Sunday Times
16 September 2001

The subject of our meetings was a film about Brian Epstein, the man who discovered the Beatles, which Law hoped to star in, and also possibly direct, and for which he wanted me, as the band's biographer, to write a script. You might expect that a 28-year-old stuck with the name of a classic Beatles song would shun all music prior to U2 or, at least, UB40. But no: Jude is a hopeless Beatle nut.

As a rule, the company of actors tends to bring me out in a sweaty rash. By the time I've heard them say how 'lovely' someone is for the 19th or 20th time, I start wanting to upset tables and break china. But Law never came on as a luvvie - just as an articulate, civilised young man with a depth of intuition and compassion that convinced me he could portray the doomed Epstein to perfection. I'd forget I was with one of British cinema's most promising young heart-throbs, then suddenly notice the waitress's goggle-eyed look as she read us the day's specials from the blackboard.

When we began our collaboration, Law was a much-praised but still relatively minor star. At that point, his most notable screen appearance had been in Wilde, Samuelson Productions' quality 1997 reprise of the Oscar Wilde scandal. Law played Lord Alfred Douglas, the petulant, heartless 'Bosie', opposite Stephen Fry's authentically sweet and put-upon Oscar. It was a performance of snaky brilliance, marred only by the fact of Law's being far better-looking than the real Bosie, who had a weak chin and champagne-bottle shoulders.

I wrote an initial version of the Brian Epstein script, which Law, very politely and quite rightly, decided was in need of further expansion. My expanded version was sent to him, I believe, in Berlin, where he was filming Enemy at the Gate, a story of duelling Russian and American snipers during the siege of Stalingrad. A few days later, I got a telephone message from him, saying he was 'thrilled' with this draft. I looked forward to the casting and preproduction stages of Epstein with pleasant anticipation.

Then came the release of Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, with Law in yet another rivetingly homoerotic role as the magnetic, fickle, rich kid Dickie Greenleaf. Among a superb cast, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett, there was no question who shone with most unholy radiance; indeed, when Matt Damon's Tom Ripley battered Dickie to death with a skiff oar, one felt the whole movie, good as it was, might just as well have ended there.

Law received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor, and was playing with the big boys at last. An immediate consequence of this new status was that a Hollywood producer came on board the Epstein project. The producer wore bifocal glasses through which, I became aware, he was inspecting me with the suspicion of a mountain gorilla being intruded on by Sir David Attenborough. Soon after, one of Law's associates phoned me to say they had 'been approached by another scriptwriter'. Infuriated by his gaucheness, I put the phone down.

Writing is an endlessly weird game, and so here I am, poised to interview incipient superstar Jude Law about his role in the new Steven Spielberg film, AI. The task has fallen to me because of Law's stipulation that he prefers not to talk to 'a journalist'. The Sunday Times could have sent along a hamburger chef or a credit-control manager but, of course, we know what he means. He wants none of the press pack who have deluged him with superlatives these past four years, and now lie in wait for him with long lenses even when he's trying to take a stroll with his children.

An hour before I set out, a phone call comes, not from the friendly Jude voice of yore but from his London agent. 'Jude's very sorry but he's got a family problem this afternoon and he won't be able to meet you. He says would you mind moving the interview forward to a week today?' Five days later, after further consultations between his LA and London representatives, the rescheduled meeting is confirmed: 3.30 to 5pm at Al Casbah, Hampstead.

Half an hour later, it is moved forward another day. So here I am, already feeling emotionally drained, sitting in an interior done up like a Berber tent.

" The keen jaw, close-set ears and peaked hairline recall 1950s screen idols like Richard Burton "

Around me, louche-looking skinheads and their ladies puff hubble-bubble pipes or pick at big wooden platters of couscous. At 3.30 on the dot, a limousine stops outside and Law's familiar rangy figure lopes in to join me. Even the mid-afternoon twilight of Al Casbah cannot obscure those intense pale blue eyes, that infectious ear-to-ear grin.

