‘I merge into the background, me’

‘I live completely anonymously,’ whispers Jim Broadbent down the phone from Lincolnshire. Nonsense, I counter. You’re one of the most recognisable actors in this united luvviedom. ‘Am I?’ he asks gently.

Oh come on. You’re Bridget Jones’s dad, Del Boy’s arch-enemy Roy Slater, Lord Longford campaigning for Myra Hindley’s parole, dotty antiques-shop owner Samuel Gruber in the Paddington films, Game of Thrones’s Archmaester Ebrose, testy but lovable W.S. Gilbert in Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, and the blackmailer who unacceptably shakes down Maggie Smith’s eponymous Lady in the Van.

I best know Broadbent as Prince Albert in Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988), trying to go incognito among the commoners by passing himself off as Glaswegian. ‘Ah, fine city,’ says Blackadder of Glasgow. ‘I love the Gorbals.’ ‘Yes, the Gorbals,’ retorts Broadbent, as Albert, uncertainly in an unmistakably German accent. ‘I love them, too. A lovely couple, lots of fun.’

The literati recall him fondly opposite Judi Dench as decrepit Oxford don John Bayley in Iris (2001), a performance that earned Broadbent an Oscar. Others will know him as the ghost of Denis Thatcher haunting Meryl Streep’s Maggie in The Iron Lady (2011). And those who saw him as blinded Gloucester in the BBC’s King Lear on the BBC last year may well have wondered when Broadbent, now 70, was going to get to play the title role.

Surely, I suggest, you’re so recognisable that if you slackened your pace as you strode through King’s Cross Station you’d be mobbed by Pottermaniacs demanding selfies with Professor Horace Slughorn? ‘But I wouldn’t slacken,’ he laughs. ‘I’ve never been spotted.’ Never? ‘Well, not there. I do get stopped but not often. People are generally totally pleasant.’

He’s certainly better at going incognito than Prince Albert. A colleague of mine once nipped to the loo during an interview with Broadbent. Returning, he thought the actor had done a runner, but no.