Reveal too much as a famous actor and you come across as undignified and needy. Say too little and you seem somehow remote, churlish, even unworthy of the acclaim you receive. There has to be a middle way and this is doubtless why Jeff Goldblum has developed a fulsome – if not easy – charm that he sprays at any journalist who might ask him a meaningful question.

How could he possibly complain about being a celebrity, he suggests. The interview circuit is an honour and a privilege. What’s not to like about being given free clothes? There have been lots of good times. Fun, yes, fun, he beams with strangely blazing eyes. Some interrogators respond by noting that he is unfailingly polite and evidently well adjusted. Others conclude that his syrupy adjectives – many of them employed to endorse his colleagues – make him sound like a studio-written press release.

The process is beginning again with the announcement that he is to join his friend Kevin Spacey in the Old Vic’s revival of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow early next year. Inevitably the prepublicity reminds us of The Fly, the 1986 movie that gave him his signature role as a visionary, but ill-fated, scientist. More affably unhinged scientific geeks followed in the blockbusters Jurassic Park and Independence Day. He is 55 now and has 30 years of acting behind him, yet beneath his own smoothly upbeat version of his life one suspects there is something more complex.

The third son of a Jewish doctor from Pittsburgh, he has spoken – since his father’s death – about the violence in his home. “There were beatings with belts and always the threat of a beating. It was terrible and abusive,” he said, though more recently he has denied that his childhood was “uncommonly unhappy”. At 17, 6ft 4in and with a chiselled face, he arrived in New York to study acting, worked at the prestigious Neighbourhood Playhouse, and found critical acclaim for his cameo role in Annie Hall. He has married two actresses, Patricia Gaul at 23, and later Geena Davis, and had an affair with Laura Dern. Since then he has been linked to Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis, but these days he is reticent about his private life. He lives quietly in the Hollywood Hills, obediently wheeling himself out when he has something to publicise.

What we do know about him is that he is serious, a man who believes in self-discipline and that he has had years of therapy. He meditates, he is assiduous about controlling his weight, he works out, he teaches acting, he sings and plays piano for an LA jazz band calls The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra. His friend and fellow actor Peter Weller calls him Buddha, but if he has reached a state of enlightenment it is not so much that he has worked everything out, rather that he has defined the way he wishes to live. He does not, he says, always feel camera-ready.

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