'Hey, great to see you again... Look, I'm really sorry about last week... It was all just crazy...' He is forgiven even before he sits down on the less comfortable chair opposite mine, with one denim knee drawn up to his chin.

Studying him with a reporter's objectivity for the first time, I realise he is something so derided and discredited these days that one hardly dares articulate it. He is masculine. The keen jaw, close-set ears and peaked hairline recall screen idols of the 1940s and 50s like Trevor Howard, James Mason and, especially, Richard Burton.

The characters they played could be wild, wayward, even sexually ambiguous, but there was never any doubting their essential - oh God, another taboo word, but what the hell - their essential manliness. Think of Law in the bath scene with Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley and you'll understand what I mean.

It turns out he is a big fan of the Al Casbah, which at night has real Moroccan music in its basement. The blue eyes brighten still further on discovering the menu includes vintage Krug champagne at £115 per bottle. Perhaps he'd care for some? 'Nah. I'm not a big fan of champagne. A bit acidic for me. I'll have what you're having,' which is a tumbler of not very effervescent mineral water.

Bad journalistic practice though it may be, I can't help kicking off on a personal note. I say how sorry I am not to be still working with him on the Brian Epstein project. Law is gracious and noncommittal, hinting at political complications inside Natural Nylon, the film company he co-owns with fellow Brit heart-throbs Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller, Sean Pertwee and Law's actress wife, Sadie Frost. I'm secretly chuffed to gather that the project hasn't progressed much further since I left it. Then an admonitory click from the tape recorder reminds us both why we're here.

AI, Artificial Intelligence, is the first Steven Spielberg film to use two initial letters and a subtitle since ET, The Extra-Terrestrial, in 1982. But its content may be somewhat less universally accessible. The film takes place in a future, post-nuclear world where human population is strictly controlled and robots, or 'mechas', of amazing lifelikeness fill the roles not only of servants but also of sexual partners and even children. Based on a short story by the British sci-fi writer Brian W Aldiss (with a little help from Pinocchio), it tells of the first child mecha to be programmed with a capacity for human emotion. Abandoned by his human mother, he sets out on a hopeless journey in search of maternal love. On the way he is befriended by a professional stud mecha, Gigolo Joe, played by Law.

When Spielberg's Jurassic Park, with its scarier-than-life computer-generated dinosaurs, was released in 1993, Kubrick decided to hand over the directing of AI to him. The two began exchanging ideas by transatlantic telephone and high-security fax, a not-quite-collaboration that continued until Kubrick's death in 1999. Largely at the behest of Kubrick's widow, Christiane, Spielberg then took full charge of the project, not only directing but writing a final screenplay within only two months.

Law's Gigolo Joe is a delectable creation, Kubrickian rather than Spielbergian; a light-footed, Elvis-quiffed droog who carries his own hi-fi in

" 'I'm looking forward to just buying a paper in the morning and taking the kids to school'"

his chest and pleasures his human clients with the jauntiness of a 1950s lounge lizard. Magnetic though his presence is, he must resign himself to not running away with the picture this time. As David, the mecha boy with the unlucky heart, 13-year-old Haley Joel Osment moved me more than any child actor has since Brandon de Wilde in Shane.

To create Gigolo Joe's almost tap-dancing gait, Law spent months studying the great movers of old-time Hollywood: Valentino, Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Cary Grant. He also borrowed from top-heavily graceful screen baddies like Robert Mitchum, rock'n'roll knee-tremblers like Presley and Gene Vincent, even from the Johnny Bravo cartoons he watches with his children. Building the robot's seductively near-human face meant a daily dawn arrival in the make-up chair, having his jaw line remodelled and his facial hair planed away ('ears, nose, everything') then being spray-painted with latex so his features could be buffed and glossed like those of a Tussaud waxwork. 'By the end,' he says, 'the make-up team had got it down to 21/2 hours.'

