Michael Sheen - Biography

After those three years the family would return to Wales, taking  a place on Ascot Drive in Bagham, a small village up in the hills beside Port Talbot. Port Talbot was a deep-harbour industrial port, dominated by a power station and the BP chemical plant on Baglan Bay. It was a rough place yet, oddly, it could lay claim to being the birth-place of several great stars. Richard Burton had grown up just down the road in Pontrhydyfen, while Anthony Hopkins hailed from nearby Taibach. Ray Milland and Sian Phillips also sprang from the area and, on a less savoury note, so did Peg Entwistle. Born Millicent Entwistle, she'd travelled to America and made a name for herself on Broadway in the 1920s, inspiring a young Bette Davis to become an actress. Sadly, the Great Depression made work harder to come by and a move to Los Angeles and film work had failed when she'd failed to impress RKO. On the night of September 18th, 1932, she climbed the maintenance ladder on the fifty foot H in the Hollywood sign above the city and jumped, immediately becoming a national symbol of dashed dreams. Just a  few days after her untimely death, a letter would arrive for her offering a job at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. She was to play a woman driven to suicide.

Michael would attend his local primary school, Blaenbaglan, then, between 1979 and 1984, the Glan Afan Comprehensive. At one point, inspired by TV star and jazz player Roy Castle, he'd decide he wanted to be a trumpeter and badger his father to buy him an instrument and pay for lessons. He'd prove to be good, too, even being put up for the West Glamorgan Band. Unfortunately, the band would practise on Saturday mornings, sacred football time for young Michael. While in Liverpool he'd caught the soccer bug and now played regularly at Baglan Boys Club, lining up on their charmingly named Evans Bevans Fields on Sunnycroft Road. It was his first love and music was no substitute.

Though most considered Port Talbot to be a hell-hole well worth leaving, Michael would recall his youth here with warm fuzziness. He'd remember sunny summers on the beach, It's A Knockout competitions between local sports clubs, being crammed into giant concrete paddling pools on the seafront along with hundreds of other kids. He could even ignore the violence now inherent in a town slowly being crushed by industrial collapse. Playing football in other parts of town, he'd recall having to fight his way home using the corner flags as weapons, making Port Talbot sound like the mythical New York of The Warriors.

Though small, Michael was actually a very talented footballer, playing Under-12 at the age of 8. He'd play after school each day and all weekend.

Michael had always been interested in cinema and, through his father, stage performance. He'd later recall being thrilled by The Great Escape and A Matter Of Life And Death, and also being disturbed and fascinated by Laurence Olivier's deeply creepy turn as Richard III. At the age of 12 he'd make his proper live debut as a young Tom of Warwick in Melyn Crythan Operatic Society's Camelot, which played for a week in Neath. Backstage he'd chat at length with local stage veteran Billy Tustin and would be hugely impressed by the man's tales of life behind the footlights. Meyrick and Irene would later claim this experience was the one that finally pushed their son towards an acting career.

Suitably enthused, Michael would now join the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre. Founded in 1975 by Godfrey Evans, this was  part of the West Glamorgan Youth Arts Company which would put on shows in the Port Talbot and Swansea areas, involving kids in the many different artistic disciplines necessary to put on a full-blown show. They'd put on performances of a wide variety of pieces, including Murder In The Cathedral, the Oresteia, The Crucible and Peter Pan, as well as less well-known pieces like Vaclav Havel's Largo Desolato and John Cowper Powys's Pair Dadeni. Michael would here gain a vital grounding in theatre and, at 16, move on to the National Youth Theatre of Wales, based in Cardiff but running operations throughout the country. Attending many courses in Swansea, he'd stay in a residential centre called Dan-y-Coed by the sea at Mumbles, sharing a big old house with 50 other students, ranging between 14 and 22. They'd work together and tour together up as far as Snowdonia, rowdy thespian teens singing along together on the bus.

Leaving Glan Afan Comprehensive, Michael would move on to Neath College where he'd prove an academic success. Scoring A-levels in English, Drama and Sociology, he'd pass the Oxbridge entrance exam but, finding the Oxbridge world too far removed from his own, returned to Wales looking for a different college.

Eventually, his parents relented and, to earn extra cash, Michael got a job at Burger Master, a drive-through burger bar on the A48 (actually more of a caravan). He'd work early mornings and late at night, cleaning, flipping burgers and serving. In the meantime, he'd apply to 8 different drama colleges, including his first choice, RADA. Seven would reply with firm offers, but not RADA. Mortally disappointed, Michael would call them to ask why he'd been rejected and be informed that there had in fact been a clerical error. Very quickly the principal of RADA rang back to tell him a place was his if he wanted it. He did.

