LONDON. "I'm not prone to talk much about what I do," says John Malkovich, in tones which resemble soft wire wool. "But then I never have been. I mean, I don't think hookers rush home from work and say, "Honey! I had the most incredible hand-job today!"

He's careful to fight shy of spelling things out. But this actor-producer-director has done more for bulky thighs than Diego Maradona. A towering, gangly, balding blonde, he's a full-on fashion freak. Yet the wild experimentalist in him approves of Ronald Reagan. When it comes to talent, however, Malkovich has the real thing.

Stunning off-Broadway acting (in Sam Shepard's True West, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Lanford Wilson's Burn This) and notable screen performances (Places in the Heart, The Killing Fields, Empire of the Sun, Dangerous Liasions) have established him as one of the decade's most intriguing thespians. At home, he is still perceived as a great character actor. But here in Europe, Malkovich is a cult, a matinee idol, a cause cŽl�bre.

His UK appearance as Pale, the manic restaurateur who disrupts lives in Burn This, began in a tiny suburban theatre. But it soon transferred to London's West End, where it sold out night after night. Critics slavered; columnists pounced. The BBC's prestigious Omnibus series polished up their lenses and pictured the Malkovich quest as full-length echt Americana (complete with a Bruce Springsteen score). To a stylebound, declining London stage, Malkovich had brought unrepentant, high-octane machismo. His Pale taps the free-floating rage of the '90s with eerie, consummate ease. (Playwright Lanford wilson is now at work on the film version.)

"When I saw it Hampstead," says Leo Davis, who handled British casting for Dangerous Liaisons, "the two women in front of me physically cowered when John came near us. They went all pink and gave little squeals. That prowling, pantherish kind of physicality just knocked the audience out."

Two hours before curtain-time, twirling Pale's trademark wig, the "new Brando" himself is a little more downbeat. "All those comparisons...Oh, well, Pale is unique in Burn This. His character fulfills a very specific function. The circumstances of the other people in the play, their thoughts and the ghosts they're chasing, are all very different. If all of them were like him, the piece wouldn't work." About the BBC portrait, Malkovich is less ambiguous. "All that Springsteen music was kinda - over-existential. But existentialism is a rather peculiarly American energy." He laughs, and quotes American tabloid the National Enquirer: "You know what they say: 'Enquiring minds minds want to know'!"

The restless, explosive aura is part of this actor's Euro-cred. "Because he's not pretty," says Leo Davis, "Americans don't find Malkovich sexy. In the US, all his incredible work in Liaisons was really ignored. Glenn Close, the costumes, the screenplay, the directing - those were the things which got the acclaim."

True. In fact, Malkovich nearly didn't get the role at all. The "money people" were loath to believe such a funny-looking, pasty-faced guy could be the catalyst for two hours of serious hanky-panky. And director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Launderette, The Grifters) says he almost agreed. "I'm not sure anyone saw John as sexy before this particular film. But Chris (author Christopher Hampton, who won the Oscar for his screen adapation) had seen him onstage in Burn This. And he became obsessed; he had to have Malkovich play Valmont."

"So," says the low-key Frears, inspecting the peeling sole of one plimsole, "The big people came to me and said, 'Chris wants this guy, but you don't have to have him'. I tried to think of someone better. But really, you know, I couldn't." The first fortnight of filming produced a less-than-comfortable culture clash. But once the movie was off and running, Malkovich ate the part alive.

Critics for whom history speaks with an Anglophile accent were scandalised. Malkovich slouched in period costume! Malkovich refused to mince! When he gave a long speech, Malkovich didn't really know where to breathe! Yet what Malkovich did had contemporary impact and resonance. He involved viewers completely in what happens to feelings subsumed by social form. Or, as he himself puts it, "What can I tell ya? Those people are just like us."

"You focus," he says today, "on how a character views the world. And, if you have talent, you focus on what they do to get what they want, on what they do when they don't know what they want, on how they look and sound and react."

"I don't go out and buy a false nose every time I pick up a script," he says, "I don't lose or gain 40 pounds. But I think about stuff like that. I've done a monocle part or two. It just seems to me that monocles and canes are only useful if they help the performance."

When Malkovich faces the media, the phrase "It seems to me" is a standard polite disclaimer. But really, it's beside the point. In practice, he knows nothing shapes or exploits a theatrical moment like confidence. And self-assurance, utter control, gives his work its tremendous force. "To me, characters are fairly obvious. It always seems clear why they do things. The trick is to present that in a way that the audience will find compelling. Either because it's somehow familiar - or because they've never seen it before."

"The first acting teacher I had," he says, "taught me the worst sin was to be boring. When it comes to how I think a character views the world, I'm fairly decisive . But for me, there has to be inherent in the act of presenting that view something which didn't exist before. Something an audience won't have seen - commensurate, of course, with the writing."