He seems surprised to learn I have already seen a British preview of AI, which for the past two years has been shrouded in secrecy far exceeding usual Hollywood paranoia. Like the whole cast, Law had to take an oath to talk to nobody about it until its release was announced. He never even saw a complete script; only his own scenes.

Whereas Spielberg film sets are usually highly social places, this one was firmly closed to everyone except - a typical Spielberg touch - children. He also recognises that AI has not so far had the soaraway success of previous Spielberg fantasies. When it opened in America on June 29, it instantly topped the national box office, taking $29m (£19m) in its crucial first weekend. But by the next weekend, that had fallen by more than 50%. When it left the US top 30 movies in August, it had grossed $77m (£51m), which in blockbuster terms - especially Spielberg ones - made it only a middling hit. Studio executives were obliged to call its performance 'respectable' rather than astronomical, and to grope for phrases like 'selling the concept'. With ET, nobody had even to think about selling the concept.

Law has no doubt that AI represents another seven-league creative leap for Hollywood's greatest modern storyteller. He also firmly rejects the idea that it may be too adult, too bleak and strange and sometimes downright unpleasant to cast Spielberg's usual magic over the whole family.

'It does have a lot of difficult content for children. But I think that, as someone who's the father of seven, he understands children are now ready, willing and waiting to listen to darker and more complicated voices. He's not delivering just another super-glossy, super-speedy commercial package. Here you've got a story as real and emotional as Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, mixed with the world of super-reality, like Jurassic Park. It's more than simple gratification.'

Law himself was of the generation of children strictly excluded from the limb-chomping of Jaws, but dazzled by Close Encounters and ET beyond the power of any written fairy tales. 'I always knew Spielberg was taking me where no other film maker would dare to take a child. In Close Encounters, the scene everyone remembers is where Richard Dreyfuss gets the message from the aliens and starts building that mountain of mashed potato. But do you remember his eight-year-old son sitting beside him and sobbing? As a kid, I wanted to find out what the mountain meant. But I also knew that if my dad did that, I'd think he'd gone crazy, and be running off in tears to Grandma.'

Law's next film, just finished shooting, is The Road to Perdition, directed by the British wunderkind Sam Mendes in the afterglow of his Oscar-grabbing American Beauty. Set in Chicago's Irish gangland of the 1930s, it stars Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Law plays a crime-scene photographer who doubles as a professional assassin in the pay of Al Capone. 'I was working with all these wonderful people,' he laughs, 'and I hardly ever saw them. I had to pitch up and do most of my scenes all on my own.'

It's rare to find a rising young star so happily steeped in domesticity. As well as four-year-old Rafferty, he and Sadie have a 10-month-old daughter, Iris. Sadie's 11-year-old son, Finlay, by her first marriage - to Gary Kemp of the 1980s band Spandau Ballet - lives on and off at the Law home in an easy but close relationship. My mind goes back 18 months or so, to an Epstein script meeting in a cafe with Law and his (childless) producer. As we talked, a small child near us began rhythmically bashing the wooden table with a fork. The producer grew more and more upset by the mindless din, but the seasoned parent Law never turned a hair.

Those who set out to build homes at a young age can often be compensating for deprived early years. But Law has no such demons of misery at his back. He grew up in southeast London, the son of a primary school headmaster. His parents, Peter and Maggie, were leading members of the Eltham Little Theatre, later renamed the Bob Hope Theatre. Jude and his elder sister, Natasha - now a photographer - joined the theatre's junior wing. His first stage appearance had been aged four, as St George in a school production of St George and the Dragon. 'I remember the joy I felt at being on stage in front of people. From then on, it was the only thing I ever wanted to do.'

He describes his childhood home as 'a friendly house', lucky him. 'My parents were bohemian, but not in the sense of hash cakes for breakfast and kaftans - more upwardly mobile bohemian. They loved the theatre, cinema and reading, and, for some reason, I didn't rebel against it.'