At RADA, of course, Sheen would receive the finest theatrical grounding, being schooled  in speech, dance, movement, stage fighting, everything he would later need to know. And he proved to be a special student, in his second year being granted the Laurence Olivier Bursary. This had been established in 1987 by the Society of London Theatre to commemorate the 80th birthday of the great actor. Their thought was that third-year study at RADA made part-time work near impossible, the bursary being intended to aid the country's very finest students. Each drama school would submit two names for consideration, about 40 being entered in total. Ewan McGregor was a past beneficiary. Sheen would have to be interviewed by and perform before a panel of society members, and would win the award - around £7, 500, in 1990.

So excellent was Sheen as a student, and so strong was his reputation that in 1991, before he even graduated, he was given a role in When She Danced at London's Globe. This starred Vanessa Redgrave as Isadora Duncan (Redgrave had played Duncan on film in Isadora back in 1968) and examined one  day in her relationship with the Russian poet Sergey Esenin in Paris in 1923, when Duncan was 45 and the destructive, alcoholic Esenin 18 years younger. She spoke no Russian, he spoke no English, so they'd communicate via art and an interpreter played by Frances de la Tour. Sheen would play Alexandros Eliopolos, a 19-year-old Greek concert pianist who worships Duncan and claims to be a pederast, a frantic, poignant character in a play exploring champagne socialism and the inadequacy of language. Both Oleg Menshikov, who played Esenin, and De La Tour would win Olivier awards for their efforts.

Sheen would graduate from RADA during the 7-week rehearsal period of When She Danced. His next appearance would come the next year when he took the lead in Romeo & Juliet at the Manchester Royal Exchange. Directed by Gregory Hersov and with Kate Byers as Juliet, this would play in Manchester through February and March, then take off on a national tour in the company's mobile theatre. Taken on tour at the same time would be A View From The Bridge, wherein Jonathan Hackett would star as Eddie Carbone, with Sheen popping up as a fellow longshoreman, an illegal immigrant. For his efforts in Romeo & Juliet Sheen would receive glowing reviews, being compared to both Nicol Williamson and Jonathan Pryce. Suddenly, after just two professional roles, he was being touted as the most exciting actor of his generation.

Sheen's theatrical career would continue in April, 1993 with Don't Fool With Love at the Donmar Warehouse. The play, written by Alfred de Musset in 1861, would see him join up with the Cheek By Jowl company, formed by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod in 1981. In a bare, circular acting space, Sheen and Maria Miles would play young lovers. His father, the baron, wants them to marry, but Miles's Camille is set on becoming a nun. Thus she and Sheen's Perdican set about verbally shredding each other, pretending not to care, pretending to love others as they flay each other's beliefs, Miles being placid and hysterical, Sheen's smile straining under his doubt and disappointment. It was a lively production with key characters becoming chorus members, manhandling the other actors into position and even massaging their faces into the correct expression. And it went down well with public and critics, Sheen being nominated for an Ian Charleson Award.

In September of 1993, Sheen would move on to the Almeida and the premiere of Harold Pinter's Moonlight. Here Ian Holm would star as the dying anti-intellectual Andy, looking back on the loves, lusts and betrayals of his youth as he's cared for by wife Anna Massey. In the shadows are Andy's smart sons, Sheen and Douglas Hodge, estranged from their father, conspiring enigmatically, unable to bridge the gap with their dad, a gap easily crossed by their 16-year-old sister, played by Claire Skinner. This same year would bring Sheen's first TV roles. First he'd appear in the BBC's three-hour Gallowglass, written by Ruth Rendell as Barbara Vine. Here he'd play the disturbed and vulnerable Joe, forever in the debt of Paul Rhys's sourpuss snob, a man who earlier saved his life. Rhys demands absolute loyalty from the impressionable Sheen, involving him in kidnap and murder. Following this would come an episode of Maigret where Michael Gambon's inspector would investigate the murders of a countess and an alcoholic stripper. Also appearing would be Minnie Driver and Brenda Blethyn.

1994 would bring more work in a radio adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers On A Train, with Anton Lesser, Saskia Reeves and Bill Nighy. Far more controversial would be Yukio Ninagawa's reworking of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, produced by Thelma Holt, where Ninagawa would draw together Eastern and Western theatrical traditions as he cast Gynt as a globetrotting hellraiser tormented by virtual reality fantasies, placing the international cast inside a computer game in a vast and brilliantly lit set. Ninagawa had earlier staged Peer Gynt as a rock opera in Tokyo and this production annoyed many critics just as much. Costing £750,000 for just 28 performances, the show would open in Oslo to celebrate the Winter Olympics coming to Norway, then move on to London's Barbican, then Manchester, and finally Tokyo. Holding it together well despite the wild onstage shenanigans, Sheen would play Gynt from young to old and back again, winning over most reviewers, including the Norwegian press who, it had been feared, would not take kindly to this free and easy take on their national epic.

