The happy actor bringing a bit of magic into the lives of millions

“NICE actor, shame about the face. There, I’ve given you your opening line,” Timothy Spall says, with a chuckle.

The 54-year-old star is speaking ahead of next month’s cinema release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the final, eagerly-awaited adventure in the Harry Potter series, in which Spall plays Peter Pettigrew.

The film franchise, based around JK Rowling’s acclaimed books, has been a phenomenon in its own right and one Spall enjoyed being part of.

“It was brilliant fun and it was a pure pleasure coming into to work every morning, even though I don’t like getting up early, and going into make-up. In every cubicle you would see an iconic British actor having a fake ear stuck on, or something. You’d look down the line and see John Hurt, Michael Gambon and Bill Nighy and it was an honour to be in such great company,” he says.

It’s more than 30 years since Spall’s film debut in Quadrophenia, in which he played the “fat projectionist”, as he puts it. The film quickly became a cult classic helping to launch the careers of several of its stars, including Phil Daniels and Phil Davis. For Spall, it wasn’t until Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, a few years later, that he first made a name for himself playing hapless Brummie Barry Taylor.

It could have pigeon-holed him, but instead, Spall has gone on to establish himself as one of the outstanding British character actors of his generation. His most recent work includes The Wake Wood, an atmospheric horror film set in Ireland, and Reuniting the Rubins, a comedy in which Spall plays a man trying to reunite his dysfunctional family.

“The difference between Reuniting the Rubins and the Harry Potter films is about £200m, but you’re still trying to tell a story that you hope is entertaining and gives people a bit of magic and excites them, or takes them into another realm,” he says.

“The Harry Potter franchise was always likely to be successful but nobody imagined it would be as successful as it has been, and it’s the same with The King’s Speech – you just do the best you can and hope people warm to it.”

In The King’s Speech, Spall plays Winston Churchill, a role he repeated in the satirical Jackboots on Whitehall. Many actors shy away from playing real-life people, especially those as formidable and iconic as Churchill. So why put yourself in the firing line?

“You do set yourself up to be criticised,” he agrees. “Some people don’t know much about him although they assume they do. But most of them have heard his voice at least and there is an older generation who know him very well.”

Which is why he spent endless hours researching his subject. “I listened to all his keynote speeches from 1937 to 1950 over and over again to try to get his speech rhythms. I felt that was important because he had his own speech impediment, he had quite a pronounced lisp. But I didn’t just want to impersonate him; there’s a glint in his eye and I tried to do what I always do and go for something inside him.

“Churchill once told someone, ‘the thing you need to know about me is I’m a terrible blubber’,” Spall says, mimicking the great wartime leader for a moment.

“He had to have a ruthless streak, but behind that he was a sentimental man, and if you listen to those speeches he gave, they are full of feeling. If you listen to his ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’ speech, he’s basically saying we’re up the creek without a paddle, the Germans are 20 miles away and we don’t have an army.

“But he was a great figurehead and for a while his speeches were the only weaponry we had apart from the RAF. He was a brilliant actor and his speeches were full of passion; at times they sound like Shakespearian soliloquies and 70 years on they still make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.”

The son of a postman and a hairdresser, Spall was born and raised in south London.

“As a kid I used to go to the pictures at least twice a week. I lived in Battersea and there were two cinemas, one at the top of the street and one at the bottom, and I used to go with my dad or on my own. There was also another one, known as the ‘fleapit’, where you had to join a queue to buy a ticket and then join another queue and the guy who sold you the ticket would throw on an overall and stand at the door to let you in,” he says, laughing.

Acting, though, wasn’t top of his career choices as a teenager.

“At the time, I was torn between joining the Army or going to art college,” he says. It was his performance in a school play that would change the course of his life.

“I was playing the lion in the Wizard of Oz at school, and the lady who did my make-up was my drama teacher, a really fantastic person, and I remember the first performance went very well and afterwards, as she was taking off my lion’s nose, she said, ‘I’ve never said this to a pupil before, but you really should be an actor’. She showed me what I needed to do and I am forever in her debt.”

After joining the National Youth Theatre, he was bitten by the acting bug and at the age of 19 he auditioned for Rada and was accepted.

“I went to Birmingham rep and then Quadrophenia was my first film. It was only a small cameo but it’s a film that’s held in great affection and it ushered in a new generation of actors like Ray Winstone, Phil Davis and Phil Daniels.

“I started as an actor in the theatre and spent two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company working with great people like Ben Kingsley and Bob Peck, but film was always my first love,” he says.

Then came Auf Wiedersehen, Pet which he was happy to return to when the show was revived by the BBC in 2002.

“That was great fun, it really was. I’ve done a lot of telly over the years and I continue to do so, which has been a delight.”

His film career, too, makes impressive reading. He has appeared alongside Tom Cruise in Hollywood blockbusters like Vanilla Sky and The Last Samurai, and as Peter Taylor in The Damned United he was the perfect foil for Michael Sheen’s Brian Clough.

He’s also played the lead role in several films including the compelling Pierrepoint which tells the story of Albert Pierrepoint, the notorious British executioner.

But it’s his collaborations with Mike Leigh for which he is perhaps most synonymous. In Life is Sweet (1990), he plays a would-be-restaurateur whose taste in clothes suggests his food isn’t going to be up to much, and in Secrets and Lies (1996) he plays a mild-mannered photographer trying to stay out of his family’s upheavals.

Throughout his career, Spall has made a virtue out of playing likeable fools and decent, ordinary family men struggling to rise above the flotsam of suburban life.

“I rarely play heroes unless they are unconventional because most people aren’t heroes. People are who they are, rather than who they would like to be.”

Spall’s consummate skill is his ability to allow the audience to see the delusion his characters are unable to recognise.

“I always feel that as an actor it’s my job to serve the character and serve the piece you’re doing. A lot of people think acting is all about showing off, but it isn’t; for me, it’s about retaining a kind of integrity and aiming for some sense of truth, and I’ve been lucky that people have said nice things about me over the years.”

Despite all the accolades that have come his way, his life hasn’t all been plain sailing. In the mid-90s, he was diagnosed with leukaemia. “It was a particular strain of leukaemia that you either get rid of, or it gets rid of you,” says Spall.

“It made me stop worrying as much because no matter how bad things might seem, you can always say ‘well at least I’m not nearly dead’.

“I don’t advise it as a diet, or as a way of method acting, but it does help open your soul, and when something like that happens, it opens something in you that doesn’t close.”

Since overcoming the illness, he’s been given a clean bill of health and continues to be one of the most sought-after names in the business.

“As an actor, you’re trying to be another person and if you’re pretending to be another person, you have to understand them. From Mike Leigh, to Wake Wood, to Harry Potter, it’s a joy to be able to try your different skins, it really is, it’s an absolute pleasure.”

The pleasure is all ours.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is on cinema release in the UK from July 15.