Ian McShane addresses the reactions to his Game of Thrones spoilers 

 Ian McShane, star of Deadwood and Lovejoy, is back on British TV in Doctor Thorne and soon to appear in Game of Thrones. He pulls no punches, finds Nigel Farndale

Although Ian McShane has lived in Venice Beach, California, since 1980, he still thinks of Manchester as home. He visits the city as often as he can because his mother, who is 95, still lives here, and he is a fanatical Man United fan (which is not surprising since you consider his father, Harry McShane, played for the club back in the Fifties, when Matt Busby was manager).

Raffish and compact in jeans, pumps and zip-up jacket, and with thick, mostly dark hair, Hollywood teeth and a mahogany tan, the 73-year-old actor neither looks nor dresses his age. And though he is friendly and open, he still retains some of the angry young man qualities that have characterised his performances over the years.

When, for example, I ask about the Man United v Man City match he went to see (with his friend Sir Alex Ferguson), he says: “Do I really hate Man City? Of course, I do.” And he is refreshingly rude about his fellow Hollywood stars, especially those involved in the racism row at this year’s “all-white” Oscars. “You’ve got Will Smith’s wife, whoever she is, saying she will boycott the Oscars and we’re thinking, \'Yeah I’m sure we’ll miss you, darling.’ Why? Because her husband wasn’t nominated, even though he’s put on a Nigerian accent for his latest film? We’re expected to go \'wow’ about that, are we? It’s like Leonardo DiCaprio. Not the finest performance, just him grunting and being raped by a bear. The Oscars are ridiculous.”

Or consider this unpretentious answer when I ask if he is a Trollopian, a reasonable question, I thought, considering he is starring in ITV’s new Sunday night costume drama,

Julian Fellowes’s adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne. “Na, haven’t read any of his books,” he says. “Only the synopsis.”

Still, it is intriguing that McShane has made this brief return to British television, because this is where he made his name, back in the Eighties, with the comedy drama Lovejoy. That show, in which he played a lovable but roguish antiques dealer, would attract around 16 million viewers and turn him into an unlikely sex symbol.

Ian McShane as the loveable antiques dealer in Lovejoy (1986)

After that, he went to Hollywood and never looked back, making films such as Sexy Beast, Hot Rod and the blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean. Most notably, he starred in the cult television series Deadwood (2004-06), about a South Dakota gold mining town in the lawless 1870s. He played the saloon bar and brothel owner Al Swearengen, known as much for his poetically foul mouth as for his calm way of being violent. With its subtle characterisation and rich, almost Shakespearean language, Deadwood earned huge critical acclaim and eight Emmys, including a Best Actor award for McShane.

So why the return to cosy old British television? “Harvey Weinstein, who produced it, wanted a name that meant something in America. That was why they asked me, and I thought why not?”

Oh. OK. Not the answer I was expecting, but, again, refreshingly honest. I ask if Doctor Thorne is safe for his mother to watch, given that she has, in the past, complained about his on-screen swearing and violence. “Oh, she won’t like me in this because I’m playing an old reprobate – a dying alcoholic. \'Do you have to look like that?’ she will ask. Mums always have a different perspective to everyone else. Here I am, 73, and I still feel like a schoolboy around her.”

Doctor Thorne, review: Julian Fellowes and Anthony Trollope is a happy marriage

Ian McShane as Sir Roger Scatcherd in ITV's Doctor Thorne

This, he reckons, is a great time to be an actor, “especially if you’re a young British actor, because you can go over to America and get in television shows instantly”. Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly a good time for him to be an actor. As well as Doctor Thorne, he is, at the moment, in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Grimsby, and the list of film and television projects he has in the pipeline includes the British boxing movie Jawbone, US indie flick Pottersville and the lead role in American Gods (a much-anticipated television adaptation of the Neil Gaiman fantasy novel). McShane is in demand, you imagine, because whenever he is in a scene it invariably seems to crackle into life. And there is always a whiff of cordite about him, on screen and off.

I ask him about the latest British invasion of Hollywood, all those public school actors such as Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch and Damian Lewis. What do Americans reckon to Britons taking their jobs? “Americans aren’t like that, they are the most generous people in the world. They only care about talent, not where you come from.”

Ian McShane as Blackbeard in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

He is also about to appear in Game of Thrones. In his cavalier way the other day, he lit up the internet by letting slip that his character, a priest, brings back a popular character who was thought to have died in an earlier episode. “You say the slightest thing and the internet goes ape,” he says. “I was accused of giving the plot away, but I just think get a f---ing life. It’s only tits and dragons.

They asked me if I wanted to do Game of Thrones and I said, \'Sure, I’ll be able to see my old pals Charlie Dance and Stephen Dillane’ and they said, \'No, we’ve killed them off.’ I wasn’t sure whether I could commit, but then they said it would only be for one episode, so I said, \'So that means I must die at the end of it. Great, I’m in.’ ” (And with that, he gives away another plot twist.)