He casts about for a good example. "OK, once I saw Sean Penn be great in this play. And the funny things in it were very funny and the sad things were very sad. And, in retrospect, they fit together in a way which was inevitable but, at the same time, suprising." Acting, he says, is like that. "In that way, it's sort of like mathematics."

John Malkovich knows who he is. He comes from a smalltown, midWestern family just one generation removed from its Yugoslavian roots. He's the second-eldest of five children. And he trained at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. Founded in 1976, the self-reliant American company has produced a clutch of successful actors (Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf, Joan Allen, Glenne Headly) and nationally-acclaimed productions (True West, Balm In Gilead, The Grapes of Wrath). In 1982, Steppenwolf sent Malkovich and Gary Sinise to New York to play the warring brothers in Sam Shepard's True West. The play's ultra-physical staging caused a minor critical earthquake, won Malkovich the Best Actor Obie and brought him a new life in films.

It also meant that American critics discovered "the Steppenwolf style": extreme, kinetic, high-impact theatre. The intense, committed Chicagoans provided a high contrast to bourgeouis Broadway. But Steppenwolf were shock troops for a politics of region which was transforming many American theatres. Encouraged by the buzz a Malkovich generated because of - and not despite - his roots, American actors started to shelve longstanding cultural insecurities. They started to be proud of testing what it meant to be rural and not urban, Southwestern rather than Southern, a black man from north Carolina instead of a black man from Watts.

While Malkovich was in residence, Steppenwolf also fulfilled a function vital to regional theatre: it succeeded in defining itself as more than just "not New York". Malkovich (who married a Steppenwolf colleague, Glenne Headly) still speaks of the company as "my real spiritual home." And, like all its alumnae, he carries with him that sense of identity it instilled. "Where a lot of great actors are deeply insecure," says Leo Davis, "John is quite at ease with himself. But he's also a great showoff, and he plays terrible games."

Stephen Frears agrees. The first time they met, he says, he was struck by the actor's weird physiognomy. "I wanted to know if anyone had ever photographed him really properly. He looked at me very thoughtfully. And he said, 'Well, no, I don't guess they have.' Later on, I find out he's already worked with Chris Menges and Nestor Almendros - two of the people I happen to most admire in this world!"

Frears was lucky. When director Robert Benton was courting the wŸnderkind for Places In the Heart, Malkovich had only a single cinema credit on his curriculum vitae. So a formal dinner was staged, to sell him to the movie's backers. Malkovich turned up - then insisted everyone present accompany him to see Revenge of the Nerds.

His reputation, he says, should not be taken too seriously. "I just never like being condemned by the ways society already operates. Remember when Jonathan Pryce was almost barred from doing Miss Saigon in New York, when Equity said they had to use a Eurasian actor instead? I called up the head of our union and said, 'Listen, do what you want. But unless you rethink that decision, I'll happily withdraw from the union'."

"There's always valid social and racial and regional stuff to consider," he says. "But I'm rather sick of the so-called black experience, the so-called Asian experience, the so-called Indian experience. To me, acting is an act of imagination. I'd venture to say, in all humilty, that I could play Malcolm X as well as anyone else." He isn't smiling, either. "People will say, 'What makes you think you could do that?' And the answer is: nothing. Probably, I would have more in common playing a big, fat, retarded guy. But, you know - so what?"

"It's 'Be lucky, be good, and have a good story to tell '," he finishes, settling back. "Cause a failure is a failure. And, believe me, I've had many. It's like playing baseball. Even the best actors don't bat 300 all the time. Sometimes, you know, you just strike out."

But Malkovich thrives on the unexpected. His favourite moment in theatre, for instance, was teaching Mr T to act. This came about before he ever left Chicago. Faced with rising expenses, Steppenwolf brokered its reputation into a series of workshops: where aspiring actors who coughed up were instructed by company stars. One afternoon, in a darkened theatre, Malkovich was auditioning students for one such enterprise. Two large black men approached him - one from either side aisle. Glittering with jewellery, each laid a hand on one of his shoulders. "Mr T be ready for his audition," they hissed in his ears. Startled, Malkovich glanced towards the company's Finance Director. "Whatever happens, John," he whispered, "Mr T will be accepted." "So," smiles the actor, "In my workshop, we did a few scenes from The Great White Hope."

Malkovich and Mr T saw eye-to-eye, however, because neither is ashamed of acting out America. Both their imaginations feed on its rootsiest, gutsiest self. (Malkovich likes to cite as definitively American a view "that there's gotta be something out there, and we assume it's something better".) But what makes Mr T a cartoon makes his onetime coach an electric talent.

