Smash hit

Sheen’s parents, Meyrick and Irene, both worked in personnel, but Meyrick has also doubled as a Jack Nicholson impersonator. “He’s just got balls,” explains his son. “I always say what he lacks in specificity he makes up for in commitment.”

Michael was probably the only kid in Port Talbot who wasn’t desperate to escape. “Nobody really has a good word to say about Port Talbot in terms of how it looks, but it’s an amazing place. It’s got such a mixture of safety and danger. I didn’t have a false sense of what the world is like.” His first offer to leave came from Arsenal F.C. Tony Adams’s father spotted Sheen playing football when he was 12, but Meyrick vetoed the move. Two years later, Sheen discovered Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier. “I basically wanted to be a theatre actor in the Fifties. I wanted to be part of that Olivier-Gielgud-Richardson-Redgrave group. It seemed impossibly glamorous.” He joined the Port Talbot youth theatre and, at 18, Rada.

The ghost of Sheen’s obliterated football career surely helped him when he came to portray Clough, whose career was cruelly snuffed out by injury. Clough dealt with the trauma by shifting into management and creating his inflated persona. The gap between the two, as with Williams, Blair and Frost, is where Sheen went looking for his own dramatic truth. “It’s a common thread with all real-life characters: the public and the private. There is an interview at the beginning of the film that he did on the day he was taking over Leeds. The real-life interview begins with footage of Clough being injured, rolling around in agony. It’s horrible to watch. Then the camera cuts to Clough in the studio and you see the look on his face is just so vulnerable and hurt. Then he realises the camera is on him and he suddenly changes into arrogant, brash, confident Clough.

I remember thinking: ‘That’s him. That’s who I’m playing.’”

And as for the hinterland behind Sheen’s bright eyes… well, the adjutants aren’t going to allow any questions about his – at the time – heavily reported split from Beckinsale. Lately, he has stopped shuttling between London and LA and has taken up residence over there permanently. “I got to a certain point in my life about a year ago, and just thought the thing that makes me unhappiest is being away from my daughter, and I’m 39 and she’s 9, and I just don’t want to be away from her as much. So I had to commit to that.”

So his appearances in Port Talbot are getting less frequent. Intriguingly, however, the prodigal son may pay a different sort of visit if his plan to make a film about Richard Burton comes off. It may never happen: Sheen was once slated to play Dylan Thomas – he even started fattening up – and nothing came of that. But it would be quite something: to play not only another actor, but one who sprang from the same unpromising soil, and who, unlike Sheen, was very much the romantic lead. So I ask him if there really is something in the water in Port Talbot.

“I think there is something about the character of that very particular place,” he says. “There must be. I’m not likening myself to them in terms of how good they are, and it’s hard to put a finger on what it is, but I can see something that’s in Burton that’s also in Hopkins and that’s also in me. There is a frustration there. There is something unpredictable and slightly on the edge.”

Frost/Nixon opens on January 23

THE TIMES BREAKTHROUGH AWARD

Michael Sheen will present The Times Breakthrough Award at this year’s South Bank Show awards at the Dorchester hotel, London, on Tuesday, January 20. The nominees – all rising talents – will be announced in The Times all this coming week, starting on Monday, along with details of how you can vote.

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