Rapidly becoming known as a precocious talent, Sheen would now take part in the RSC's autumn season by performing for them in Zeno Bianu's Le Livre De Spencer at the Odeon Theatre de L'Europe in Paris, directed by Luis Pasqual and delivered in French and English. This was in October and November of 1994. By December, he'd moved back to the Royal Exchange in Manchester for the classic farce Charley's Aunt. Here the titular Charley and his student friend need a chaperone so they can respectably entertain two young ladies. Charley's aunt is coming to visit and should serve well, but she cancels at the last minute so the lads talk their friend, Lord Fancourt Babberley (played by Sheen) into dressing up as the aunt, thus allowing the romance to continue. Sheen would again be lauded for his work, being described as "a splendid cross between Queen Victoria and Old Mother Riley" as he fended off the advances of his friend's father and inappropriately chatted up the two young ladies himself.

Charley's Aunt would continue into January, 1995, then, along with much of the cast, including Hermione Norris and Claire Skinner (who'd earlier played his sister in Moonlight) Sheen would remain at the Royal Exchange for a new staging of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger. Directed once more by Gregory Hersov, who'd helmed his breakthrough in Romeo & Juliet, Sheen would follow in the footsteps of Port Talbot forebear Richard Burton by delivering a lacerating Jimmy Porter. With Skinner as his Alison and Norris his Helena, he'd be funny, desperate and passionate, reviewers describing him as tempestuous and electrifying and the staging as genuinely thrilling.

Sheen's next stage role would bring far more than simple plaudits.

Reviews of The Seagull were mixed but Sheen did benefit in that he'd begin a relationship with Beckinsale, daughter of the deceased comedian Richard and actress Judy Loe. Beckinsale was about to make a minor breakthrough in the superior ghost flick Haunted, her star was certainly in the ascendant. They were a golden couple, indeed. Beyond this, Sheen had been encouraged to spread his wings by Thelma Holt and would now direct and star in a production of Ronald Harwood's The Dresser at Plymouth's Drum Theatre. Here he'd be Norman, the dresser of the title, attempting to maintain the sanity of a once great Shakespearean actor as he plays Lear for the umpteenth time out in the provinces. It would be another fine performance by Sheen - camp, cajoling, servile and controlling but, away from the action, sad, lonely and bitter. On top of this, Sheen would enjoy success with some more radio work, playing Jack to Judi Dench's Lady Bracknell in The Importance Of Being Earnest, and appearing in Susan-Jane Harrsion's Alaska.

1995 had also brought Sheen his film debut in Oliver Parker's Othello, with Laurence Fishburne as the Moor, Irene Jacob as Desdemona and Kenneth Branagh as the loathsome Iago. Sheen would appear as Lodovico, a new arrival at court, who's shocked by Othello's treatment of Desdemona and unwittingly witnesses Iago's murderous plotting. As the tragedy unfolds, he attempts to take control of the court to prevent further disaster, and fails. The next year would see an appearance in another big budget movie based on classic literature. This was Stephen Frears' Mary Reilly, taken from Stevenson's Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, where Julia Roberts would play the curious, damaged Irish serving-girl of John Malkovich's experimenting Jekyll. Sheen would play Jekyll's manservant Bradshaw, kept in the dark about his dangerous secret and theorising that Hyde is a blackmailing rotter who has Jekyll in his clutches. As Mary Reilly was filmed in England and Scotland in 1994, this should have been Sheen's big screen debut, but delays allowed the perhaps more appropriate Othello slip in first.

Much of Sheen's work, though, was still onstage, and March, 1996, would see him at the National's Cottesloe Theatre for The Ends Of The Earth. This was a strange new play by David Lan where Sheen would be a bright young geologist sent to build a dam in an unnamed Balkan state. Caught in a battle between upland and valley people, he's also torn by the grave illness of his 5-month-old daughter and the pleas of his wife, Samantha Bond. He's sincere, but nervous, and comes to lose it as his marriage, his family and his job disintegrate around him, slipping into a tortured introspection and even believing that he can save his kid by quitting fags.

Sheen would end 1996 and begin 1997 back at the National, at the Lyttelton in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming where David Bradley's retired butcher  would live in a North London house with his sons and brother, loathing and resentment overshadowing all. Then his eldest son, played by Keith Allen, would show up with a new wife, Lindsay Duncan, and the macho social order within the household would be forever altered. Sheen would play Lenny, one of Bradley's sons, a lean, sly and scruffy pimp, quick to smile but ever on the look-out for an opportunity to take a dig. It was dark, intense and savage stuff, director Roger Michell doing a fine job in bringing out the latent violence of the script.