McShane doesn’t seem to have had a “starving in a garret” period after leaving Rada in 1962, aged 19. “Na, went straight into a movie with Johnny Hurt, The Wild and the Willing. I’d spent most of my time there chasing girls. Being straight when so many of the actors were gay was great.”

Ian McShane as the Prime Minister in the 1978 TV serial Disraeli 

He certainly seems to have embraced the Swinging Sixties. “The summer of ’66 was my favourite because I spent it hanging out with George Best. Beautiful, curly hair, fifth Beatle. All that.” The playwright Joe Orton was another of his drinking buddies. “Joe had this insouciance and cheekiness which was great. I was in the original West End production of his play Loot, but it was terrible. How to f--- up the second play of a great playwright. Kenneth Williams was in it as well and was completely wrong for it, looked like a Nazi queen in leather.”

He says he was never that aware of Orton’s notorious penchant for cottaging, as immortalised in the Alan Bennett film Prick Up Your Ears. “That side of things was none of my business,” he says. But did he draw on his time with Orton when he came to play a gay character opposite Richard Burton in Villain (1971)? (The two actors kissed on screen, which was considered quite daring at the time.) “Not really, because that character was bisexual. I remember Burton saying to me, \'I’m glad you’re playing this part because you remind me of Elizabeth.’ It was because of my long hair, I think. My tits weren’t as good as hers, though.”

It was from Burton that McShane learnt the pleasures of drinking vodka for breakfast, and hell-raising generally. After that, the rest of the Seventies were a blur. “I became a high-functioning alcoholic and drug taker [cocaine mostly]. I would always remember my lines, and always be on time, but some of the films I was in then I have no recollection of having done them.” And there were “a couple of wives, or whatever”. He can’t remember much about them either, although when I quote his second wife, Ruth Post, a model, as saying he neglected all his responsibilities as a father, he does become a little defensive.

“Well that was bullshit. Ruth was an angry woman. I told our two kids, \'When people get divorced things can turn ugly and people say ugly things.’ I said to them, \'The truth is we were both, as parents, quite irresponsible together, there were faults on both sides.’ ”

He left Post for the actress Sylvia Kristel, best known for the Emmanuelle soft porn films. I quote a passage from Kristel’s memoirs, in which she describes how their love/hate relationship was fuelled by cocaine and alcohol. His short stature made him so frustrated, she claimed, he would sometimes explode with rage. And the couple’s arguments would escalate into physical violence, on both sides.

“Yeah,” he says, “that was a volatile time in my life. Lunacy. Off the rails for a year and a half. Sylvia was a great girl, but we were hardly seeing each other towards the end, because we were always away filming in different parts of the world and then, when we did meet, we would fight.”

After Kristel he seems to have had a “road to Damascus” experience when he met the American actress Gwen Humble. “I realised all I had ever felt for women up to that point was lust, but that what I was feeling for Gwen was love. It took me a few years to get sober, but my life took a good turn after that. I went to an AA meeting and that was 28 years ago and I’ve been sober ever since.”

His going to AA coincided with Lovejoy taking off, and his life came together in another way because, as the show’s producer as well as its star, he made a lot of money. “That came about because I found these Lovejoy books and said to my friend Ian La Frenais that he should adapt them, because I knew that was the kind of comedy drama that would suit his talents perfectly. When the BBC bought it, Michael Grade wanted to take over the production, but I told him to f--- off.”

The show was so successful it looked for a time as if McShane would never be able to persuade casting agents that he was capable of grittier roles, but then along came Deadwood. I ask if it was a relief to think that his obituaries, when they came, might lead on Deadwood, rather than Lovejoy. “Well, in this country, it might be the other way around, but that’s OK. Lovejoy was a good show, too.”

The demise of Deadwood came at the height of its success, but he’s philosophical about it. “It was a combination of hubris and money, with the heads of HBO arguing among themselves,” he says with a shrug. “But it was great while it lasted. When I find myself in a hotel room and see Deadwood is on, I always find myself hooked.”

He still sounds British – that sandpapery Lancastrian burr – and he has kept a British passport, but does he feel American? “No, not really. My wife is American, though, and she’s been my wife for 36 years, and I do love the place. When I see all this Trump bullshit, all his bombast and stupidity, I think that’s not the America I know.”

He says his father, who was in the RAF during the war, was his hero. “But I didn’t feel in his shadow, because we were friends. He had an easy personality. Wasn’t bitter. He had Alzheimer’s at the end. He’d say to me: \'Who are you playing for these days?’ and I’d say \'Dad, you’re the footballer, I’m the actor.’ And he said \'Oh. Would I have seen you in anything?’”McShane cracks up laughing as he recalls this. “That’s a great line, isn’t it? I sometimes wonder whether he was setting me up for it.”

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