My dad’s little finger was as big as my thumb,” says David Morrissey, holding his hands out in front of him, palm up. “These have never done a day’s work in their life.” He laughs sadly, puts his hands back in his lap, lifts his flinty grey-blue eyes.

It’s not true. Morrissey has quietly become one of our most industrious TV, film and theatre actors. To pluck a small and random selection, he has played a singing arcade owner in Blackpool, a teenage runaway in Willy Russell’s One Summer, an adulterous MP in State of Play, a reserved Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility and someone who believes themselves to be the Doctor in Doctor Who. Less happily (and in a rare misstep), he played a harried psychiatrist in Basic Instinct 2.

Despite his fame, there is something anonymous about him: he should be physically imposing, but at 6 foot 3 he seems smaller than he really is. He blends into the background. Notoriously fastidious about research, he seems to relish disappearing into character. Many remember a twitch-perfect Gordon Brown in The Deal, fewer that it was Morrissey who took the role.

He’s also a director and his debut feature film, Don’t Worry About Me, is showing at the London Film Festival (LFF) — a gritty romantic drama about two lost souls in his home city of Liverpool; one a trapped Londoner, one a trapped Liverpudlian girl. They laugh, they argue, explore the city and slowly unburden themselves. It is a very understated film and feels more like European Art Cinema. It was made for only £100,000 and produced by Tubedale Films, the company that he runs with his brother in Liverpool.

As a film-maker, Morrissey takes a painterly, contemplative eye to the city, filling the screen with lush pans of Crosby Beach and its lonely Antony Gormley sculptures and the docks, ghostly and empty save for the monstrous shapes of the ships. In other places it is frenetic. In part, it functions as a visual poem to the city.

Morrissey was brought up in the Kensington and Knotty Ash parts of Liverpool. He had a happy early childhood as one of four children. His father was a cobbler and his mother worked for Littlewoods Football Pools. However, his world was shattered at the age of 15 when his father died after a protracted illness.

There is a sense that his relationships are still coloured by this early loss. “I pretty much left school when Dad died,” he says. “But I discovered the Everyman Theatre and it totally saved my life. It gave me a social context to be in, to grieve in, and explore what had happened to me, it gave me a focus, it gave me girlfriends, it gave me close male friends — whom I still have, My best friend [the actor] Ian Hart, came from there.”

The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool was a crucible of 1980s northern talent; Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale were writing there at the time. Morrissey’s first television role came through his association with the theatre, starring in Russell’s One Summer.

His family had been sceptical about his acting career. “If I’d told my mum and dad I wanted to be an astronaut, it would’ve been the same as saying I wanted to be an actor. They had no inroads into that world,” he says. “My brothers saw One Summer and they thought, for the first time, ‘Ok, this might be an option’.

“Then when I got into RADA, they understood that maybe I hadn’t needed to do my homework after all.” Having failed his 11-plus exam, the time he spent reading plays in the city library while skipping school paid off. Roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Cheek By Jowl theatre company and the National Theatre followed.

Now aged 45, he is married to Esther Freud, the Hideous Kinky novelist, who is the daughter of Lucien, the painter, and the great grand-daughter of Sigmund, the psychoanalyst. They have three children and split their time between homes in London and Southwold.

He frequently refers to his family. When asked about his reaction to the critical mauling he received after Basic Instinct 2, he recalls his son teasing him about it. His eyes roll. “I was like, thanks very much mate.”

Liverpool is hugely important to him. “As a child you had so many examples of people — the Beatles being the biggest — in the same streets, having become internationally famous. It was all happening: Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, And The Boys from the Blackstuff was on. You felt you were in a place where you could have an idea and it could get out there.”

He also features in another Mersey-focused film at the LFF, Sam Taylor-Wood’s highly anticipated directorial debut, Nowhere Boy. It’s the story of John Lennon’s childhood and Morrissey plays John “Twitchy” Dykins, the spivvish boyfriend of Lennon’s mother.

Morrissey says that acting and directing feed into each other, although he is determined to keep the two separate (“Who would call cut?”). He describes himself as a ‘nosey’ actor who would always stay on set asking questions, rather than relaxing in his trailer.

As a director, he has three films due for release, two television series and another series of plays. He is also organising some children’s drama workshops in Beirut on behalf of the United Nations.

While he loves directing, it has made him feel vulnerable in a way that acting doesn’t. After seeing a clip of his film at an LFF press morning, he said: “So many people put their trust in you. I was stuck in a mixture of panic, excitement, fear. ‘F*** me! It’s on.’ It took me by surprise.

“I’ll always be an actor who directs — I love acting, that’s my passion. But directing’s made it much easier for me. People ask you 47 questions a minute, so you get bombarded – which I love, actually.

“Afterwards when I got onto a film set as an actor, I only had one thing to do and that was to look after my character. And it was great. It suddenly gave me back a freedom as an actor. It gave me my acting buzz back again.”

Don’t Worry About Me will be shown on Oct 24 at 6.30pm, Vue6; Oct 26 at 2pm, NFT3; Oct 29 at 7pm, Studio

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