Lady Audley's Secret

Costume drama's brooding hero, Steven Mackintosh, is to don a Victorian topcoat - again - in Lady Audley's Secret.

EVERYONE ADMIRES Steven Mackintosh - in particular women. Not only is he rated as one of the best British actors of his generation, he is also undeniably sexy in an un-macho, interesting kind of way, and has mesmerising blue eyes. Yet my respect . for him reached new heights when I watched a preview of I.ady Audley's Secret, ITV's dramatisation of a rattlingVictorian melodrama penned by long-forgotten novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

As one of the few people in the world who has read I.ady Audley's Secret (an English degree comes in handy occasionally), I can tell you that there are very good reasons why the name of Mary Elizabeth Braddon is not up there with the Brontes and Jane Austen. Lady Audley's Secret is the most preposterous melodrama imagin able, involving an uppity governess, an abandoned child, madness, asylums, death, disaster and so forth, but it has the virtue of vitality. It's like a story written by children, full of 'and thens' as the plot begins to veer wildly out of control. And I'm certainly not going to tell you what the 'secret' actually is.

Steven plays Robert Audley nephew to old Sir Michael Audley (played by Kenneth Cranham). He becomes strangely attracted to Sir Michael's new bride, Lucy (Neve McIntosh), who is the aforementioned uppity governess. Producer Jane Wellesley explains: "It's a detective story where the hero becomes a detective and then becomes erotically obsessed with the person that he's meant to be investigating. When we were auditioning for our cast, all the actors admitted that they didn't see what was coming in the story - and no one guesses the major twist."

 So, why do I admire Steven so much in this new role? Is it because he again demonstrates that he is the best British actor of his generation or that he looks rather nice in a selection of dashing tweed overcoats? Well there is that. But more to the point, how many men do you know who could look the heroine in the eye and say with a completely straight face: "It's to be a fight to the death then, my lady" Marvellous stuff if I had Lady Audley's Secret on video, I'd rewind that bit constantly.

And the story is full of lines like it. I'm sure it will provide all kinds of gems for It'll Be Alright On The Night, with out-takes featuring the valiant cast laughing helplessly after each scene. I loved every minute, not least because it's like Dynasty on opium. "It's to be a fight to the death then, my lady." It sends shivers down my spine. Could you do it one more time Steven, and by the way how did your character escape from the burning room and why didn't you make more enquiries about the whereabouts of the chap who was pushed down the well? "When you're doing something like Lady Audley's Secret you have to find some sort of reality for yourself laughter factor," says Steven pleasantly ignoring several of my questions.

He's such a tease. "Robert Audley does turn out to be quite a brutal character," he continues. "But I think all through the story he manages to justify his actions to hirnself - even when things get quite extreme. That's what I found so challenging, because he is of an era where people were very restrained yet his mood is so heightened towards the end it really tests your acting skills:'

This is the second time I've talked to Steven Mackintosh. The first time was when we met for breakfast at some faux proletarian eaterie in Islington where he wolfed down a large plate of fried eggs and mushrooms. He looked as though he needed a square meal, and he also looked as though he had just got out of bed. His blonde hair was all messy and his T-shirt looked as though he'd found it discarded on the bedroom floor from the night before, somewhere near his combat trousers. HURRIEDLY diverting my mind from such matters I decided to ask him about his childhood.

"I'm originally from Cambridge," he says. "Which is fairly uninteresting. And I went to the local comprehensive. I was fairly lazy. It wasn't that I wasn't capable, I just wasn't interested:' Now aged 32, Mackintosh caught the acting bug early on, even though he now says that he might just as easily have gone to art school. At the age of 12 he appeared in The Number Of The Beast, a play by Snoo Wilson about the satanist Aleister Crowley starring John Stride and staged at London's Bush Theatre."I had to dash a mouse's brains out. It was filled with spaghetti in fact. Then I had to shove it in my mouth and run round the stage shouting abuse at people. It was all set in a commune where people were getting up to some very strange sexual acts. There was a naked man in it. Actually, it was a very interesting play" he concludes, taking a sip of tea.

He has worked pretty much continuously ever since. In the Adrian Mole television series he was Adrian's mate, Nigel - "I think I was meant to be marginally more attractive than Adrian, but considerably more stupid:' In the mid-Eighties he had a spell at the National Theatre where he met his wife, actress Lisa Jacobs. They married when Steven was only 21 and are happy as clams with two daughters, Martha, aged eight and Blythe, aged three. At the National, under the strict tutelage of director Peter Hall, he found Shakespeare daunting. "It was very hard. I suppose I felt that I sounded like a robot and people like Michael Bryant made it sound so effortless. I was glad I did it but I'm not eager to repeat it. It's important to know your limitations in acting." His next major 'TV role was in the adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha Of Suburbia. "A lot of people thought it was fantastic. There is an awful lot of bad television about, stuff that just fills up the slots. But I think serials like The Buddha Of Suburbia and Our Mutual Friend can achieve things that really can only be done on television" But it was the filin Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels that turned Steven Mackintosh into a big star."It's amazing to be part of something which really is a cult.

I gather people hold Lock, Stock-evenings." Just the other day Steven was minding his own business, riding up an escalator on the Underground when someone shouted "Copious amounts, mate;' at him. ("Copious amounts" being one of the movie's catchphrases, referring to the large quantities of illegal substances grown by Steven's character.) Meanwhile, on TV he played a sinister priest in the Gothic series Bad Blood, was Daniela Nardini's nervy cop husband in Undercover Heart, and was once again in those Victorian topcoats in Our Mutual Friend. "Those sort of clothes dictate the way you act, particularly the tight jackets. They force you to stand up straight. Naturally I'm a bit of a slouch. My posture's really bad, actually" The next time we see on screen will be in modern wear in a contemporary London thriller called The Criminal, in which he co-stars with Eddie Izzard. He is also about to start work on Gone to Earth, directed by Rebecca Miller (daughter of playwright Arthur Miller) whose cast also includes Jeremy Irons and Lynn Redgrave.

He has no idea how a modern audience is going to respond to Lady Audley's Secret. "I just they'll go with the heightened energy of it. The trouble is that TV viewers are so used to naturalism. Unlike many actors who guard their private lives jealously Steven loves talking about his family. Probably because his life is completely transparent, honest and happy. Martha has just started learning violin, using the Suzuki method. Do he and Lisa want any more children? "Absolutely not things are perfect as they are." He is serious about his work and his family but not in the slightest bit pompous about either. With most celebrities, we feel a cruel delight when their lives fall apart, or when their relationships go wrong , or they hit the ropes in one way or another. Steven Mackintosh is so straightforward and uncomplicated and content that I really everything goes well for him. There are some good guys after all.