If his onstage physicality flips out the front row in theatres, his offstage predeliction for sketching and sewing have done the same thing for film directors. Directing him in the The Sheltering Sky, Bernardo Bertolucci "could not believe it" when he saw his existentialist hero hunched over an embroidery hoop. But it's less pretension than pragmatism; Malkovich just hates to be bored. So he reads and writes voraciously, smokes and loves a joke.

When Malkovich joined Harry Dean Stanton on the catwalk for Comme de Gar�ons ("Why did I do it? Why do you think I did it - I got free clothes!"), his secret life as a fashion victim was publically revealed. "He's crazy about fashion," says London-based, Dallas-born actor William Hootkins, who worked with Malkovich in BBC-TV's Rocket To The Moon. "He moved out of the Savoy because they were snotty to him about the way he dressed. He was slouching around in this coat to the floor, with a beret pulled down over his ears and just his Walkman showing."

Pop, he notes, is also big in the personal Malkovich orbit. "The day I saw 'Burn This' in New York, Sade had released her new album. And John couldn't wait to get it. So he ran out into the rain wearing his last-act costume and wig. We met up in the street with him in this wig - which, up close, is like four feet long - clutching this package from Tower Records."

Hootkins is one of many suprised to find that this wild man, like Sam Shepard, is politically conservative. "Yeah, he's extremely right-wing. So much so I still sometimes wonder if he's kidding. But one key to his character is this recent immigrant thing in his family. Everything else he's done is stuff his parents can't understand. But his politics - that they can relate to." Hootkins, who himself speaks six languages and has acted since the age of 17, pauses. "He's a complicated man. An extremely sweet human being. And, in the literal sense of the word, the most interesting guy I've ever worked with."

Leo Davis detects another impulse at work in the actor's conservatism. "Despite all this free-form, free-style experimentation, he's still got a lot of that American Masterpiece Theatre awe. He always teases me about living in scruffy, 'dirty, leftie' Notting Hill. Of course, he means it tongue-in-cheek. But to John, England is Chelsea. He really does love it that we have an aristocracy."

Malkovich has made two films which flopped - Peter Yates' Eleni, and Susan Seidelman's Making Mr Right. His involvement with leading ladies has brought him marital grief. And, as of last week, he is father to a child conceived during Sheltering Sky. But you won't find this actor baring his soul to People magazine. "John's interview technique," says one of his former publicists, "Is be forthcoming, be friendly, be extremely articulate - and leave the interrogator with nothing. There's no way he entertains serious talk about his work. He'll always say, 'Look, it's really just a job'. Or 'I only took the part because I knew I could shop at Cerruti'."

At the moment, his former client has two films in the can: the epic Sheltering Sky and Michael Lindsay-Hogg's The Object of Beauty: which co-stars Andie McDowell and a Henry Moore statue. Before this year is out, he is looking at three more projects: "little parts" in Robert Benton's film of E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and Woody Allen's next movie; and a BBC-TV production of Harold Pinter's Old Times. After that comes Song of the Earth: the story of archeologist Henriech Schleimann, alongside Henry and June's Maria de Madeiros. "I just like to keep working," he shrugs.

At the inception of his career, Steppenwolf gave John Malkovich some very valuable touchstones. It made him familiar with every satisfaction drama can yield. Cameos, sound, lighting, production, design - he has tried them all. (Two years ago, he produced a film: The Accidental Tourist, which starred William Hurt). Most importantly, says his friend Gary Oldman (Prick Up Your Ears, Criminal Law), Malkovich learned the stimulus which is gained from change and variety. Says Oldman (an actor the American admires): "Change is vital to any actor. If you keep playing lead after lead, you're really gonna dry up. Because all those vehicles wean you away from the truths of human behaviour."

"If you stop listening to people," he says, "you no longer know what the story is. Stars may not literally stop listening. But some get very snobbish about who they give their attention to. John stays wide open."

In the ways that matter, says Malkovich, he really hopes he does. But, with celebrity, much is changed. "These days, you know, people try to make a lot out of everything. It's 'This person idolises you, this person hates you; this person idolises your work but he hates you' - all that sorta stuff. When basically, I've lived a much less interesting life than the average milkman."

As he speaks, he is doing five things at once; talking, closing the door, stacking his make-up, pushing some laundry back into the suds of the backstage sink. "I was sitting in Piccadilly, y'know, when a guy came up and asked some directions. So I told him where to go and I went back to reading my book. But he kept saying, 'Don't I know your face?' 'Aren't you an actor?' 'What have you done?' And finally I said, 'Look, why don't you go wherever it is you're trying to find'. Which might sound kinda snotty. But, by the 60,000th time, it really starts to be a drag."

Malkovich pauses, a favourite habit. "Those things you lose forever," he says, "No one can really warn you they're going. It's not the kind of thing anyone could prepare you for. I was an actor for ten years and nobody ever bothered me once. But what can I say? You know - Garbo had a point."

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