In Peter Sheridan's film version of Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy, which details Behan's detention as an IRA-supporting 16-year-old at an East Anglian reform school, the firm but kindly borstal governor is played with sensitivity and authority by Michael York.
"I always love working on independent films and I ask my London agent to be on the lookout for all the interesting things that are happening," says York. "He suggested Borstal Boy, and I have loved Brendan Behan's work ever since I was in The Hostage at university in Oxford and then in a professional production in rep at Dundee. It's a great story." Born in March, 1942, the versatile English actor has been working in movies for 33 years, but age has not withered him. On the contrary. Put it down to good living and the California sunshine. York is one of the very few people I've met who actually has a good word to say about Los Angeles, which he and his wife, Pat, have called home since 1976. "I love it," he says. "It's a great city and I wouldn't be there otherwise. And it's getting better and better all the time." He grew up in the suburbs of London and acted with the National Youth Theatre and with Oxford University Dramatic Society - where his fellow performers included two of the actors who subsequently devised Monty Python, Michael Palin and Terry Jones - before turning professional and joining the National Theatre in London during Laurence Olivier's reign as artistic director.
"Olivier gave me some very nice opportunities," he says. "Then, when I had a film career, he offered me bigger roles to try and get me back to the National. At the time, I felt I was between two stools and I decided to consolidate one of them. The tide was flowing cinematically, so I went with it. "It was such an intense and exciting time for film-making in the early Sixties with the French New Wave, and even a new wave in British cinema, with all those early films from John Schlesinger and Karel Reisz. It wasn't Hollywood-dominated, which was refreshing.
"I hadn't hoped to become a film actor so soon, which was a consummation devoutly to be wished. I was very lucky to get a foot in the door so early. I joined the National Theatre Company and the first thing Franco Zeffirelli directed there was this quite controversial production of Much Ado About Nothing with Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Derek Jacobi, Albert Finney, Lynn Redgrave and Ian McKellen. It reads like a who's who now. I had a small part in it and Zeffirelli asked me to audition for his film of The Taming of the Shrew. Luckily, I got the role."
Before making his film debut opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in The Taming of the Shrew, York's most notable screen experience was playing the young Jolly in The Forsyth Saga, which captivated viewers around the world in the 1960s. "It was amazing," says York. "It was probably the first of the mini-series. Even when I went to Russia for the first time, it was playing on television there and I got stopped in Red Square all the time." York followed it with Joseph Losey's brilliant Accident and the Swinging London yarn Smashing Time, before reuniting with Zeffirelli to play Tybalt in his film of Romeo and Juliet. Around that time he met the woman who would become his wife. "I had just come out in two movies on the same week in New York - The Taming of the Shrew and Accident - so I was the flavour of the week," he says. "Pat was on assignment in Europe and she was doing photographs of Albert Finney, Raquel Welch and myself for Vogue. We got on well and then fate brought us together again when I was working with Zeffirelli on Romeo and Juliet, and then she was working on The Guru, which I did for Merchany-Ivory in India. And we got married."
In 1969, York revealed a capacity for playing the darker side of humanity when he played an amoral bisexual opportunist who seduces an entire family in Harold Prince's underestimated black comedy, Something For Everyone, which was released here as Black Flowers For the Bride. "In America, it was an underground cult classic, although now it's above ground and you can get it on video," he says. "I love it. It's one of my favourites."
There was an initially more discreet ambiguity about his character, an Englishman drawn into the decadence of Weimar Berlin, in Bob Fosse's sophisticated and chilling 1972 musical, Cabaret. Despite the apparent confidence with which the film was made, York says "Fosse kept looking over his shoulder because his film of Sweet Charity hadn't worked out very well".
A few years earlier, York had co-starred with David Hemmings in Alfred the Great, on location in Ireland. "It's very interesting being back in Ireland," he says, "because Pat and I had our first home here - when I was doing Alfred the Great here I rented a castle. It was a wonderful summer." He returned in 1976 to work on the zany spoof, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, directed by its star and co-writer, the late comic, Marty Feldman. "I'd love to have seen a director's cut of that, the way Marty wanted it to be," says York. "Apparently, the Universal executives sat poker-faced through it and just didn't get it at all. The humour was so bizarre. What was left of the film after the suits got at it was very patchy. It happens all the time. Now, of course, you get DVDs, so you can see a lot of dropped footage. Sometimes, I think, they give too much information."
Around the same time York starred in the cultish Logan's Run, set in a future society where everyone is doomed to die at the age of 30. "There's talk of them remaking it and someone said I should play the old man this time," he laughs. "It has a real cult following. They even have Logan's Run conventions. I've been to one of them. It's a bit frightening. People ask you about the most minute details."
More recently, York has been enjoying an altogether larger following for his deadpan portrayal of Basil Exposition in the two Austin Powers movies. "It's funny, but the first film tested badly when they did the previews," he says. "We kept going in and changing the ending. There were a lot of gloomy faces around. That's what I love about the film business - you never know how an audience will respond."
An even more surprising success, he says, has been The Omega Code. One of a growing number of independently financed Christian movies, it features him as the anti-Christ, an evil press baron who uses the hidden powers of the Book of Revelations to enslave mankind. "This Christian broadcasting network wanted to expand their output and to play Hollywood at their own game," he says. "They wanted to make a film that had special effects and car chases, using the Book of Revelations. It was scheduled to come out during the millennium, so it was an apocalyptic thriller. "It was only on 400 screens, which is nothing, and it started to do huge numbers, to the point where this little David was slaughtering the Goliaths at the box office. Then it came out on video and DVD and went to number four on the American charts. Apparently, it drew an audience which didn't want to go to the cinema anymore because they didn't like the kind of movies being made these days. And we're making a sequel in Los Angeles and Jerusalem."
While Michael York's output for film and television remains prolific, he continues to work on the stage. His more recent Broadway appearances include the Frank McGuinness play, Someone Who'll Watch Over Me. He has recorded over 50 audio books, including a Grammy-nominated Treasure Island. And in addition to writing his autobiography, Accidentally On Pur- pose, he joined forces with director Adrian Brine to write A Shakespearean Actor Prepares, which was published by Simon and Kraus in the US this year. Some signed copies of the book are available at Kennys in Galway, following York's visit there for the Galway Film Fleadh screening of Borstal Boy during the summer.
Borstal Boy goes on release next Friday.