Hence the knowledge of black-and-white mid-20th-century pop culture that one normally would expect from someone twice his age. His all-time favourite film, for instance, is The Night of the Hunter, the single essay in directing by Britain's greatest screen actor of the 1930s and 40s, Charles Laughton. Laughton's use of child actors, Law thinks, came close to rivalling Spielberg's in empathic daring. And the vinyl-age music he learnt to appreciate at his father's knee went far beyond the Beatles. 'Cat Stevens I love!' he says, and begins to hum a Stevens track from some mimsy early-1970s album like Teaser and the Firecat. Then he begins to hum another one.

Peter and Maggie Law later turned their back on suburbia to become theatrical producers. Settling in France, they began putting together companies for productions at the Edinburgh Fringe and to tour in Europe. Maggie Law has become a formidable stage director in her own right. 'My mum,' says Law, 'is great.' He's just back from visiting his parents at their home in the Loire valley and sampling some heavenly local vintages with his father.

His own transition came via the quicksand of television soap opera. Spotted in a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the National Youth Music Theatre, he was offered a role in the now forgotten Families, and left Alleyn's School at 17 without A-levels or a backward glance. Wisely ejecting from Families at the end of his 18-month contract, he toyed with the idea of drama school. Then, out of the blue, came a part at the Hampstead Theatre. Then one at the Gate in Notting Hill, then another in Leeds. 'And from there on, acting was home.' He never thought of trying the further step into movies, he says - not until he saw Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette.

'That made me realise that films could be about the world I understood. And I loved Daniel Day-Lewis as the punk. Those wonderful character touches, like the way you always knew when he was going to beat someone up because he carefully took his watch off first. How amazing to think that within a year he also played Cecil in A Room with a View. The way he wore that terrible tight collar!

And did up his shoelaces at the bottom of the stairs!' Recollecting these minuscule moments of filmic truth seems to give Law an almost sensual pleasure.

His big screen debut was Shopping (1994), a braindead attempt to glamorise the urban plague of juvenile car theft and ram-raiding, in every way far below the intellectual level of Families. The characters who attended even its West End media preview put one in imminent fear of being mugged. Questionable though the film may have been as an acting vehicle for Law, it proved beyond any doubt how much the camera adored him. It also introduced him to Sadie Frost. 'People always say I met her when we did Shopping,' he complains. 'But what really happened was that we met at work. That's where most people meet, isn't it?'

Domestically speaking, he says, he's a hopeless organiser and planner, but Sadie - six years older - 'is brilliant at all that. Maybe I'm the fourth child of the family, in having everything done for me'.

Is there any professional rivalry between them? 'The media might like to set us against one another, but we've never really been competitive. Sadie's got so many other things going on. She develops a lot more stuff than me, she writes more than me. She's got another company, a clothes company. She's also had three children in 11 years. If you look at it individually, she's living a completely different life to me, though, thank God, we're linked.'

He and Sadie have been together for 10 years, married for the past four. Amazing, I say. 'Why?' Law asks with perhaps the faintest touch of frost. Er, well, because show business notoriously takes such a toll on married bliss. 'It does and it doesn't,' he replies. 'There have been lots of long and happy marriages in the film-acting profession. Look at Jimmy Stewart... Paul Newman... Jack Lemmon...' How interesting that those should be his role models.

After mineral water and a glass of doubtful white wine, he decides to join me in some Moroccan mint tea. Our waiter puts the coloured glasses on the table, then lifts the beaten metal pot high into the air to pour a stream of green-gold liquid into each. Law's delight could hardly be greater if they started giving us the dance of the seven veils. When he refills my glass, he too holds the pot up in the air.

I realise we've already had 25 minutes longer than our strictly prescribed hour and a half. He's still here, I'm still here, neither the LA nor the London offices are squawking, and the limo is on hold. Quite like old times, in fact.