For many years, Jonathan Pryce was the kind of actor who had to work to win applause. The 55-year-old hung out his soul every night in productions of Chekhov and Shakespeare, for the sort of audience which always leaves the theatre feeling mildly unimpressed. Then, one night in New York, he was taken to see Les Misérables. It was only the second musical he had seen in his life (the first being Annie), and it gave Pryce a pang of regret. Snobbery be damned, he thought, here was a bunch of actors provoking the kind of wild, untempered enthusiasm he could only dream about. "I'd just been playing Macbeth and I thought, they're getting the response from an audience that I hope to get with Macbeth, but they're not beating their heads against a wall. And I thought, I'd like to have a go at that."
Since then, Pryce has become a regular fixture in West End musicals: Miss Saigon, Oliver!, and most recently, My Fair Lady with his famously flaky co-star Martine McCutcheon, while building an increasingly successful film career. It took a while to get into the swing of the musicals - there was embarrassment to overcome, the whole breaking-into-song bit, especially in school-play staples like Oliver! When he played Fagin, Pryce was struck every night with a quiet dread when it came to singing You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two. It seemed too cliched for even a benign West End audience to swallow without tittering; but swallow it they did, and his confidence grew.
Pryce can sing very well; that is, not in the shouty vibrato that passes for singing in a lot of musical theatre. Maybe it's his grey-green eyes, or his north Welsh roots, or the memory of his brilliant portrayal of Lytton Strachey in the film Carrington, but Pryce has a seriousness about him that saves the most overblown production from cheesiness. After getting himself noticed in 1983 as morally bankrupt journalist James Penfield in Richard Eyre's The Ploughman's Lunch (and following it up two years later in the lead role in Terry Gilliam's sci-fi classic, Brazil, he has established himself as a sort of less precious Anthony Hopkins, serious but willing to risk ridicule. His Bond villain, Elliot Carver, in Tomorrow Never Dies, was memorable for his sinister black polo-neck and rasping control-freakery, a new-media kind of bad-guy which Pryce played just the right side of send-up.
In his new film, Unconditional Love, he plays an equally camp role, Victor Fox, a superstar crooner in a spangly blue jacket, whom the ladies love and who gets to sing ballads such as You Were Always on My Mind and Dusty Springfield covers. The film is a weird combination of sharpness and schmaltz: the schmaltz from Kathy Bates as a downtrodden housewife, trying, in the best American tradition, to find herself and uplift the audience along the way. The sharpness comes from Rupert Everett, who plays Fox's secret lover with an excellently English bitterness, a mainstream version of Withnail. Pryce, as Fox, is as smooth as an avocado. It is worth seeing also for the performance of Meredith Eaton, a belligerent dwarf, or "little person" as she's called by the producers, and idiotic cameos by Julie Andrews ("she's a laugh" says Pryce) and Barry Manilow ("charming but orange").
Pryce says he loved playing Victor Fox. "When you sing on stage, the songs are part of the narrative, but in Unconditional Love, it was just singing for singing's sake. It was playing at being pop star. As a young boy growing up in north Wales, that was my fantasy. I grew up in the 50s at the beginning of rock 'n' roll, and would strum a tennis racket in front of the mirror. Forty-five years later, I got a chance to be that person. But I was protected, because I was in a character. It was really uninhibiting."
Singing as himself is something Pryce gave up while he was still a student. He found it too nerve-racking. While you can bluff your way through bad acting, bad singing is hard to disguise. At 16, he went to art college and then trained to be a teacher in Liverpool, where he and his friend John formed a loose musical alliance. John played guitar, Pryce did the singing. They entered a talent competition with a top prize of £100, at a working-men's club in north Wales. "We were half way through Seven Golden Daffodils" he says, "and I looked down to see a woman sitting in the front row doing this -" he pulls a sour face and crosses his arms. "I said to John, 'Cut to the end, cut to the end!' We didn't win. The memory of that woman's face has stayed with me. All through My Fair Lady, I expected to look down and see people pulling it, asking themselves, 'What is going on?' "
In fact, most of the audience were asking themselves what's going on, not because of Pryce's ropey singing, but because of speculation surrounding his co-star McCutcheon's serial absenteeism. Pryce was forced to play opposite a series of terrified understudies. "It could've been more enjoyable," he says carefully, making a throttling motion with his hands. "I wasn't going to throw away the show because certain things were . . . it was very difficult for a while, to act with someone who hadn't rehearsed the show. Alex Jay, the first understudy, was 18 and completely inexperienced. The first time she replaced Martine, I had 20 minutes rehearsal with her. She was wonderful and would continue to be wonderful for 14 months. But because of her lack of experience I was acting for two." Does he look back with bitterness? "Other than wanting to take out a contract on people, no. It was what it was. It's just unfortunate that it didn't work out."
He had a much easier time with his leading lady in the film version of Evita. The 1996 Alan Parker film cast Pryce as Juan Peron opposite Madonna's Eva. "She is hugely confident, but I had a good working relationship with her. She works incredibly hard. She's a very bright woman. She has an extraordinary life, so it was never going to be a case of let's all be pals and have a chat together. But when I first met her, we were in the recording studio doing the songs and she was very supportive and helpful to me. There was a mutual respect." Accustomed to smaller films, he says he loved being involved with something on that scale. The crowd scenes intoxicated him. "The cinematography on that film was so underrated," he says. "It really looked stunning."
After Pryce's own dreams of rock stardom evaporated, he committed to becoming an art teacher. While studying, he took part in a college theatre production and an impressed friend sent off to Rada for an application form. Pryce wound up getting in and though he found the place a bit straight-laced, graduated and was taken on at Liverpool's Everyman theatre. It was the late 1960s. "It was a very free, anarchic unpretentious theatre and that appealed to me. I was young. I wasn't very ambitious or aware of anything I really wanted to do. I just kept falling into things because I enjoyed them."
His confidence draws on his ability to laugh at himself. He thinks that no missed opportunity is unique: like buses, there is always another one around the corner. Pryce is happy with his level of fame. He gets stopped now and then near his home in Hampstead, where he lives with his partner and their three children. "I live a very ordinary life. The rare awards ceremonies I go to are quite fun, because I can enjoy the irony of one minute walking to the tube, and the next being driven along the same stretch of road in a limo. I have just enough public appreciation to make me happy. I know people whose entire lives are ruined by fame. If you make yourself exclusive, people want to break that down, but if you go about doing your shopping, no one bugs you."
It amazes him how people get seduced by the bogus trappings of fame. "We did a public performance of Under Milk Wood in Hampstead, and Prince Charles attended, so there was a lot of security. They'd put up barriers on Hampstead High Street, and as I arrived, there were people behind the barriers shouting 'Jonathan! Jonathan!' These were people who I passed every day on the way to the shops. They were only doing it because the barriers were there. The next day, I walked down the same bit of street with them and nobody wanted to know me." It is called the best of both worlds.
· Unconditional Love is released on September 13.