Antonio Banderas shuffles into his Berlin hotel suite and rests his face on the table in front of him. “I am so tired!” he groans. “My kingdom for a pillow!”

He is not living up to his reputation as a fiery sex symbol today. Shorter and squatter than his swashbuckling, heel-clicking, nostril-flaring screen image suggests, Banderas has been promoting his latest labour of love on the film festival circuit for weeks. And it shows. He looks dog-tired. He looks older than his 46 years. He looks, frankly, as though he has been sleeping face down in a ditch.

But, boy, he can still talk. He may occasionally slip into pidgin English when the real stuff escapes him, but Banderas is unstoppable about his new ensemble drama, El Camino de los Ingleses.

Based on a novel by his childhood friend Antonio Soler, this bittersweet tale of growing pains is set in 1970s Spain. Directed by Banderas with a certain rough poetry, it took the Hollywood exile back to his native Málaga for the longest stretch of time in almost 30 years. A real sentimental journey.

“It was interesting, not only to go back to that time but to my home town,” he says. “At that time it was forbidden to dream in Spain. I suppose because the country was very closed to the exterior world, we had a certain complex of inferiority. But when I read the novel what caught my attention was that he makes no allusion to that. There are no politics in the movie, no religion. He put the characters in a bubble and in that way he made them a bit more open internationally.”

During his own adolescence, Banderas found the politics of Franco’s fascist regime harder to escape. During his teens he felt “totally trapped by the circumstances of my country”. While a student actor he was arrested several times for performing left-wing drama, which was especially embarrassing for the son of a policeman.

“I remember playing Bertolt Brecht, on stage at the University in Málaga, and seeing the shine on the helmets of the cops in the wings,” he says with a grin. “We finish the performance, we take the bow, the curtain goes down – then we were handcuffed and went to the police station! Ha! They didn’t do anything to us, just scared us a little. Once I was arrested and my father was in the police station when I arrived.”

Banderas was initially a promising footballer, a career path scuppered by a broken foot when he was 14. When he shifted his sights towards acting, his father and mother, a teacher, were less than thrilled. “They acted in the worst way they could: they just laughed,” says Banderas. “For them it was a world of whores and prostitutes and maricóns, homosexuals.”

Coincidentally, that was precisely the sleazy, glamor-ous demimonde that Pedro Almodóvar began putting on Spanish screens in the liberated postFranco Spain of the 1980s. By casting the young Banderas in five films, including several gay roles, the maverick director helped to propel him to international fame and acclaim. His parents, though, were horrified: “When my mother saw Law of Desireshe almost had to go to a psychiatrist for a month!” El Camino de los Ingleses is being retitled Summer Rain in English-speaking markets, although a British distributor has yet to be found – perhaps because Banderas resisted the advice of his producers by staying behind the camera. Reviews in Spain have so far been mixed, but the actor turned director takes heart from his film-making mentor.

“The first years of Almodó-var were not nice,” Banderas says. “I remember going around the world with his movies and we were kicked big time! It was not until the fifth or sixth movie that people started saying: ‘OK, I know what you mean . . .’ Then they respected him. It’s a process that takes years.”

After almost a decade with Almodóvar, Banderas took his first faltering steps into Hollywood. When he was making The Mambo Kings (1992) his English was still so rough that he had to learn his dialogue phonetically. But his roles in high-profile projects such as Philadelphia, Interview with a Vampire and Evitasoon proved his versatility and charisma.

With his second marriage, to the actress Melanie Griffith ( pictured below right with Banderas) in 1996, Banderas achieved Hollywood royalty status. The couple’s volatile relationship frequently makes headlines, with constant rumours of affairs and even a brief separation in 2002. But he talks of Griffith tenderly, and makes a point of personally thanking her for her patience in the credits to El Camino de los Ingleses.

“She doesn’t want to have a husband who says: ‘I should have gone and directed that movie but you didn’t allow me to.’ She’s very smart.”

Unlike some European exports to Hollywood, such as Colin Farrell and Jude Law, Banderas is often still type-cast as a smouldering sex symbol. This sometimes works in his favour, as when the director Robert Rodriguez made smartly self-conscious use of the star’s looks in his El Mari-achi and Spy Kids series. But serious dramatic roles have eluded him in recent years.

Banderas says that his parents finally offered their approval of his career after his lucrative mainstream outings, first as Zorro and then as the voice of Puss in Boots in Shrek 2. With a third Shrek due this June, and even a Puss in Boots spin-off film scheduled for 2010, the star offers no apologies for taking big-budget roles to finance his more personal projects.

“I can do a movie like El Camino de los Ingleses because I buy my freedom, in a way, with Zorro or Shrek,” he says. “By the way, I don’t renounce them – I had a lot of fun playing those characters. I think Zorro is a beautiful character. If you’re trying to make Zorro like Ingmar Bergman then it is just stupid. But movies are made for many different reasons.”

After years of habitually checking his box-office and popularity ratings in Hollywood, Banderas claims that he “forgot how difficult it was to be free”. But returning to Málaga, he says, gave free rein to his true, emotionally charged Spanish soul. “I have to be sincere with myself, even if this is too much,” he insists. “That’s the way I am. I am Andalusian! I am baroque! And I’m surrealist! I have to be sincere.”

Banderas is almost bab-tion takes hold. Minders loom to bundle him off to his next appointment – with a hotel bed. There is just time to ask the football-loving Banderas his opinion of David Beckham leaving Real Ma-drid for Hollywood. Smart move or dead end?

“I think he’s a great player, I really do,” Banderas says. “Not like some people say, because he’s handsome and takes care of himself. No, he’s a real player . . . I think he should have stayed.”

He means Beckham, of course. But maybe, at some level, Banderas is also talking bling now, as sleep depriva- about himself.

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