April 5, 2003
Daily Mail
The man who could be king;
Dougray Scott is set to be crowned as our greatest acting talent
by author unavailable

For decades Scotland had only one slightly irascible, golf-obsessed movie star and sex symbol. Now it has two.

Dougray Scott may be the closest thing we have to a young Connery ruggedly handsome but without vanity and still speaking in the broad Scottish brogue he grew up with.

Dougray is blessed with more hair and fewer tattoos but he even moves like Connery, walking with an easy, fluid gait.

He also shares Big Tam's sporty competitiveness. On the day of our interview he was at a Glasgow curling rink, learning the basics for a new Scottish film, Bum's Rush, a project he produced and stars in. His character is not supposed to be a curling champion, but Dougray is focused and serious as he slides the stones down the ice.

Beside him, his co-star, Trainspotting's Kevin McKidd, is trying also to master the technicalities but with less success. At one point he forgets to let go and ends up following his stone towards its target.

But with his next shot, Kevin flukily scores a bullseye. Scott glances up, registers this, and does not look entirely happy. 'I do get obsessive,' he admits later. 'It's there in everything I do but especially sport. I love football but golf is the game I can play every day. I get very zen about it and I love playing in Scotland.' Dougray is a very different animal when talking about sport. He can wax lyrical about Hibs, his boyhood team, for hours. He adores them their former manager Alex McLeish is a close pal and Dougray even bunked off the premiere of his film Enigma to catch a vital match on TV.

But steer the conversation towards his private life and the 37-year-old Fifer can turn Connery-dour. His speech slows to a monotone, the eyelids drop and pulling teeth is a breeze compared to extracting the most innocuous biographical detail.

Sometimes, he says, he panics when he discovers how much of his personal life is already public knowledge.

His reticence is understandable a couple of years ago he was linked to fellow Enigma star Kate Winslet, then still married. Allegations of a relationship were fiercely denied, but when he went to embrace his wife Sarah at the film's premiere she appeared to rebuff him. The scene set tongues wagging.

Dougray's new film, To Kill A King, opens next month. The English Civil War movie was a troubled project financially and at one point the production ran out of money and ground to a halt. So Dougray dipped into his own pocket and paid GBP 80,000 to cover the crew's wages and get it up and running again.

You've only got one life,' he shrugs. 'I believe in this film. I'd been involved with it for almost two years. And in the end I got my money back.'

But at that time it was a gamble. Films go bust all the time did he not feel the slightest bit apprehensive?

'It was important to me,' he says flatly. 'And I wasn't afraid to show it.

If you're committed to something, then it infects other people with enthusiasm. If you're not sure, then people can smell it, like fear.' He takes his work seriously. He also takes journalists seriously and he takes Dougray Scott seriously.

'I could call up Tom Cruise right now,' he once told me while we were discussing the friendship that has endured since they worked together on Mission: Impossible 2.

'Oh, go on then,' I said, offering my mobile. He was not the slightest bit amused.

Before filming Mission: Impossible 2 he won his role after beating Cruise at pool Dougray undertook a gruelling seven-month fitness programme, including 45 hours of gun training, to play an evil, muscle-bound adversary bent on world domination.

Since then he has made shape shifting something of a specialty. For his role in the World War II thriller Enigma, he had to lose nearly two stone to play a weak and weedy looking mathematics genius.

'I started losing the weight from when I finished Mission: Impossible 2.

I was 12 stone 10lbs when I did Mission: Impossible 2 the muscles I had have since disappeared, unfortunately. Then when I started filming Enigma I was just under 11 stone.' 'What's the secret?' I asked, thinking there could be a market for an illustrated Dougray Scott Diet Book. 'Eat less,' he says.

In fact, his preparation for film roles usually goes much further than dropping or gaining a few pounds. For Enigma, he learnt how to operate a real code-breaking Enigma machine, right down to stripping it down and reassembling it.

After he finishes filming Bum's Rush, a GBP 2million black comedy in which he not only stars but is also executive producer, he has just a few months to gain weight before filming starts on Map of Love, in which he plays Dylan Thomas.

'It's a beautiful voice Thomas had,' he enthuses. 'Very BBC.' Dougray is certainly Celtic but physically he is taller and rather better looking than the potato-faced poet who appears in dustjacket pictures.

'I really don't look like a lot of the people I play at the start,' he agrees.

'But I think it's more important to get the voice and his spirit. And Thomas wasn't fat when he was younger.

Someone told me he was angelic.' Dougray has already spent two days in Thomas's birthplace, meeting some of the poet's old friends. He learnt from one woman that, when drunk, the Welsh wonder was something of a sloppy kisser.

Dougray has a sentimental attachment to Wales, having studied at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Acting was not something he had considered as a young boy. Instead, he had wanted to be a professional footballer but he now admits, 'I'm better off watching.' HIS father once played for Queen's Park but never fulfilled his ambition to become a professional actor, working nine-to-five as a salesman instead.

Next, the young Dougray then going by his real name, Stephen wanted to be a cowboy, but Fife hadn't much in the way of cattle drives. Pretending to be other people was the next best thing, and when at 14 he read Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, everything fell into place.

But he was not always encouraged by others: 'A drama teacher in Kirkcaldy told me that I wouldn't make it as an actor I should be a stage manager instead.' This would seem a crushing judgment for someone still to land his first professional role, growing up on a council estate in Glenrothes where ambition was not exactly encouraged.

Luckily his father Alan and mother Elizabeth, a nurse, thought otherwise.

Dougray had a precocious self-belief. ' I have always been my own motivator and never had a mentor. I knew that acting was the right thing for me to do.

'My drama teacher was wrong.' His determination paid off. At drama school he won the most promising student award in 1989.

But after graduating he found himself jobless for six months and living on benefit.

'It makes me grateful for the position I'm in now,' he says.

'I was out of work for a long, long time. But I stayed active. It is hard because a painter can still paint and a writer can still write but an unemployed actor can't really act.

'Instead, I would set myself targets. I read enormously. Once I decided to read everything by Graham Greene, so I got the books and went through them in three days.' For five years he struggled, but a turning point came in 1995.

He adopted the name Dougray, landed a role in the TV drama Soldier Soldier and never looked back.

A part in Kavanagh QC followed and, perhaps inevitably, Taggart. The black comedy Twin Town, filmed in Swansea, was the trigger that started his career in earnest and led to big screen appearances, including in the Hollywood blockbuster Deep Impact.

These days he lives in London with his casting agent wife Sarah Travis the couple have been together for several years but only married two years ago, with his close friend Ewan McGregor as best man. The couple have twins, Gabriel and Eden.

Dougray's father died six years ago, when his son was on the cusp of stardom it is an abiding regret that his dad never got to live his dream through his son.

But his mother still lives in the same Glenrothes house where he grew up and Dougray often goes home to see her.

After Mission: Impossible 2, he seemed set for Hollywood but instead he has stubbornly stuck to his guns, turning down lucrative offers and choosing instead to act in independent and British productions.

'I have no wish to live in LA, it's a factory town,' he says. 'The fact that their business is film doesn't cut any ice with me. I'd rather be here, making films and playing golf.' Spoken like a true Scott.

Copyright 2003 Associated Newspapers Ltd.