NIGHY (&KNIGHTLEY TOO)

Have you seen The Girl in the Cafe? It is a wonderful film, if only to hear Kelly McDonald ask Bill Nighy to "risk it" and to have Nighy muse about giving the Rolling Stones a bit of a musical lift.

Anyway, for you Nighy fans:

Bill Nighy is behaving like a child, rushing around the Royal Suite of the Lanesborough Hotel opening doors, looking in cupboards and wondering whether he's allowed to jump on the bed.
Bill Nighy: 'I think it is vulgar to ask people to sit in the dark for hours and not tell them a joke'
When he finds the bathroom, he is in heaven examining all the toiletries. "You take this," he says, handing me a bar of tissue-wrapped soap. "My wife has banned me from bringing any more home."
The north London house he shares with actress Diana Quick must be littered with bars of soap because Nighy spends half his life in hotels, whether staying in them during filming or occupying a room - as we are now - for an interview. It's one of the consequences of being in constant demand, which he has been ever since he stole the show as an ageing rocker in Love Actually in 2003.
This summer, his admirers will be able to enjoy him in two very different new roles. Next month, Stormbreaker will open with Nighy as a grey man in a grey suit from M16. "My name is Blunt, Alan Blunt," he says, assuming a stern expression and dodging into character for a few seconds to discuss the junior version of James Bond, based on Anthony Horowitz's novels about a 14-year-old spy.
Meanwhile, in two weeks, he can be seen with Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. "It's an odd engagement," he says in his deadpan way, "because I appear as a computer generated sea-creature, half crab and half squid. Whether this will further my career or not is a moot point."
Frankly, his career doesn't need much furthering. One "good gig", as he calls them, seems to follow another. He has made the shift from being an actor whose name used to spring into casting directors' mind whenever the words "shabby, lanky, shallow or run to seed" appeared in a script. Now he is known as someone who can inject a little humour into even a solemn situation.
He is even recognised by doormen in the US. " 'I like your choices,' one of them said the other day," he recounts with glee. "Now that is Big Information." (More than once Nighy seems to speak in capitals.)
What it means is that Nighy has arrived. He is box office. But he doesn't brag about it like that. Instead, he adopts what he calls a "craven light entertainment pose" and makes fun of the fact that at the age of 56, with his skinny body and tight-lipped face, he has become a name who can carry a film and even get the girl.

"The degree of attention I've been getting of late is slightly unnerving, but I'm not complaining," he says, smoothing the sleeves of his immaculate Alfred Dunhill suit and giving a quizzical look over his glasses. "There was a period when Nelly - my dog - and I couldn't go for a walk without ending up in a newspaper.
"Last Christmas, three different people wanted me to do a single [he hit number one with Christmas Is All Around from Love Actually]. And for a time there was a part of the house I couldn't go to any more because so many scripts were coming through the door and I thought I had to read them. Then I realised that most of them get sent to whoever next pops their head above the parapet."
His way of coping - and being charming - is not to take it all too seriously. It could be a pose, but it probably comes naturally to a career neurotic who, as we sit at the desk in the hotel suite, is constantly straightening pen, paper and glasses. He is, he admits, obsessive about neatness, an interesting trait for someone who describes himself as a "mess", and dislikes talking about the wild rock-and-roll days of his youthful excesses.
"There was nothing wild about it at all," he says, for once without a trace of humour. "The neatness absolutely goes with the territory. I don't know why. I'm not a shrink. As a kid I always had this neatness thing, but I've learnt, if I go into someone else's messy room, to take that bit out of my brain and think: 'These people are beyond help.' "
There seems to be a constant dialogue inside his head between Nighy the nutcase and a more sensible voice telling him to calm down. Being aware of this puts him in the position of wry observer who can see the comic potential in every situation, whether the self-righteousness of the messy or the bizarre nature of late-onset fame.
"A Big Change has been that people now start to accommodate me in terms of dates. It used to be that you'd spend months doing nothing then get three gigs at once and have to choose. Now they plan the filming around me. Rushing from one set to another, I find I'm looking for a prop when rehearsing and thinking; 'Not that. Not glasses today' or, 'No, don't talk posh. That's Thursday.'
"I've even had producers asking me 'What play would you like to do?' That is Big News. I think, 'Blimey,' and my mind goes blank."
I find myself in helpless giggles. What he says is often funny, but his delivery is even better. And yet he only became a comic actor by accident. In fact, after fluffing his O-levels at school in Caterham, Nighy - son of a garage owner and a nurse - set out to become a Great Writer in Paris (the habit of thinking in capital letters is catching).
He got only as far as the first line. A girlfriend suggested to this confused youth that he should go to drama school instead, and there he found the talent that he has spent the past 35 years honing.
"I've never quite recovered from standing on stage and everyone laughing," he says. "I am endlessly interested in why certain pauses or pronunciations are funnier than others, how to get louder and longer laughs. Did you know that, if you stress the last consonant of the final word, everyone in an audience laughs at the same time but if you don't, they laugh in pockets because nobody receives the word at the same time? Things like that are very satisfying. It's not world peace, but it makes us useful to have around."
Nighy's co-stars in Pirates of the Caribbean 2
Being funny is so important to him that he has not only "retired" from Shakespeare - he blames the tights; he likes to act in lounge suits - he has also retired from doing plays that don't contain jokes. "I think it's vulgar to ask people to sit in the dark for hours and not tell them a joke," he declares. "I don't mind other people doing plays like King Lear or Hedda Gabler, but I do think information travels well in joke form."
The success, the laughter, as well as Diana Quick, his stalwart not-quite-wife of many years and their daughter Mary Nighy, a budding actress - all these have helped to transform him from a highly strung young man who used to go on benders into a highly-strung middle-aged man who remains sober, but still doesn't seem to have any fundamental confidence.
"I have problems in that area," he says, shifting as he often does from the first person singular to the more universal "you". "Some days you can get up and you're capable of certain things and other days you aren't. I have average difficulty persuading myself I can do my job, as it is one of those jobs which is quite hard to pull off on occasions.
"People, quite understandably, imagine that actors have a different response to standing up in front of hundreds of strangers and being the only one allowed to speak. In fact, you have the same response as anybody else: how did this happen? Why am I here? Please God let me go now. Can I go home?
"I used to think I was in trouble because I couldn't rely on having confidence on any given day. But the Big News is that I've discovered it doesn't matter. You can just go to work without any confidence. No one knows what's going on in your mind. You can stand there paranoid and anxious but they don't know, so you just say the lines anyway."
And get the laughs and the good reviews. Agonising though he may find day-to-day life, his nervous disposition does mean that he is grateful for every shred of success, every cheque that allows him to buy smart clothes for himself and his family, or indulge his habit of sticking his hand out to hail a taxi whenever he sees an orange light. (Predictably, he doesn't drive.)
He is not even blasé about the hotels in which he spends so much time. "I'm obsessively keen on them. I like the fact that the environment is controlled. I like the stationery. They change the sheets every day and bring you food. So all I have to do is work. I read, I put my iPod onto Dylan shuffle or Stones shuffle and I'm pretty happy."
Now, whenever I am in the bath, I look at the piece of soap he encouraged me to nick and feel glad that some people need to make others laugh.