1997 would be another busy year. Sheen would direct an audio version of Romeo & Juliet, playing Romeo to Kate Beckinsale's Juliet, the production also featuring Frances Barber, Fiona Shaw and Beckinsale's mother, Judy Loe. Also on the radio, he'd perform an 8-part reading of James Hawe's bestseller a White Merc With Fins. On TV, he'd appear in an episode of The Grand, a drama series set above and below stairs in an opulent Manchester hotel just after WW1, devised and written by Russell T Davies, also a former member of the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre and soon to find fame by re-energising Doctor Who. And there'd be a further cinematic breakthrough with Wilde, where Stephen Fry would star as the great Irish writer, the film following his rise and fall. Sheen would play Robbie Ross, son of a diplomat in Canada, who comes to stay with Fry, his wife Jennifer Ehle and his new son. The marriage is decent and respectable, but the witty, decadent Sheen recognises Fry's real nature and, one night, strips off in front of him and seduces him in his own sitting-room, then leading him out into a London underworld of rent boys, drugs and secret parties. Eventually Fry would dump Sheen for Ioan Gruffudd's long-haired John Grey (the inspiration for Dorian), but Sheen would remain his friend, comforting and consoling Ehle while Fry is out roistering, helping Fry in his work and strongly advising him not to sue the Marquess of Queensbury, father of his new lover Jude Law.

Back onstage, 1997 would see Sheen directing Simon Harris's Badfinger, part of the Donmar Warehouse's Four Corners season, where four plays from around the country would be brought to the Donmar for a run of a couple of weeks (though in this year there were only three plays). Set in a Welsh junk shop, Badfinger would see Robert Blythe as a man deeply into am dram and "protecting" underage boys, who discovers a street singer and believes he may have unearthed a star. Throughout a play littered with inventive profanity his dreams are at risk as he fends off a succession of would-be partners. Rhodri Hugh would be excellent as a satanic villain, with Rhys Ifans as a desperate cadger, and Sheen would win praise for his witty and lively direction of a play influenced as much by Wilde's Salome as it was David Mamet's American Buffalo.

Badfinger would say much about Sheen's commitment to theatre in the UK. Though he was clearly in with a chance of stardom, he would still help to improve matters for others, regularly visiting the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre for workshops and, later, supporting and advising the Manchester-based Northern Gap Theatre Company. Badfinger itself was the product of the Thin Language company that Sheen had formed back in 1992 with fellow RADA graduate Harris and Natasha Betteridge, hoping to promote regional and particularly Welsh work. Their first production, back in 1993, had been Forever Yours Marie Lou, a play by Michel Tremblay about the marginalisation of French Canadians in Quebec. Two years later had come Nothing To Pay, featuring Jason Hughes, who'd shared a house with Sheen and was about to find fame in the TV series This Life. Sheen, along with Helen McCrory and Robert Delamere, would furthermore set up a production company called The Foundry, dedicated to the promotion of new and exciting writing. The next year, 1998, The Foundry would put on In A Little World Of Our Own at the Donmar Warehouse, again part of the Four Corners season. Directed by Delamere and featuring McCrory, this would see Colin Farrell make his London stage debut as a semi-autistic teenager enduring family problems in Belfast. The role would get Farrell noticed by Kevin Spacey, and his film career would quickly take off.

Sheen's final appearances of 1997, taking him from September through to December, would see him take the lead in Ron Daniels' Henry V, first at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, then on to Manchester, Canterbury, Norwich, Bradford, London, Glasgow, Bath Theatre Royal once again, and Woking. Ambitious, heroic and ecstatic, he would rally his brave troops against the French at Agincourt, deliver several of the finest speeches in the English language, and find himself nominated for an Ian Charleson Award for the second time.

As a couple, Sheen and Beckinsale were now shining brightly. Having impressed in Haunted and Cold Comfort Farm, Beckinsale had scored a big success in 1997 with a new adaptation of Emma. Now she would chance her arm in Hollywood, quickly finding prime roles in The Last Days Of Disco and Brokedown Palace. Their relationship would be further stretched by Sheen's own success. Having lent his voice to an animated version of Beowulf and appeared in Lost In France, a series of shorts following a family's adventures as they attempt to follow the England football team through the World Cup, he'd tie up with Sir Peter Hall for a revival of Amadeus. This would see David Suchet as Salieri, tormented by the devil-may-care genius of Sheen's giggling, decadent Mozart. Sheen would be brilliant in the role, passionate and impudent, foul-mouthed and womanising, madly energetic and keen to be spanked by his wife, Constanze, played by Lucy Whybrow. To wildly enthusiastic reviews, the play would tour through Richmond, Bath, Malvern, Norwich and Sheffield before settling at the Old Vic where it would remain until June, 1999.

