Regal eagle

ARBROATH SMOKIES," SAYS EDWARD Fox, the warm glow of nostalgia in his voice. From a drab London rehearsal room, he is transported back more than 40 years to Dundee Rep Theatre and to the cooking of his landlady in Broughty Ferry. He smiles wistfully as if tasting the fish in his memory. "They were damn good."

Fox was then in his twenties, pounding the boards in a repertory company. Eight shows a week, a new play every fortnight, churning out Shakespeare, Chekhov, Agatha Christie, in an old church off the Lochee Road. But to him it was a place of epiphany, the place where he realised he was born to be an actor.

"You do a great play like Death of a Salesman and there's a communion between the audience and the stage which is about a kind of shared learning. A shared learning about the experience of being alive. One's terribly lucky if, at some point in your reasonably young life – and I was quite old, about 24 – you think, 'Aha! I've found what I've got to do'."

Edward Fox is now 71, an elder statesman of the acting profession, with a distinguished career behind him in film and television and on the stage. He is the patriarch of an acting dynasty, elder brother of James Fox and film producer Robert Fox, father of Emilia Fox and uncle to Billie Piper's actor husband Laurence Fox. His son, Freddie, is at drama school.

He looks like an Edwardian country squire in his dapper three-piece tweed suit and impeccably knotted tie. He talks like one too, speaking of respect and decency and soldiering on, and has a tendency to refer to himself as "one". He is like a natural Edwardian piloted forward in time who is none too impressed at the 21st century. But he is unflinchingly courteous, listening considerately, answering patiently. He may not be enjoying this, but he is too much of a gentleman to say so.

Aristocrats and military men have always been Fox's stock-in-trade. He says he'd have a shot at playing a dustman but it would take him six months to learn the accent. On the other hand, when he played Edward VIII in the hugely popular TV drama Edward and Mrs Simpson in 1978, friends said they felt inclined to curtsey for months afterwards. It's the bearing.

Currently, he is Sir William Boothroyd, a retired general, in Lloyd George Knew My Father by William Douglas Home. The revival of the play was his suggestion, taken up by Theatre Royal Bath for a UK tour. Lloyd George was a hit when it was first performed in 1972, but has received less attention since than drawing-room comedies of a similar ilk by playwrights such as Coward and Rattigan.

"Douglas Home knew how to entertain," Fox says. "It's a marvellous play, a real light comedy – something that doesn't get written too much these days. It's comic in the way life is comic. It's witty, beautifully constructed. It's a proper play."

Fox likes "proper plays", with "a beginning, a middle, an end – and a story". He holds with the old-fashioned idea that theatre should entertain. Dark contemporary drama leaves him cold. "It's a question of satisfaction. Audiences are very good; once they've paid for a ticket they believe they've done the right thing so they'll go out from even quite moderate entertainment saying, 'Yes, it was jolly nice', but they'll forget it immediately. There's a big difference between that sort of play-going and coming out saying, 'I wouldn't have missed that for the world'."

And this play is one of those? "I feel so, that's the reason one is doing it."

When the play opens, Sir William's estate is under threat from the building of a bypass. Lady Sheila Booth-royd (played by Helen Ryan, replacing Claire Bloom who withdrew from the project earlier this month) has threatened to kill herself when the bulldozers move in.

"William Douglas Home is a terrific writer because he writes scenes which are relevant to our times, but he never knocks the audience on the head and says, 'You've got to take notice of the fact that I'm writing a theme which is relevant to our time'. I mean, look at Heathrow," Fox smoulders (we meet a few days after the Government gave the go-ahead for a third runway, which involves the demolition of the village of Sipson). The idea of demolishing a whole village is just..." he scouts around for a suitably odious word... "disgusting."

While Fox doesn't strike me as the sort to lie down in front of bulldozers – not in that beautifully tailored suit – he identifies with the sense of frustration in the play when decent people rise up in anger. He was a prominent supporter of James Goldsmith's Referendum Party and marched with the Countryside Alliance to save fox hunting. He also wanted to march against the war in Iraq, though he had to swear off because he was on stage at the time.

"I like to stand up and be counted about lots of things. One should do. What you know is that you do damn-all good if you do, but there are moments when one must, even at the cost of one's own comfort, or indeed safety. That was a case of the Government not listening to the people, being lick-spittles to the American Government."

He speaks with some warmth of William Douglas Home (brother of the Prime Minister Alec Douglas Home) who died in 1992, and whom he remembers as a "lovely man". As an officer during the Second World War, Douglas Home refused to attack Le Havre on the grounds that there would be many civilian casualties, and was imprisoned for his disobedience. To Fox, he was "morally brave".

