It's difficult to see the short, 69-year-old man before me as King Lear. Track-suit trousers, trainers and a white T-shirt hardly seem appropriate attire for a man who railed on the heath in the National's most accomplished production of Shakespeare's bleak classic for years. His short, stocky frame seems more suited to playing a gnome or a hobbitsaunters up to me in the Gate theatre in Dublin, I'm still trying to conjure up his face. Holm's CV may read like a encyclopaedia of 20th-century film - character parts in everything from Chariots of Fire and Brazil to Alien and The Fifth Element - but he's the kind of accomplished actor that has never quite hit the mega-time. People only rarely stop him on the street, and when they do they often can't remember him in any specific role. When he gets near enough for me to see his face clearly, however, it rings a kind of bell. "Oh, he's that guy, from that film. What's the character he played called ...?"
Holm as he admits, was never lead-man material. His cinema career has been dominated by supporting actor and cameo roles. "I'm only five foot six, I know I'm not a lead man," he says. "As far as film roles go, it's fair to say I've mainly played cameos. I was beginning to think that I'd slip into old age and that the cameos would get smaller and smaller."
Age has been good to Holm, however. His late 60s saw him come into his own as a performer, cast in lead roles for the first time and experiencing a new wave in his performing career. In theatre, he achieved a triumph in Richard Eyre's Lear, while his role as the attorney in the film adaption of Russell Banks's novel, The Sweet Hereafter (although an independent Canadian-produced project, rather than a Hollywood blockbuster) propelled him onto a new level of fame. Holm has hardly been out of work since he took to the stage in the 1950s. His was a calling that came early.
Born of Scottish parents in 1930s England, Holm's first days were spent in a mental asylum - for no other reason than his father was a psychiatrist. With the outbreak of the second World War, the family moved to Devon, away from the Blitz. But it wasn't until he moved to grammar school in Essex, and the rather unpleasant experiences he encountered there, that Holm discovered drama. "I had, to put it mildly, a rough schooling. I was bullied. I was an archetypical sort of midget and really shy - easy meat for anybody who wanted to squash me. That was in Devon. Then I was sent to a grammar school in Essex, which was 'a good school' with a wonderful headmaster called Dr James, who was instrumental in getting me into the business in the first place. "It was a grammar school, but to all intents and purposes, it was a private school. I learnt nothing there. But - you can print this if you like - I was shown the biggest cock I've ever seen in my life on the first-eleven playing field ... I was aged 10 or 11 and had no idea what to do, so I ran. That was common practice in those days."
Despite the trauma of his school days, it was in this period that Holm first took to the stage in school productions. But it was a later chance encounter that finally led him to RADA and onto what would become his life's work. "I went to the dentist one day in Worthing and he said: 'You're keen on acting'. I said: 'Yeah. But I don't know anything about it.' He said he had a patient; he was an old actor laddy, a provincial actor of the 1930s. Very famous then. So I met this guy. Very tall with a beret. Well he stuck his tongue down my throat one day. I thought: 'What is this? What's going on here?' But he did teach me a thing or two and prepared me for RADA."
After RADA, Holm's career never hit a low ebb. He spent years at Stratford and the Royal Shakespeare Company, spouting enough lines penned by the bard to get him into the Guinness Book of Records one year, as the actor who had spoken more Shakespearian lines than any other - not surprising as it was not uncommon to have as many as three productions a day during Holm's time with the RSC. Things seemed to be going fine. Television and film work ensued. In 1967, a historic first production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming brought him a Tony Award for his portrayal of Lenny.but a crisis lay under the surface waiting to erupt. Holm didn't know what was going to hit him.
"I really don't know where it came from. I'd done a long stint on a television film, Jesus of Nazareth, which Franco Zeffirelli directed. We were in the desert in Tunisia on permanent stand-by. A lot of people were going a bit stir-crazy on that thing. I was relieved to go back home to my mates and something that I knew, to do The Iceman Cometh. I was really happy and not expecting any untoward event. Then, halfway through rehearsals, I suddenly got gripped by this fear, and it got worse and worse and worse. I staggered through one preview, then on the second preview, I just walked off. The Iceman Goeth."
It took almost 20 years for Holm to return to the theatre. He took time off, went to a psychiatrist, was diagnosed with depression and put on medication. He claims that while he has mastered the fear, he still sometimes has concerns about it. "Of course it won't happen again, but sometimes you fear it will. I'm walking on thin ice at the moment and I have been waking up in the morning with panic attacks. It's very easy to translate that to the stage."
The "thin ice" he is walking on may have something to do with the current divorce he's going through. With three previous relationships having broken up, he admits that his personal life "has been pretty messy, to put it mildly"; he says that it has taken him "a long time to grow up". Adding with a laugh, as he looks at me sitting opposite him nodding and taking notes, "I feel like I'm in therapy here".
Hopefully, when it comes to the opening night of the Gate Theatre's production of The Homecoming on June 12th - followed by a relocation to New York's Lincoln Centre for the Pinter Festival there this summer - Holm, in his role of Max, will feel on steadier ground. At nearly 70, he admits that he is finding the rehearsal process exhausting, saying that rehearsals have been "slow and fairly intense. The voyage of discovery in this play has been fiendishly difficult".
His admiration for the work is obvious, however, as he shows me his original first edition of the play signed by the author. He holds it before me with all the pride of a schoolboy showing off his prize comic. Look, but don't touch. When he speaks of Pinter he becomes animated: "Pinter is the greatest dramatist we have writing in the English language today. It's an endless voyage of discovery with Pinter - very much like Shakespeare. You know that the word that has finally been put down on the page has taken blood. It is the right word."
Directed by Robin Lefevre, The Gate's Homecoming - a story of a north-London family gathering and a tribal battle for supremacy - differs from the original 1965 version directed by Peter Hall in that Pinter is no longer at the mercy of a censor. Holm recounts, "Pinter told me he'd changed only one word in The Homecoming: 'Flake off'. He said, 'We had censors in those days. I now say fuck off'."
Audiences can expect a visceral and gripping performance in The Homecoming from Holm as Max, the bullying patriarch, who returns to the play 36 years after he first played the original Lenny, played in this production by Ian Hart. In a very real sense, this is a homecoming for Holm himself, who hasn't seen another production of the work in the intervening years. "I hate to say this, but I created Lenny. It's always been very, very personal to me. I've actually never seen another production of the play. I just literally couldn't bring myself to go and see it. But when I was doing it I thought, one day I'll play the old guy."
Holm is living proof that all things come to those who wait. And yet his journey from supporting actor to leading man has left him with few ambitions. "I'm not an ambitious person. I've been incredibly lucky in my career, if not in my life. There have not been many times when I've been out of work. Long may that continue. I don't have any specific ambitions in theatre, possibly The Tempest. But a great new play - that's what I'd like to do. And maybe a comedy."
As for his recognition problem, The Lord of the Rings will put paid to that. To a whole generation, he'll be eternally known as Bilbo Baggins.
The Homecoming runs at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, from June 12th to 30th. Tel: 01-8744045