He is an Old Etonian English actor who has enjoyed the biggest success of his career playing a streetwise Baltimore cop and will next appear as an Australian scientist.

So Dominic West is not the most obvious candidate to advocate protectionism in casting but now the star of The Wire has apparently done just that, attacking the Hollywood A-listers Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp and Renée Zellweger for “stealing our great heroes” by playing famous Britons.

West, 39, was quoted yesterday as saying that he took the role of Professor Howard Florey from Adelaide in Breaking The Mould, an upcoming BBC4 film, partly to even the score.

“I was sort of smarting from Russell Crowe coming over here and playing Robin Hood and all these foreigners coming over here and stealing our great heroes — I felt I was striking a blow back by being a Brit playing a foreigner,” West said.

Professor Florey was instrumental in the development of penicillin but is largely forgotten outside academic circles in the UK.

“Florey got the Nobel Prize with [Alexander] Fleming but was basically lost to history really, except in Australia where he was recently voted the greatest Australian of all time. I’d never heard of this guy and I just thought it would be interesting to play this unknown guy and then they said he’s the biggest guy in Australia.

Crowe’s role in a long-delayed Ridley Scott adaptation of the Robin Hood legend, which filmed in Surrey and Pembrokeshire this summer, seems to have struck a nerve with West.

“I’d love to play Robin Hood but I’d particularly like to play all those parts Johnny Depp plays that are English people like the Earl of Rochester.”

Depp played the debauched poet Rochester in The Libertine, J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, in Finding Neverland and Sweeney Todd in Tim Burton’s retelling of the legend of the Fleet Street barber.

“I suppose for someone who made quite a lot of money out of being in an American TV show I shouldn’t moan really, but it does annoy me when Beatrix Potter is played by a Texan [Zellweger]. And Bridget Jones — what’s wrong with our great Kate Winslet? Why wasn’t she Bridget Jones?”

A spokeman for West said last night that the comments were intended to be ironic and had been taken out of context.

West had a varied career on the stage, in the Argentinean circus group De La Guarda and in films including Spice World and Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace before he landed the role that made his reputation.

Jimmy McNulty, a loveable, hardbitten detective was the linchpin of The Wire, the American drama about the Baltimore drugs trade that became a slowburn commercial hit through DVD sales and is now regularly cited as one of the best television programmes ever made.

West’s own cut-glass Queen’s English was replaced by an Irish-American growl. One of his character’s principal adversaries, the drug kingpin Stringer Bell, was also played by an Englishman — Idris Elba from Hackney in East London.

West has previously suggested that British actors have done well in American television because they are cheap but he also recognises that he has had opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic that would not have existed in the UK.

“I think everyone has to contend with what people’s expectations of who you are, and I don’t think I’d have got a McNulty part in England because I’m an Old Etonian. And that means nothing in America, so you can transcend your background.

“Everyone has to do that from wherever they’re from, so I was just doing that really.”

“I went to a Wire quiz the other night and had to give out a prize or whatever and I started speaking and I could sense the deflation in the room when they found out I was just a dippy Sloane, instead of this hard-bitten cop they thought I was.”

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