Nigel Hawthorne was in South Africa to film A Reasonable Man and be a presenter at the M-Net All Africa Film Awards. Adrienne Sichel caught up with him

'It's going to be quite painful today," the director tells the cast and film crew of A Reasonable Man. Then he disappears. Not physically. As the cameras roll, Gavin Hood, this crime thriller's writer and director, switches into the lead character of lawyer Sean Raine.

The feisty legal eagle is doing battle with Vusi Kunene's state prosecutor. Being grilled in the witness box is Graham Hopkins as anthropologist Professor MacKenzie who has spent 22 years studying ritual murders. Talk about a heavyweight line-up. But wait.

Presiding at the bench, in the musty cream wood and marble courtroom, so realistic you can smell the Natal humidity dripping off the murals, is Judge Wendon. The solid presence in the scarlet robes is none other than Nigel Hawthorne, the South African-raised actor who has carved a major international career.

Then Hawthorne is free to talk despite the fact that he has been suffering from food poisoning. Leaving the giant hangar, which is Movie World in Silverton, we head for the jacaranda-splashed veld since Nige is anxious to soak up as much sun as possible before returning to the wintry north. Surrounded by thorn trees and pushy bluegums, the respected English actor considers his relationship with Africa, where he has made three films in the past four years. In 1995 it was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission-themed Inside, directed by Arthur Penn on location in Johannesburg, and last year he played Dr Livingstone in National Geographic's Out of Darkness.

The Madness of King George, Alan Bennett's play which won him four major British theatre awards in 1992 and then an Academy Award nomination in 1995, was a landmark in his career, introducing him to a new side of the film business. As his memorable portrayal of the Duke of Clarence proved, in Richard Loncraine and Ian McKellen's Richard III, Hawthorne's artistry and craftmanship apply equally to cameo roles.

This year alone he has shot five films. "The love for theatre was waning, the honeymoon was over. It's just on 50 years so I feel my dues have been paid to a certain extent," is the urbane explanation. That doesn't mean he has deserted the stage. Just the contrary. To honour all the personal milestones which pop up in 1999 - turning 70, celebrating 50 years on stage, having the same agent for 30 years and perhaps embarking on film directing - he's going for broke. He'll star in celebrated Japanese theatre director Nina Gawa's staging of King Lear. This Royal Shakespeare Company production will be rehearsed in Stratford from August, opens in Tokyo and goes to the Barbican and Stratford for the millennium.

Is Lear a role he has always envisaged playing? Hawthorne smiles wryly. "Adrian Noble, director of the RSC, called me from New York and said 'King Lear'. I said 'Oh G-o-d', because it's everyone's favourite mountain. I think it's something I have to face because it is not only Shakespeare's greatest play but a significant play for an older man. If you have the courage to play it and face up to, not only its vocal and physical challenges, but also its emotional and spiritual challenges, then you can consider yourself well and truly stamped as an actor. Most people are in their 40s when they do it - I'll be 70.

"In many ways King George was my Lear, that's why I rejected the previous pursuit. But Lear goes further than George ever went and the language is more poetic, more alarming in its ferocity."

Apart from the deep-grained humility and pragmatism, one of the keys to Hawthorne's success as an actor has to be his passion for research. He's already pondering his Lear, whom he envisages will dole out his kingdom after the little-known Queen Lear's funeral, a tactic which should establish his emotional state.

Hawthorne's return to South Africa was a result of Inside, which marked his first professional homecoming in 34 years, in which he was cast as Colonel Kruger, a security policeman. He befriended co-actor Janine Eser who is married to Gavin Hood who has taken five years to get the project about muti murder off the ground.

Although the part of the judge is far from large, Hawthorne found the all South African production a positive experience. "Gavin's instincts are very good ... His commitment is total. It is indeed a topical subject. It also brings into question what is right and what is wrong. We base everything on what we, as Westerners, consider morality, but we forget other people have different ways of going about things."

Hawthorne's fine-tuned candour and critical sensibility have served him well. This is amply displayed in his opinion of Inside which he saw at a film festival in Tunisia. "I enjoyed working with Arthur Penn, Eric Stoltz and Louis Gossett Junior. But ultimately the film was so complicated and so harrowing that people couldn't be bothered with it. One of the problems and probably the reason it wasn't shown here is it wasn't played by South Africans. And it should have been. I was the only one who was South African with any authenticity. That's very important because it's about the here and now. Real people."

Like the characters of A Reasonable Man, in which a herdboy in Zululand, played by newcomer Loyiso Gxwala, is accused of murdering an infant whom he thought was the tokolosh, putting the judge in a ticklish position. "Actually he is quite a good man," says his creator. "He is just confused, quite understandably, by a belief as primitive as that. Killing an evil spirit is something quite beyond your grasp. South Africa's anomalies certainly make it interesting.

"I choose to live in Britain. My work is there. That doesn't mean I don't love Africa. That I don't hanker for it." The challenges of making it in Britain, the stigma that clung to South Africans and has vanished post-1994, are an indelible part of his history.

Having made the choice to become Anglicised, the boy from Camps Bay who won gold medals at Eistedfodds with playwright-to-be Ronnie Harwood, performed at the Bantu Men's Social Centre in Johannesburg and tried his hand as a cartoonist, hasn't lost touch. And not only because his brothers and sisters still live here. He went to World War 2-pockmarked London in 1951 not for political reasons - "I'm ashamed to say" - but as a career choice. He later did take a political stand through the anti-apartheid movement.

There's an ingredient ensuring his sustained excellence. "I've always kept the danger. The moment you lose the danger you become boring, calcified. Calcified theatre is the worst."

Although not born here, his roots run deep. His grandmother was one of the first botanical artists at Kirstenbosch. "That's the artistic side I come from. That is, if you can call acting an art." It certainly is if the actor's name is Nigel Hawthorne.