Now there would be no let up in Sheen's hectic stage schedule as July would see him back at the National Theatre, this time at the Lyttelton, to reprise his role as Jimmy Porter in Gregory Hersov's production of Look Back In Anger. Again, contemptuous and hugely funny, he'd roar and rant and whine, this time verbally battering Emma Fielding's Alison and Matilda Ziegler's Helena, with his old roomie Jason Hughes playing brother Cliff. Again the reviewers would rave, and this time Sheen would be rewarded with an Olivier nomination.

Look Back In Anger would run at the National till September then, with Cindy Katz and David McCullum joining the cast, Amadeus would start up again, this time in America. Thus Sheen was able to live in the same city as his partner and new child (daughter Lily Mo having been born in January of that year) as he played Mozart at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles between October and November, before moving on to the Music Box Theatre on Broadway, where he'd remain until May, 2000. His stage career was taking up all of his work time, his only onscreen role being  in 1999's Doomwatch, an attempt to revive the much-loved 1970s series, where eco-guerrillas attempt to counteract dangerous scientific experimentation, in this case a plot involving nuclear waste and black holes.

With Lily Mo on the scene and Kate Beckinsale's Hollywood career burgeoning as she scored roles in the John Cusack rom-com Serendipity and the blockbuster Pearl Harbour, Sheen was spending more time in America, and was consequently forced to cut down on theatre appearances, long runs and tours keeping him away from his family for too long. Instead, he decided to concentrate on films, short bursts of work, the idea being that Beckinsale could stay with him on-set and vice-versa. This arrangement did not always prove to be a resounding success, trouble flaring on the set of Beckinsale's The Golden Bowl when Sheen felt her co-star Jeremy Northam was being rude to her. The Port Talbot street kid in him sprang once more to the surface and he whacked Northam. Hard. Not the sort of behaviour you'd expect on a Merchant-Ivory set, really, but gratifyingly chivalrous nonetheless.

The first fruit of Sheen's new cinematic direction would be the British comedy drama Heartlands, his first starring role and an odd choice for one used to playing such heroic figures as Peer Gynt, Romeo and Henry V. Here Sheen would play a simple northern soul, a trusting innocent working in his wife's newsagents. Spending much of his time sitting and staring out the window, he's ignored by the local kids and quietly bullied by Jim Carter, a policeman and also his darts captain. He's obsessed with darts, is Sheen, wholly in love with his wife and seemingly content in his very small world. But then Carter, who's been having an affair with said wife, Jane Robbins, decides to make a decisive move, kicks Sheen out of the team and takes Robbins with him to the big darts championship in Blackpool. Sheen's a broken man, waking up weeping amidst a pile of Walkers crisps boxes and empty cans of John Smiths. He's a deeply pathetic figure but, advised to fight back, decides to take off on his moped across the Pennines to win back his missus. Thus he engages in a series of minor adventures with bikers and Girl Scouts, trapped women and lascivious publicans, moving ever closer to the final confrontation with Carter. It was an impressive performance by Sheen. His northern accent would slip very occasionally (this was good practice for his later tour de force as Brian Clough), but he'd make a great job of gradually revealing his character to be a downtrodden romantic rather than a hapless loser.

Sheen's other filmic release of 2002 would be a very different affair.

After his theatrical success, an indie starring role and a plum role in a blockbuster, Sheen looked set fair. However, he'd now be undermined by trouble in his private life. Between September and November of 2002 he'd be off to Budapest to film Underworld, an all-action vampire movie set to star his partner Beckinsale. He'd also be working on another part in Bright Young Things, the directorial debut of Stephen Fry, his lover in Wilde. Unfortunately for Sheen, Beckinsale would fall for Underworld director Len Wiseman, her relationship with Sheen would crash and burn, and a split would be announced by Christmas. Though Sheen's stock had never been higher, these were dark days, indeed.

Following the split, 2003 would see a stream of Sheen releases. First would come Bright Young Things, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, set amongst the wild social scene in London before WW2. Here poor Stephen Campbell Moore would struggle to find the funds to support posh Emily Mortimer as they prance through a mad sequence of theme parties, regattas and motor rallies. Sheen and Fenella Woolgar would be perhaps the brightest of the young things, Sheen being very camp and decadent with his puffed-up hair, eye-shadow and furs, giant pouts and witty quips. One of the film's funniest scenes would see him slip some cocaine to octogenarian John Mills, one of its most moving when his compromising letters to a young driver are found and he must announce to his friends that he's leaving the country. Constantly cracking up as he struggles to remain brash and breezy, he's spelling out the end of a lifestyle that will be finished for good by the war.

Underworld would, naturally, be something else. This was set in a future where vampires and werewolves (known as Lycans) fight a secret war above, in and below the city streets of clueless humans.

