Timothy Spall

By Jasper Rees

1980 THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
Spall the theatre tyro, star of the National Youth Theatre and top of his year at RADA, is now a distant memory. In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s compendious epic, he set out his stall as a shape-shifter. As Young Wackford Squeers (far right), scion of the Yorkshire torture den Dotheboys Hall, he was a Humpty Dumptyish eruption of noisy, puerile cruelty; then, as Mr Folair, a chattering theatrical popinjay. The stage’s loss was to be the screen’s gain: Spall hasn’t done theatre since 1997.

1990 LIFE IS SWEET
The first of Spall’s four big-screen roles for Mike Leigh, to go with one in the theatre and a sixth on television. Leigh’s intense method of building character with his players yielded Aubrey, a sexually pent-up, jiggling bag of nerves in a Disney cap and moon specs, fired by a doomed ambition to be a refined restaurateur. “I’m not just a wanker,” explains the proprietor of The Regret Rien. “I’m a magician.” Veering between slapstick and pathos, Spall is matchlessly plausible in either guise..