His own military career was short and undistinguished. After leaving Harrow, he served as a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards. The apocryphal story goes that he was shunted to another regiment after throwing his superior officer in a river, though he claims he no longer remembers. In any case, after two years' military service, he made up his mind that any uniform he wore from then on would come from a costume department.

He went to RADA against the advice of his father and mother, a theatrical agent and an actress. While his more flamboyant brother James was a safe bet for the stage, Edward was a shy, retiring lad. But he would not be deterred and set about learning his craft as a jobbing actor.

After Dundee came a spell at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow, a beacon on the edge of the old Gorbals, beaming out both classic theatre and the great comedians of the day. "I remember seeing Lex McLean – wonderful comedian – but I couldn't understand a word he said. We lived in the Gorbals. For the first week, I thought Glasgow was the most ghastly place I'd ever lived in my life. In a week I fell in love with it."

But surely the Gorbals in the 1960s was no place for a cut-glass accent and a tendency to refer to oneself as "one"? "Oh, they used to like me. If you behaved yourself and had good manners they respected you utterly. They made fun of you, or course, pulled your leg, but that's part of the fun. If they like you, they take you to their hearts. I made wonderful friends in Glasgow."

He remembers leaving the Citz one evening after his debut performance as Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream. "There were three young boys on the other side of the street and, I promise you this is true, one of them said, 'Look oor er, it's hum, big Tim the fairy kung!'" (He does a surprisingly good rendition of Gorbals gutteral.) "That was the best of the Citz, they made it possible for people to go to the theatre who you wouldn't necessarily think would want to."

By the end of the 1960s, he was catching the eye of film directors. He won a Bafta for Best Supporting Actor in The Go-Between in 1970 and became internationally known playing the cold-eyed, well-spoken hitman in Fred Zinnemann's Day of the Jackal in 1973.

Zinnemann moved to the United States soon afterwards, and suggested Fox should too. Though he would make other movies – A Bridge Too Far, Force 10 From Navarone with Robert Shaw and Harrison Ford, Gandhi – he refused the invitation. "I wouldn't have wanted to go to Hollywood to tell you the truth. You have to go to live there, to become part of it, and I never wanted to do that. I like this country, I like the people, I wouldn't have wanted to become Americanised." He shrugs. "Can't see the point really."

Surely he could have been a candidate to follow Sean Connery as James Bond? "I was a bit old – I was 35 when I made Day of the Jackal." Come on, Roger Moore was 46 when he made Live and Let Die. "It's difficult to say I wouldn't have accepted ... but I wouldn't have wanted to become James Bond, to be known only for that. I'm a bit of a bore and a bit of a puritan that way. I like the freedom to be what I like. And anyway, if you've carried a gun in one film you've done enough really. There are other things to do." (He did later play 'M' in the unofficial Bond film Never Say Never Again).

For all his aristocratic bearing, Fox is a man refreshingly undominated by ego. He was never drawn into competition with James, whose film career blossomed while his older brother was still treading the boards in rep. Now, he is equally mellow about the prospect of being upstaged by his offspring: both Emilia and Freddie, his children with the actress Joanna David, are actors (he also has a daughter, Lucy – not an actor – from his short marriage to Tracy Reed, a fellow student at RADA). In recent years, Emilia has made a name for herself in television shows such as Silent Witness and Fallen Angel as well as in period dramas.

"She's a good girl," he says, proudly. "I've been her father in a film (The Republic of Love, based on a story by Carol Shields). She needed a father, so she asked for me! It was nice, we had a few days together filming in Canada. I quite like the idea of being the father in a minute part while my son or daughter plays the lead, I don't mind at all. Somebody's got to go on playing (smaller) parts and hopefully giving pleasure, which is really all it's about."

Did he try to warn either of his children off the stage? "I left both of them on a very loose rein about it. They're very self-willed anyway, so they wouldn't pay a blind bit of attention to what I said." Nevertheless he did give them two pieces of advice: be prepared not to earn a living, and go and do rep.

While he has appeared in supporting parts in TV dramas such as Daniel Deronda and Nicholas Nickleby, and the film Stage Beauty, he doesn't crave lead roles or keep a list of "parts I must do before I die". "I never wish for things, because I play a lot of parts in the bath, as it were. If someone came along and said, 'Would you play King Lear?' I'd spend a year brushing it up, because it's a great play." But he isn't about to start pounding on the door of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Would he ever retire? He pushes his glasses up on to his forehead and peers thoughtfully as if he'd like to see the question more clearly. "I don't think so. As long as the circumstances are right and the part is interesting. No, I don't see retirement as being particularly practical. If you've got an ability to do something and still remember the lines, well, crack on."

Lloyd George Knew My Father, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, February 16-21, 7:30pm, matinees 2:30pm on Wednesday and Saturday. Tickets, £12.50 to £25, tel: [phone], www.kingstheatre.org.uk