If Underworld and its sequels introduced Sheen to a worldwide audience, the TV drama The Deal would lead to an equally important series. Directed by Stephen Frears, who'd earlier hired Sheen for Mary Reilly, this was an important slice of British history, based around the agreement struck by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to win power and then share it. Sheen would make an excellent Blair, charming but untrustworthy, wholly pragmatic, while David Morrissey's Brown would be glum and blustering, ever more resentful as ambition drives a wedge between them. It was a powerful drama, also featuring Sheen's former Gallowglass co-star Paul Rhys, playing Peter Mandelson.

Sheen's final film release of 2003  would be the extraordinary Timeline, directed by Richard Donner and written by Michael Crichton. Here Billy Connolly would lead a team of student archaeologists at a dig in France, a ruined castle where the French were so inflamed by English cruelty back in 1357 that they successfully stormed a famously impregnable keep. Unbeknownst to the kids, shady government scientist David Thewlis had been building a teleporter to zip secret agents to places they are least wanted. However, due to some technical glitch, or wormhole, or something, the spies keep being sent back to that castle in 1357. Connolly is thus recruited to go back in time and, when he gets stuck there, his son Paul Walker and students Frances O'Connor and Gerard Butler are sent to rescue him, arriving in that dangerous period just before the battle. Here they'd be captured by the English and dragged before Sheen's Lord Oliver, an amusing fellow who loves to jest and play-fight with his men but is also vicious, ruthless and paranoid, killing prisoners without compunction. It was an odd film, a romance, a mystery and an action epic, but it failed on all counts, despite a very impressive final siege that saw huge trebuchets flinging flaming missiles through the night. One of its faults was its misuse of two excellent villains, Thewlis in the present day and Sheen in the past. Once Sheen has laughingly executed one of the students you long for him to return, to bring a real threat if not more mayhem.

Sheen's one theatrical appearance of 2003 had been a tough one, but another success. Having just split from Kate Beckinsale, Sheen had returned to London while she took off for Prague to film Van Helsing. It was now that he'd accept the role of Caligula back at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Michael Grandage and also featuring Sheen's former Thin Language cohort Jason Hughes. This was a prime role for Sheen, Lord Oliver taken to the max. After losing his beloved sister Drusilla, his Caligula would consider the meaninglessness of life, wonder if he should teach the world a lesson with his violent wielding of absolute power. Thus he calls senators "Ducky", hosts a Gong Show for bad poets, dolls himself up as Venus in drag with crazy gold eyelashes, and of course he threatens and kills, revelling in his tyrannical nihilism. Described as "hypnotically dangerous", he'd be nominated for an Olivier award once again. It was cathartic work for Sheen, Caligula's loss of Drusilla mirroring his own loss of Beckinsale. With Sheen committed to Caligula, the makers of The Deal had had to fit filming in around his schedule. Writer Peter Morgan was unhappy with this set-up, but would quickly come to think so highly of Sheen that he'd several times jump at the chance to work with him again in the near future.

The split from Beckinsale would cause Sheen to seriously rethink his career. In order to see his daughter, he'd cut out theatre performances almost entirely, film work giving him a better chance to visit Los Angeles regularly. He'd need a home in LA, too, and theatre work would not allow him to pay his increased bills. His first appearance of 2004 would come in the short The Open Doors, based on the short story by Saki. Here, suffering from nervous exhaustion he'd go to the country for a prescribed rest and call upon Cherie Lunghi, a friend of his sister. Shown into the parlour by Lunghi's young niece, he'd then be told by the girl how Lunghi's husband and sons had gone hunting in the marshes three years before and never returned. Lunghi, she explained, left the French windows open every day till dusk in the hope that they might return. Then, to Sheen's mounting horror, through the mist they do return, the story unfolding in Saki's typically brilliant and twisted fashion.

After this would come Laws Of Attraction, a pet project of Pierce Brosnan where Brosnan and Julianne Moore would play rival divorce lawyers in New York. She's tough but emotionally vulnerable, he's sensitive but ruthless, they get drunk and foolishly marry. Then a case comes up where rock star Sheen is to split from wife Parker Posey. Moore is set to represent Posey but Brosnan steals her away and so Moore approaches Sheen instead. He's a cocky cockney, with shades and spiky black hair.

