Dougray Scott, the Fifer who shoots pool with Tom Cruise, shoots films with Kate Winslet and saves his cross words for the press

Scott is 35 and has made 13 films, including Mission: Impossible II, but remains an unknown quantity. He was all over the front pages in August but only because he was standing next to Kate Winslet at the Enigma premiere in Edinburgh. Did you notice the far away look in his eyes? Translation: 'I'd rather be in the pub watching Hibs.' Typical Dougray.

Scottish actors are a peculiarly reticent species, but he is the alpha male. He could haud his wheesht for Scotland, is deeply unimpressed by his own celebrity ('I'm an actor, I want to be judged on my work, not on the number of flash suits in my wardrobe'), and is likely to answer press enquiries into his private life with a contemptuous stare. Translation: 'I'd rather be in the pub watching anything.'

Today he's sitting in an Edinburgh hotel, picking away at a plaster on his finger, preparing to endure his least favourite part of life in the movie biz. Scott hates journalists because they ask him about his marriage and because they describe him as 'a hunk'. He considers this an insult which negates his talent.

In fact, he's about as hunky as Hen Broon put through a mangle (although he's more of a dour Wullie). He's six feet tall and surprisingly scrawny, his face sharp and gaunt beneath the tan. That said, his good looks are undeniable. Although he won't thank you for mentioning them, they have surely contributed a great deal to his success, particularly in the States.

Starring opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible II (he got the job after beating the former Mr Kidman at pool) raised his global profile, but it seems to have been his performance as Prince Charming to Drew Barrymore's Cinderella in 1998's Ever After which has earned him a special place in the heart of young female America.

The internet is packed with sites dedicated to Scott. One lists 17 ways to tell you're a fan. These veer from the sweet ('You wear cherry flavoured ChapStick, even though you hate the taste of cherry, because he said that Drew's lips tasted like cherries and you want to be prepared') to the troubling ('You want to be his horse in Ever After'). Scott doesn't look himself up on the internet, but if he did and saw those, he'd probably keel over, foaming at the mouth, muttering something about Stanislavsky.

As it is, he just sits there, picking at that plaster, waiting for questions. I'm interested in the fact that, as an actor, he seems driven by an insatiable curiosity about other people's lives, and yet he gets all clench-buttocked when a journalist asks him a personal question. It's quite a contradiction.

'It's not a contradiction, it's not,' he says, vexed, his Fife accent quite broad compared with the sanitised Scots he has used on screen. 'I have my own life, but I am here because of my films. I don't draw attention to myself in public, and therefore I don't think I'm fair game for anyone to investigate me. I try to keep a certain amount of privacy because I want to protect the people around me. I don't want them to be drawn into it. It wasn't their choice that I'm in films.'

I understand that totally, I tell him. But people want to build a more complete picture.

'Yeah, I mean. But ... ' he begins, then stops and thinks about what I've just said. 'Football! I talk about football a lot. I think people maybe think that's a cover-up, but it's not. Football is a huge passion of mine, and the reason is -- and this is quite personal -- that when my father was taking me to football matches when I was a child, he used that as an education for me. Now I can track back my whole life by football matches, by places I went to and the insights I got into life through my father. Football, to me, is about the way that he showed his love for me. He would go home and away with me for weeks.'

Scott's father, Allan, died in 1997 but remains a looming presence in his life. Over the years, he had various jobs -- copy boy on the Daily Express, selling sausage skins, playing football for Queen's Park on the right wing ('He was fast as anything, very jinky') -- but it was his work as Scottish sales rep for Lec refrigerators that had most impact on the young Dougray, who was known as plain old Stephen back in those days.

'Watching my father as a salesman was my greatest inspiration as an actor,' he says. 'The dressing up that he used to do. The intimate detail. How he used to get up in the morning and have his shave in his vest, then wash. Then he'd go upstairs and start putting his clothes on. He used to tie his tie in the downstairs mirror, make sure it was just so, put his hat on, smile and then go out to the car. Whatever was going on in his life, he had to go through that door and make a sale. His commission was our livelihood.'

The pose, the calculated smile, how to sell yourself -- these are the things that Scott learned growing up. A self-confessed 'outsider' at Auchmuchty Secondary School in Glenrothes, 'a very grey place, with an authoritarian headmaster', where the 'teachers were patronising and orientated towards the middle-class kids', he fell into acting as a kind of escapism.

He had wanted to be a professional footballer but wasn't skilled enough. His second choice was a cowboy, but Fife -- although quite good for last-chance saloons -- has always been a bit short on Mexican bandits and cattle rustlers. Pretending to be other people was a way of legitimising his fantasy life. Then, at 14, he read Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman and everything fell into place.

'Of course,' he says, 'when you decide that you want to be a professional actor, it is no longer a game. It becomes more like an obsession about being truthful. It's about mapping out people's lives. I'm not escaping from my own life, because I like my own life, but I am really intrigued by how other people see the world. I want to look at the world through their eyes. I'm not a mad person and I can't explain why I like it, but I do.'

