Women all over the country would doubtless have been weak-kneed at the suggestion. Anthony Head, heartthrob and star of that coffee ad, has just offered to get me "a cup of something". No, thanks, I do not even want a cup of freshly perked. He is now on the floor, scrabbling in his large, leather shoulder bag, looking, he says, for some rosemary aromatherapy oil "which is terribly good for stress and just what you need to make you feel better". And anyway he could do with some, too.

Well, actually, Mr Head, what I need is a hot bath, a cup of Earl Grey, a warm bed, and to have my fevered brow mopped by my husband. I do not want an aromatherapy massage from a tardy thespian, however beneficial it might prove. Being a punctual type, I have turned up on a bitterly cold evening at Windsor's Theatre Royal promptly at 5.58pm for my appointed head-to-Head at 6pm. "He's not here," snaps the stage-door person. "He's not expected for another hour." Please, please, may I come in out of the cold? I beg.

Grudgingly, I am admitted to the grotty hallowed halls, where I stand and wait, like some hapless stage-door groupie, for exactly 63 minutes. Meanwhile the gorgon on the door has been joined by another who eventually -- in best you'll-have-had-your-tea tones -- offers a cup of coffee. Coffee! Aaagh! At the back of seven, Head pops his head round the stage door, looks aghast when he sees me (he has obviously just remembered the appointment), and starts wittering on about Gloucester Road snarl-ups, the traumas of the M4, et cetera, et cetera.

We are now in the relative warmth and comfort of Head's dressing-room, where, charm oozing out of every pore, he peels an orange and offers me slices. Thanks, but no thanks. Please, please, may we now talk about Rope, the spine -chilling Patrick Hamilton play which he tours to Glasgow next week?

This closet-murder drama was a huge hit in the thirties, but then vanished totally, killed off by an inadequate Hitchcock film, and the mistaken belief that the story was of the Leopold/Loeb murder in Chicago, which has been the source of many subsequent plays and films. In fact, Rope was written before that murder was committed, and is a resolutely Belgravia story: two wealthy undergraduates murder a third, put his body in a trunk, and invite his father to eat canapes off it. Director Keith Baxter has turned this grisly material into a stunning psychological and timely drama about gay killing.

"In the casting of Anthony Head," wrote the critic Sheridan Morley, "as the war -weary poet who thinks he can tolerate murder until confronted with one, we have the best-actor performance of the year." Certainly, acknowledges Head, who is a smooth blend of charm and good looks, he has received the best reviews of his life for this role in which he plays an oddball, Rupert Cadell, who mystifies everyone as to which way he will bounce. Working with Baxter, who is also an acclaimed actor, on the show which originated at Chichester's Minerva Studio "was a real trip," according to Head.

Head props up on his dressing-table a photocopied picture of the poet Rupert Brooke, "my role model", and proceeds to shave, do his eye make-up and give himself the necessarily fagged-out pallor for the part. It's one of the perks of the job, watching actors putting on their slap, and later struggling to decipher a tape recording of an interview with electric-shaver sound-effects. Head is quick to deny that he got the part on the strength of his performance in a TV commercial.

"I had had some great parts before the ad, you know," he says, obviously cut to the quick. And, heigh-ho, we get the quick skip through the full CV. Has he not played a Herald in the Jackdaw of Rheims at six, the title role in the Emperor's New Clothes at seven, gone straight from LAMDA to Godspell, played Octavius in Julius Caesar at Riverside Studios, had two spells at the National Theatre, which included playing Laflotte "and others" in Danton's Death and Absalom in Yonadab, starred as Freddy Trumper in Chess, Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days, the transvestite, suspender-belted Frank 'n' Furter in The Rocky Horror Show ("I'm not a hugely confident person, but once inside those four-inch heels, I could deal with anybody"), Morris Townsend in the national tour of The Heiress, and been in that coffee ad, in which he believes he and actress Sharon Maughan struck up "a Tracy/Hepburn, Bogart/Bacall relationship with the electric magnetism between us happening on screen, happening in the lens"?

On TV he has played a succession of real mean guys and a heck of a lot of smiling villains. "Basically, I think because I have this, well, it's been variously described, but perhaps principally, it's 'a wry smile'," he says, smiling, wryly. "They usually turn to me because I look a bit wicked." He has recently made an American movie, Royce, with James Belushi, in which he played another serious baddie. "Tony," said the director, "I see this guy as a lightning-struck tree, he's hollow, he has killed so many people."

Okay, said, Head, I'll be tree-like. You mean wooden? I ask. No, he means over the top. In America where the Gold Blend ads are also being shown they are very pleased with this hollowed-out tree stuff, so he could yet find himself, his aromatherapist partner (that explains the rosemary oil) Sarah Fisher, and their two daughters, five-year-old Emily and three-year-old Daisy, lotus-eating beside a Hollywood pool and preparing to be discovered.

Mind you, he says, he has done a bit of that, lounging in the Hollywood sun, twiddling his thumbs, taking classes in audition techniques, and writing a script beside a swimming-pool (he's currently writing his second musical, the first had to be scrapped because he could not use the story). The business is in the genes, he thinks. His brother, Murray Head, is a singer and an actor. Their mother is the actress Helen Shingler, who was Madame Maigret in the original sixties' Rupert Davies TV series based on the Simenon novels, and their father, Seafield, was a documentary film producer. "They were cool when I said I wanted to act, anyway I'd always been heavily into dressing up and stuff as a kid. I had to be because I was so useless, indeed pathetic, at sports."

Rope, though, is proof that there is life after a TV ad, he admits. The c-word, then, can we talk about coffee? Did it bring instant stardom? Has he become the toast of (Nes)cafe society? Certainly early on in the campaign he was out of bounds to casting directors, "as is anyone who has done a soap or a TV commercial. The bottom line, however, is that it has given me the sort of salary that, basically, actors can only fantasise about. It has not made me an incredibly wealthy man. I mean, I'm not swanning about in yachts and things. I've got a nice house, but I had to wait for it. We saved and saved and saved. We sat in a three-bedroom house in Tooting, which is hardly Belgravia, but for the first year after the ad I was able to stay at home and take a year off to be with Emily."

BC (before coffee) he had a good career going, he repeats. "But the ad has certainly made me a household face and it certainly puts bottoms on seats in the theatre. People know my face, but they don't necessarily know the name. Now the ad is huge in the States and I'm getting this big international profile which most actors would kill for. English actors go out there on a hope, a wing, and a prayer, but I actually have a hook, and over there they love the fact that you are known, even if it is only an ad, they think that's great. Over here they are still a bit precious about all that."

* Rope is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, February 14-19.

Caption: Anthony Head: "The TV ad has given me the sort of salary that, basically, actors can only fantasise about."

Page created May 1999. Original material © Betsy Vera (bentley@umich.edu). This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.