Sheen's next TV role would see him challenge himself yet again. In Dirty Filthy Love he'd play an architect with worsening OCD and Tourette's. Fired from his job, split from his wife, he's misunderstood by his flat-mates and misdiagnosed by his doctor, spiralling down into uncontrollable neurosis, living in squalor and becoming a danger to himself and others. A fellow patient, Shirley Henderson, recognises his problems and tries to help, but he's obsessed with getting his wife and job back, just as he's obsessed with cleaning his behind and stepping backwards before he climbs stairs. It began sweetly but became harder and harder, an excellent portrait of OCD, with Sheen twitching and gesturing brilliantly. And he'd remain a tad fixated for his next release, a BAFTA-winning short called The Banker, where he played a nerdy tech in a sperm bank, thinking only of collecting and storing little swimmers, each day delivering them to the fertility clinic nurse he adores (this is Jane Robbins, his faithless wife in Heartlands). Scared to ask her out, he goes to insane lengths to express his hidden love.

Late 2004 would see an up-turn in his personal life when he went to see his cousin Caroline perform at the National in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. Also in the cast, playing Panacea, would be the Royal Ballet-trained Lorraine Stewart who'd earlier appeared onstage in A Matter Of Life And Death and The Man Of Mode and on film in Beyond The Sea and The Phantom Of The Opera. She'd also worked as a backing dancer for pop band S Club 7. Soon she and Sheen would be an item, Sheen taking her to the BAFTAs in 2005.

2005 would see another raft of Sheen releases. First would come Dead Long Enough, a product of the Irish Film Board and Arts Council of Wales, that would see Sheen reunite with his Caligula colleague Jason Hughes. Here Hughes is a depressed Welsh lawyer who's accepted the marriage proposal of his ball-busting girlfriend. To shake him from his torpor, his brother Sheen, a promiscuous TV archaeologist, takes him back to Donegal where the pair spent a happy working holiday some 16 years before. Once there they meet old flames, gun runners, teen ravers and a randy Icelandic photographer, family secrets are revealed and questions of morality and parentage arise. It was mild good fun, satirising the view Brits and Americans have of the Irish, with Hughes and Sheen proving a neat double-act.

Sheen would now move on to another epic, Ridley Scott's Kingdom Of Heaven. Here he'd appear right at the beginning, being the cause of Orlando Bloom's need for crusading redemption.

2006 would be Sheen's biggest year yet. He'd pop up in flashback in Underworld: Evolution, the continuing tale of vampires and Lycans, then he'd be magnificent as Kenneth Williams in Fantabulosa! Pouting, sneering and waspish, he'd be repelled by his own homosexuality but driven to give the public what they wanted, his flaring nostrils, flapping hands and endless witticisms hiding the fact that he's a lonely, bitter old spinster, constantly masturbating and racked with self-hatred. He'd be BAFTA-nominated for his efforts, then would see yet more success when reuniting with Stephen Frears and Peter Morgan for The Queen. Here he'd reprise his role as Tony Blair, this time attempting to advise Helen Mirren's Elizabeth II during the monarchical crisis following the death of Diana Spencer. His Foundry co-founder Helen McCrory would play his wife Cherie as he mixed sycophancy with hard-nosed hype and revealed Blair's very real and oddly old-school respect for British tradition. It was a great performance by Sheen but would be mostly overlooked as Mirren swept the awards boards worldwide. Sheen would have to content himself with simultaneous BAFTA nominations for Fantabulosa, Dirty Filthy Love and The Queen.

Having dealt with the monstrous Caligula at the Donmar Warehouse, Sheen now turned his attention to that other paragon of imperial Roman excess, Nero. This was in the second episode of the BBC's series Ancient Rome, a dramatized documentary following Nero's attempts to hold the empire together and rebuild Rome after its great fire.

Sheen's next part would again see him taking on a real-life character, this time HG Wells in the TV drama War With The World. Here he'd play Wells first as a confident womaniser, radical and prophet, a famous warmonger during WWI then, embittered by the slaughter, a zealous missionary pushing for a world state to end all conflicts. Sally Hawkins would co-star as his sometime lover, the writer Rebecca West. He'd then move on to rejoin Djimon Hounsou in Blood Diamond, where mercenary Leonardo DiCaprio, in serious debt, agrees to help fisherman Hounsou recover and smuggle a giant diamond and save his family. As Sierra Leone's vile trade in diamonds and guns was exposed, Sheen would play the amusingly slimy British representative of a South African diamond executive. He has qualms about the blood diamonds of the title, but his misgivings weren't strong enough to stop him dealing. He'd also find time to trick his ex Kate Beckinsale on Ashton Kutcher's Punk'd, taking Beckinsale to a pool-side restaurant table where she's hit on by a chubby predator. Returning to the table Sheen flies off the handle, pushes the wrong guy into the pool, causes a huge fuss and then pushes the right guy into the water before revealing the joke.

