He's also brought to the screen a gallery of grotesques that have marked him as an actor capable of plumbing the depths of the human psyche. Yet this ordinary guy from a quiet town in Wisconsin tends not to linger over his creations.

He moulds them, meets them, shakes their hands and then moves on to the next job. Looking back, he says, is not healthy.

Like contemporaries, such as John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, Dafoe flits between movies and theatre. He's lived the real-life role of starving actor. He's seen the lean times. Now he is cosily domiciled in Italy though, he is quick to point out, New York remains his spiritual and cultural home.

In Fireflies in the Garden, he plays Charles Taylor, a patriarchal martinet who drives his son away through a series of increasingly bizarre reactions to the boy's behaviour. It's a turbulent, universal tale told with uncomfortable clarity, focusing on a form of villainy in a suburban home that so many people – fathers, sons and sundry observers alike – will recognise and wince at.

"It's not so much that Charles is unemotional," muses Dafoe. "I think he's striving. He's worried about things he shouldn't be worried about. It's clear that he's doing it because he's worried about the kid. He's motivated out of his own fear and I think that's what is touching about him. But he is brutal – not physically, but physiologically.

"My job is to present the whole human being and state his case a little bit, to humanise him. He's placed in the movie in a very strange way. You can see him soften after the fact, but by that time the damage is done. That's kind of the story.

"(Am I] sympathetic? I guess I have a good relationship with my father, but certain things in the relationship reminded me of him. I think I put something bad into it. I have a son, too, so in some ways I recognise that you do become your father. It manifests slightly differently but I think there is a stamp on you. It's in your genes."

Dafoe comes from blue collar stock. He was one of eight children – he had five sisters and two brothers – and his parents were ordinary, hard-working folk. He remembers home as "a very chaotic, very unusual household" with an atmosphere of reserve and courtesy.

"I remember as a kid my father being very concerned about appearance and the family name," he says. "I couldn't get around that one at all, so in a very similar way he was rigid like Charles. He was rigid in the sense that he had these very strict rules about how you should conduct yourself, which kind of denied who we were, and I think that's the same kind of oppression we see expressed in this movie."

Oppression often goes hand-in-hand with thwarted ambition. But Dafoe admits he never considered acting as a career when young. It simply didn't compute when you lived out in the sticks.

"I was a totally regular kid. I liked sports. I never did think I was going to be an actor because, where I grew up, nobody was an actor. I didn't even know anyone in New York City. That's not what people did, so it never occurred to me.

"You always had that mythology about the kid on the bus arriving at the Port Authority, going to the Actors' Studio and getting a break to be an actor. That mythology was all in place but it was never that attractive to me."

He's now 54. Over the last 20-odd years he's racked up a string of hit movies – blockbusters and arthouse oddities – that have led to two Oscar nominations and a reputation for excellence.

He skips nimbly from comic strip extravaganzas such as Spider-man to Anthony Minghella's majestic The English Patient. Then there are indie successes like American Psycho, Basquiat and The Boondock Saints.

Directors as diverse as Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Lars von Trier positively queue up to work with him. He's in a good place, and he knows it.

He'll soon be seen in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? for Werner Herzog as well as Daybreakers, which looks at starving vampires on a far-off world.

The vampire movie "has a beautiful feel to it. It'll be great, I think" while working with Herzog takes Dafoe back to the days of watching The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. "I've always liked Herzog. His films were very important to me when I was younger."

Clearly, he sees equal merit in both.

"I am conscious that sometimes movies don't get received well, and you learn more from the other side," he says, ruminating on his craft.

"I don't think there is a good or bad movie. People see many different things and it's so subjective, it shifts, so you have to have a sense of humour about these things.

"Performing is a confidence thing, and it can make you nervous. You have to protect yourself from what's going on outside the movie."

Fireflies in the Garden (15) is on general release.