WAR! What is it good for? Well, it's been pretty good for Dougray Scott's career. He got his big break in Soldier Soldier and has since appeared as a Lance Corporal in the TV movie The Place Of The Dead, as the war poet Robert Graves in Regeneration and as the leader of a tank crew in Nick Whitby's play To The Green Fields Beyond, directed by Sam Mendes at the Donmar in London last year. He is lined up to play an English Civil War leader in Cromwell and Fairfax and then a hero of the First World War in Close Quarter.

His father was stationed in France as part of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders during the Second World War. He 'never saw any real action' but told his children (Scott has two older sisters and a big brother) about the experience and gave his youngest son his tam o' shanter. Scott still has it.

Allan Scott also told him about his own father, dead before the boy was born, who had fought in the Somme -- the horrific battle of 1916 that claimed over one million lives. He survived, but was terribly traumatised by the experience.

Talking about To The Green Fields Beyond, which is set during the Great War, Scott suddenly breaks off. 'Sorry,' he says, 'that just reminds me that I lost a journal that I did about the First World War, and every time I think about it it makes me go ... ' He shakes his head with real anger. 'Someone stole it. All the research I did for the play and very personal stuff about my grandfather. Some f**ker's walking around with that journal.'

You can see why this would enrage him. Not just the theft, but the idea that someone somewhere knows more about Scott than he would like. This is a man who needs to feel in control of how much of himself he allows the public to see. The less the better.

'War is a fascinating subject,' he continues, somewhat calmer. 'It brings up all sorts of issues about good and evil, about the world that we live in and how we managed to get to a point where someone will put a bayonet in someone else and rip their intestines out.'

In his new film, Enigma, Scott plays Tom Jericho, a maths genius working at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, part of a top-secret operation to crack the German U-Boat code. His success or otherwise could change the course of the war. Unfortunately Kate Winslet and Saffron Burrows are shimmying around in those chi-chi Forties styles, giving poor Jericho the horn.

The film, adapted from the novel by Robert Harris, is based in fact. Between 1939-45, thousands of men and women worked secretly at Bletchley Park, near London, trying to crack the Enigma code but unable to tell anyone about their ordinary heroism. The odds against success were 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. Even when they triumphed, shortening the war by an estimated two years, the Official Secrets Act meant they could not talk about it until decades later. Churchill called them 'the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled'.

While preparing for Enigma, Scott met some of the Bletchley geese. His research also took him to Oxford University, where Professor Jon Chapman, an expert on codes, helped him to get his head around the idea -- crucial to playing Jericho -- that numbers can be beautiful, that in maths, truth and beauty are the same. 'There was just so much to understand,' Scott admits. 'This was the most difficult part I ever played.' And this from a man who once strutted around in leather trousers in the sequel to 9 1/2 Weeks.

'I found Dougray amazingly thorough and professional in his preparation,' says Chapman. 'He had read several books on codes and the Enigma machine before I met him, and already had quite a good understanding of it all. He quizzed me about what it was like to be a mathematician, how we think about problems, go about our research, that sort of thing. He was very interested in using me not just to find out about codes but also to find out about mathematicians.'

Chapman also taught Scott the knack of solving cryptic clues in crossword puzzles. Tom Jericho is the sort of person who completes the Times crossword between forkfuls of powdered egg, so the actor felt he needed to learn this skill. Now he claims that even after filming was finished he remained obsessive about numbers and codes. He was forever picking up papers and excitedly completing the crossword.

As it happens, I've brought a copy of the Times crossword along with me. Will he have a go at solving a couple of clues? No, he will not. 'I'd probably embarrass myself,' he says, laughing his football rattle laugh. So is Enigma going to propel Scott into the A-list? According to Mick Jagger, producer of the film, 'when we cast him we felt he was on the verge of enormous fame' but the actor himself is -- inevitably -- more reserved. 'I don't feel anything. It's hard to say the right thing because you get accused of being f**king coy. But I'm not. I enjoy acting and try to avoid all the rest of the stuff because I want to have a quiet life.'

Scott has learned to be circumspect. Although he has, almost by stealth, become the only real challenger for Ewan McGregor's crown, he also has a knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Work commitments have previously forced him to turn down parts in Trainspotting and The X-Men, in which he was to play Wolverine, a star-making role for Hugh Jackman.

Still, you can expect to see him working again with his friend Tom Cruise ('I adore him') and with Sam Mendes ('He wants me to do a play every two years; we might do a film'). Oh, and it's rumoured that he will be the next James Bond, a subject that he is very coy about. Given those prospects, and the tabloid feeding frenzy created by his marriage problems, it seems certain that the one thing not within Scott's grasp is a quiet life.

He stands up, ending the interview, having twice shooed his stressed PR people away. 'Times crossword,' he says gruffly, yanking the paper out of my bag. He scans it in silence for a minute then hands it to me in triumph, looking decidedly more pleased than he has at any point in our time together. 'Yeah,' he grins. 'I got them all.'

Enigma is released on Friday.

©2001 smg sunday newspapers ltd.