Much of the late part of 2006 would be taken up by Frost/Nixon, a return to the stage. This was the debut play by Peter Morgan, writer of The Deal and The Queen, and concerned the 1977 interviews where David Frost staked his future on his onscreen confrontation with former president Richard Nixon. With Frank Langella as Nixon, the production would open at the Donmar Warehouse in August and prove such a success that it switched to the West End's Gielgud in November. Here it would stay until February, 2007, before opening at the Bernard B Jacobs Theatre on Broadway in April. Both Sheen and Langella would be Olivier-nominated for their efforts. Just four days after closing on Broadway, Sheen would join director Ron Howard to begin filming a cinematic version. He'd also manage to squeeze in a radio recording of Ibsen's The Pretenders, a chance to work with the great Paul Scofield.

Sheen's sole major release of 2007 was another tough one. Music Within would see Ron Livingston near-deafened in Vietnam then badly treated and left on the scrapheap on his return home. Among his new friends in the disabled community is Sheen's Art Honeyman, wheelchair-bound with a straggly beard and beret.

2008 would mostly be spent filming, so Sheen's sole release would be the filmed version of Frost/Nixon where he'd play David Frost as a playboy broadcaster who invests ruinously heavily in his ability to drag the truth from a calculating Nixon. The movie, also featuring Kevin Bacon and Rebecca Hall, would garner five Oscar nominations, and gain Sheen ever more kudos. He'd be further honoured when made a Freeman of Neath Port Talbot, meaning he can now herd sheep along Station Road. 2009 would then bring Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans, the third in the series and the first to involve neither Kate Beckinsale nor Len Wiseman. Sheen and Bill Nighy would now be the stars, this prequel stepping back a millennium to when vampire Nighy discovers a baby Sheen and imprisons him while he creates a legion of Lycan slaves from his bloodline. Sheen, though, begins a relationship with Nighy's treasured daughter, Rhona Mitra and, when Nighy vengefully kills her, becomes a hairy Spartacus, leading the werewolf revolt of the title. It was another exciting addition to an above-average series, with some excellent effects, including one where Sheen reverses the famous American Werewolf In London sequence and changes from wolf back to human.

From high fantasy, Sheen would now return to direct mimicry with The Damned United, with another screenplay by Peter Morgan, the story of manager Brian Clough's 44-day tenure at Leeds, the biggest football club in the land. This was another tremendous performance, with Sheen bullish, idealistic and full of himself, but also a childlike fan of Leeds and their dour manger Don Revie, enthusiastically scrubbing the bathrooms for their arrival, lovingly setting out wine and glasses for his longed-for meeting with Revie, then tight-lipped in his painful rejection. Throughout he'd be twitching with energy, bubbling with plans and ideas, punching the air at every victory, but his Middlesbrough mouth would run away with him, wrecking his relationships with Derby chairman Jim Broadbent and his own second-hand-man Timothy Spall. He was also pretty hot at football, Sheen's past experience allowing his Clough to realistically challenge his players on the training ground.

Sheen would end 2009 with My Last Five Girlfriends, based on Alain de Botton's novel On Love. This was an immensely fast-paced comedy where a suicidal Brendan Patrick would contemplate his last few relationships and the loss of his one true love, Naomie Harris, who he's dumped out of sheer paranoia. Sheen would take a minor role as a favour to the producers and they'd find a filming location close to the hotel he used during the filming of The Damned United, Sheen playing a dream-sequence investigator interrogating Patrick. In a scruffy white shirt with an American accent he's a comic stereotype, forcing Patrick to accept that Harris's excuse for her one faux pas was real. Then would come New Moon, the second movie in the Twilight franchise where Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart would reprise their roles as a vampire Romeo and human Juliet. Believing Stewart to be dead, Pattinson flees to Italy and the Volturi, a coven of vampires who might help him to end his eternal grief. Sheen would play Aro, the most exuberant of the Volturi, fascinated by Stewart's ability to block Pattinson's mind-reading powers and keen to make her a vamp as she knows so many of their secrets.

2010's Unthinkable would see Sheen in his first full-on American role. Directed by Gregor Jordan, the film would have Sheen as an American Muslim claiming to have planted nuclear devices in three US cities and being questioned by Samuel L Jackson's specialist agent and Carrie-Ann Moss's FBI officer. Following this he'd lend his voice to the White Rabbit in Tim Burton's all-star revival of Alice In Wonderland, featuring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway and Sheen's former co-stars Stephen Fry and Timothy Spall. After this would come The Special Relationship, a reunion with Peter Morgan and the third in a Tony Blair trilogy beginning with The Deal and The Queen. Set in the late 1990s, this would examine Blair's political alliance with America, Dennis Quaid stepping in as Bill Clinton.

It's clear that Michael Sheen is one of the finest British actors working today, a master mimic and a real chameleon capable of slipping easily between challenging indie fare and wholesale action blockbusters. He'll surely continue in this vein, stepping back into theatre as his child grows older and, almost certainly, making a major contribution to the artistic life of his home country, Wales.

Dominic Wills