HOWZAT

Obviously Nighy was not the only young man to be smitten in this way, even if in those early days he was ahead of the curve. But he was in good company, and within five or six years Dylan was being accepted by many a big critical hitter as the most significant poetic figure ever to have worked in the rock medium. Speaking to Nighy now, you would not assume that he had left school with just two Os ­ a triumph compared with his projections. He is well read, intellectually questing and articulate, and if he weren't these things he might not be in a 25-year relationship with the actress Diana Quick, who was the first woman president of OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society) back in the late Sixties. They live in North London with their daughter, Mary, who is in her early twenties and also an actress.

The point is that the Dylan fixation was not vacuous idolatry but rather the symptom of someone ­ and there were many ­ who wanted to learn on his own terms rather than those of his school. He had what he calls "a brief period of international travel" of the sort usually known as running away.

It happened before the O levels. "I thought it was a good time to go missing," he says. "I decided to go to the Persian Gulf." When I ask him why he chose that destination, he shakes his head and says there is no point in him even trying to explain. Presumably because there is no explanation. He was away ten days, reached the South of France, where he became hungry, managed to contact the British Consul and was brought home for a cost of £25, which he spent the next three years paying off.

In an eye-watering scene at the National Youth Employment Agency, his mother put a foot over his under the table to try and silence him after he'd told the interviewer that he wanted to become an author. "The bloke didn't panic, he just got a book and said, 'No, I don't think we have any jobs for authors, and I said, 'No, I didn't think you would.'"

BACKGROUND

• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

• Pirates III: Bye-bye, captain

• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

• I want to quit acting, says Keira Knightley

• Bill Nighy talks Pirates

BACKGROUND

• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

• Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl

Last blast for Orlando the sea dog

‘No more trilogies!’ Orlando Bloom tells us, on the eve of the final Pirates of the Caribbean

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

He did get as far as messenger boy with The Field magazine, where he got into trouble for waving at Rolls-Royces in the street. At 17 he gave the writing another go, this time in Paris. "I'd read Ford Maddox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Miller and all those people and I realised that if you were going to be a writer you had to be in Paris. I stayed there for three months. I didn't write a word, obviously. My friend Brendan went, and Jamie was already there, and we begged on the Trocadero. 'Avez-vous un franc pour moi?' was the only phrase I knew."

Back home again, he managed to get a place at Guildford School of Dance and Drama after a friend, who was studying to be a drama teacher, persuaded him to go along and audition. By the mid-Seventies he was a member of the Everyman Theatre company in Liverpool, working alongside several of the subsequently famous: Pete Postlethwaite, Julie Walters, Jonathan Pryce, Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale. His first TV appearance was as the third bank robber in the police series Softly Softly. His father died soon afterwards, but the events were not linked. Far from it; by this time he accepted that Bill had made the right career choice. There were parts in David Hare plays at the National Theatre; first in Pravda and then in A Map of the World, during which he met and fell in love with the show's star, Diana Quick. She was already well known from her performance as Lady Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited for Granada TV the previous year.

"I had no expectations of all this," says Nighy, referring to Hollywood movies and the attendant fuss. "Not when I was young. You didn't. My ambition was just to make a living as an actor, and that seemed quite lofty. There were a few stars about, but there wasn't the same traffic from London to Los Angeles as there is now. Nowadays a young actor would expect to make that trip. I never did."

Now that he has, he does seem slightly bemused by it all. Perhaps this has always been his way, finding himself in the thing after the one before, and being wanted again for precisely this knack of seeming both driven and insouciant at the same time. These days he is considered immensely cool, although he finds the notion faintly alarming. Filming the next Pirates in the movie's vast hangar in the Californian desert, he just missed out on meeting one of his own idols, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, a strong influence on Johnny Depp's playing of Jack Sparrow and now a member of the film's cast, as Sparrow's father. Nighy's appeal is not unlike Richards'. It has to do with decadent chic and ability of the unteachable kind. It looks easy because it comes naturally and is partly the result of deliberate dis-education. In the unlikely event of Mick Jagger retiring from the Stones, they could do a lot worse than Nighy when they audition for a replacement.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is released on May 25

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010