You've got to laugh

On the set of Elizabeth, he begged the costume designer to let him wear boots instead of tights "because I have the worst legs in British acting". The designer was adamant until she saw the knees: "OK, boots would be good." But then Eccleston has little personal vanity. "I haven't got traditional film actor's looks, thank God. I've got twin brothers, eight years older, with the same features, and if anybody taught me not to take myself seriously, it was them." He is also convinced that women viewers are more open-minded than Hollywood realises, embracing unusual-looking male leads such as Tim Roth, Mark Strong and Pete Postlethwaite.

For his own part, Eccleston has embraced screen nudity with little fuss. The sex scenes in Jude predictably aroused a storm from Hardy purists, but Eccleston is more affronted by the sexism surrounding the nudity. "I found it very demeaning that you couldn't see my cock and yet we were showing all of Kate [Winslet]. In a funny way it was humiliating for me as a fella, the fact that I was playing this man going through these terrible things in the film and you couldn't see his dick. I didn't like the fact that my body had to be protected, especially in that role because Jude is so exposed. But you know, I'd have had to have a hard-on because it's a sex scene - it's idiotic."

Born into a working-class Salford family (he moved back to Manchester from London several years ago), Eccleston credits his factory-worker parents with inspiring his passion for good writing. "They never watched soaps like Coronation Street - they just didn't see their own lives reflected there. I think that's probably where my passion for not talking down to the audience came from. I remember watching Spongers, a Jim Allen script filmed by Roland Joffe, as a family. It was absolutely shattering and part of that was seeing the effect it had on my dad. It taught me things about my family," he says, a noticeable lump in his throat.

Interestingly, Eccleston was a remedial reader at primary school. "I think the only reason was that I wasn't inspired. It was a bit humiliating to be marched out to our special class." A sympathetic teacher introduced him to Dr Seuss and more progressive American books, and by the age of 11 he had a reading age of 19. Today, he devours an eclectic mix of Primo Levi, Barry Hines and biographies of Caravaggio and Scorsese, but you sense that reading will never be a casual indulgence. (He is, he says, especially keen to get away from the awful school-textbook approach to Hamlet).

Leaving school in 1979, he went on to Salford Tech, where he picked up the acting bug. People assume he has had a meteoric rise, but after a drama degree at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London he spent much of the next seven years as a manual labourer with periods of "profound rejection". Most of the time, Eccleston admits, he was very angry. Finally, aged 29, he was cast as the learning-disabled teenager Derek Bentley (the last man in the UK to be hanged for murder) in the 1993 film, Let Him Have It. "They needed someone who was a nobody," he says wryly. Even as a nobody, Eccleston was still fighting to keep Derek real - "I was suddenly confronted with a piece of entertainment about a boy who was lying in a cemetery and we were going to make money out of him."