Tom Baker delivers his bombshell in the lounge of the Dorchester as we sit drinking coffee. He is stoical about it, mildly distressed rather than despairing. But it shows the ludicrous state of our entertainment industry that an actor of Baker's acknowledged calibre has to labour to live. "I shall not despise it but it distresses me slightly because I feel I'm too old and have been going too long to have to do that. But there's no other way. I can't live on what they pay me to do Macbeth at the Shaw Theatre. Last year I went to Bristol and did a couple of leads for them and then went off to do Sinbad which tided me over a few months. Then, like hundreds of others I was out of work."

"But it's always a surprise when you work. I've got a terminal optimism. You have to be irrational to be an actor. You see, I have no evidence that could make me want to go on being an actor. People say 'Well you've done a few movies, you're slightly known, that's evidence'. That's not evidence. Plenty of people have done that and it hasn't stopped them going into oblivion. It's an old joke, 'Whatever happened to ...' "

The strange thing is that under the star system Tom Baker's career would have been predestined for stardom. