He ambles into his dressing room dressed only in a towel, to be confronted by two out of the three Charlie's Angels, who have come to say hello.

Standing nearly naked in front of actresses Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu may have turned lesser men to jelly but it doesn't faze Scott, who laughs at his state of undress.

He offers them a drink, leaves them to their own devices, then retires to put his clothes on before returning to chew the fat with two of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

A few days on from his close encounter, Scott rolls up at the Soho House, a club in Greek Street near to where he is headlining in the play To The Green Fields Beyond.

The place is full of acting types and the lady on reception shows me into the circle bar to wait for Scotland's latest acting talent, whose name the ladies who lunch in theatreland pronounce Doog-ar-ray.

He arrives looking more like a Scotsman down for a weekend in London with his mates than a top movie star, and greets us with a clipped Fife accent you could cut coal with.

As he lights a cigarette, the man who Hollywood luvvieland believes is destined to be as big a star as Sean Connery laughs again as he recalls his brief encounter with Drew and Lucy.

In fact, Scott, who has already starred in Mission: Impossible II with Tom Cruise, has just finished filming Enigma with Kate Winslet and will fly out to Italy this week to make the movie of Ripley's Game with John Malkovich, laughs a lot and certainly doesn't take what he does too seriously.

His talent has taken him from Auchmuty Secondary School in Glenrothes to the Hollywood hills where he has been mixing with the likes of Cruise and Barrymore, with whom he starred in a £16m American television version of The Arabian Nights and whose friendship led to her visit to the Donmar Warehouse with Liu.

Although he takes the air-kissing world of acting with a pinch of salt, Scott remains very much true to his roots and, in common with many Scotsmen, what he does take seriously apart from his family is his love of his football team.

In his case that is Hibs, the team he has followed from his days growing up in Fife. He has become firm friends with Alex McLeish, the Hibs manager, and any question you want to throw at him about the Easter Road side he can answer straight off.

Where others may be star-struck by bumping into people such as Robert De Niro or Al Pacino, it was meeting McLeish for the first time which gave Scott his biggest kick.

"I remember I had invited Alex to the premiere of Mission: Impossible II although I had never met him," he says. "There I was in my best suit with my green shirt, the old Hibees colours, in this room with people like Russell Crowe, Tom Cruise, and Kylie Minogue, and then my nephew tells me the Hibs manager was in the lobby.

"All my family was there and it was goodbye Kylie, goodbye Tom, goodbye Russell, and hello Alex. We had a great laugh that night, and for me it always would be more exciting to meet an ex-football player like Alex McLeish than even, say, as much as I love him, Robert De Niro.

"However, whenever I meet Alex, all he wants to talk about his films and all I want to talk about is football."

Football has played a big part in the life of Dougray Scott who, despite being 34 and the father of twin boys Gabriel and Eden, freely admits to getting the hump if his team gets beaten on Saturday.

"I wasn't good enough to be a footballer so as a teenager I had to think of other things, and although my dad was a salesman he did some work with the Unity Theatre in Glasgow, and that got me interested in being an actor," says the man who studied drama at the college in Kirkcaldy which also produced Ewan McGregor.

However, the woman who ran the course at the time told him he didn't have a future as an actor and he should become a stage manager, but he ignored her advice and took a further three-year acting course in Cardiff, then graduated to community theatre in Hertfordshire.

His big break came in a stage play with the title Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, which proved to be such a success it moved to London, where he received rave reviews. From then on, Scott has never looked back.

He picked up roles in the television show Soldier, Soldier before working on BBC Scotland's adaptation of The Crow Road, which led to him securing a major role as a corrupt policeman in the critically acclaimed film Twin Town, which was based in Wales.

His performance in that production caught the attention of Cruise, who asked him to go for an audition for Mission: Impossible II, the interest in his work from the biggest box-office star in the world bringing a proud grin to Scott's face as he remembers how it happened.

"It was a weird feeling that maybe Tom had got the video of Twin Town out one night with his wife, Nicole, and sat back in their house to watch it.

"Then he maybe thought to himself as he sat there with his coffee that the guy with the Scottish accent that was in it maybe wasn't too bad.

"As a result of that I went to meet him and Mission: Impossible II director John Woo. All I did was play a few frames of pool with Tom while John sat in the corner just watching us, and I got a call a few days later to say I had got the part, simple as that."

Scott takes pleasure that the character he played in Mission: Impossible II was a baddie with a Scottish accent, possibly the first in recent cinema history, and he is pleased he didn't have to put on a foreign tone like Robert Carlyle and Robbie Coltrane had to do when they appeared on the big screen as leading villains.

The sheer Scottishness of Scott hasn't been diluted by his years in London, and he still returns north to watch Hibs play and catch up with his family.

The last time he returned was in October, when Hibs beat Hearts 6-2 and he was invited to the director's box as a guest of McLeish, but even he couldn't put on a good enough act to suppress his feelings that evening.

"I told Alex I wasn't very good at sitting on my hands when Hibs are playing, but I went anyway. It took me all my time not to jump up and down too much as the goals went in and it was all a bit weird for me trying to stay calm.

"At times I lost it completely and at the end I was out of my seat singing cheerio to the Hearts supporters as they left, which I suppose you shouldn't do from the director's box."

The conversation continues to drift away from the glitz of Hollywood to the history of Hibs, and, while other actors may talk about the first time they saw Marlon Brando in action, Scott is more inclined to talk about the first time he saw Jimmy O'Rourke, John Brownlee, or Alan Gordon playing down the slope. Get him on to his memories of his favourite player of all time, George Best, who had a spell at Easter Road, and there is no stopping him.

As we sit in the bar of the Soho House a video arrives for him, - not a latest Hollywood release, as you might think, but Inside Easter Road, which charts the progress of Hibs, and which he admits he will be watching in the wee small hours of the morning when he gets home from the theatre.

With the start of his play at the Donmar Warehouse rapidly approaching, his parting question as he gets ready to leave is whether he should take some holidays to follow Hibs in the Champions' League next year, and he jokes that he'll make sure John Malkovich is a supporter of the Easter Road side by the time they finish filming together in Italy.

As he heads out into the street you get the feeling he might just manage to convince Malkovich that, instead of spending winter in sun-kissed California, a trip to Edinburgh on a cold, wet Wednesday evening to watch Hibs play would maybe not be a bad idea.

© 2000 SMG Publishing