, Harwood was out of work, on the dole and was considering taking a job constructing the Hammersmith flyover when his father-in-law gave him a typewriter as a birthday present.

Harwood put it to use and wrote a novel in three weeks.

He remembers the moment he finished the book, his wife Natasha was out shopping.

"Writing wasn't a compulsion, I just didn't have any work, and in three weeks I wrote a novel and I knew I was on to something. I didn't know if it was good or bad, but I knew I had found something in myself. I was in this tiny flat and I paced up and down and I was hyperventilating. It was a marvellous moment."

The novel was published and a play he wrote at the same time was performed. Harwood's career and the achievement of which he is most proud – that he made a living as a writer – had been earned. Another life-altering moment came in 1980 when The Dresser premiered.

It made Harwood's name, but the five Oscar nominations the movie of the play received did not lead to a road paved with gold. In the late Nineties, his play Taking Sides was produced in Paris where it was seen by Roman Polanski. The play tells the story of Dr Wilhelm Furtwangler, the director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during the Second World War, who was admired by Hitler.

"He had the rights to The Pianist which was about a musician and the Nazis. He saw my play, saw that it was about a musician and the Nazis – there wasn't much imagination there from Roman," chuckles Harwood.

Another Oscar nomination – and a win – followed for Harwood's script.

"It meant I could pick and choose from the offers."

The one he chose was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the movie which won him another Oscar nomination.

Even now he seems bemused. "If I said to you I've written a film, it's in French with subtitles, about a man who can only blink one eye, you wouldn't want to know about it," he says.

The idea for the film was brought to him by the hugely successful Hollywood producer Kathleen Kennedy.

"She rang and said would you do it as a movie I said yes because I had read the book a few years back and loved the triumphant story. The problem was that I said yes without re-reading the book.

"I went to Paris, the deal was done very quickly and I thought I'd better read it again and when I did, I thought, 'Oh my god what have I done?' For three weeks I was very very stuck indeed and I pretended to be doing research. I was going nowhere and I thought I better give back the money. That concentrates the mind.

"I was about to call Kathleen and the idea came to me that we should see the film through his point of view. And once that happened, I was away. When it was greenlit on my first draft, it was offered to Johnny Depp. He read it and said he wanted to meet me. I went to the Finding Neverland premiere and he held my hand, looked me right in the eye and said, 'I love your script, I can't wait to start the film' and I turned to my wife and said, 'He's not going to do the movie'. I know actors. I've been around them for 57 years and I was right.

"It's really terrific to win an Oscar. To be nominated is pretty marvellous. To win it is an extraordinary thing. There's a billion people watching. George Clooney said to me, 'W e will always be known as Academy Award winners'. I was always a good writer, it's just that people found out."

Bradford's audience is in for a treat.

Ronald Harwood will be in conversation with Yorkshire Post film critic Tony Earnshaw tonight at the National Media Museum at 7pm. There will be a screening of The Dresser, launching a season of films, Made in Bradford. The film was shot largely on location within Bradford's Alhambra Theatre. The evening also includes the launch of Made in Yorkshire, a major new book on the county's film heritage by Tony Earnshaw.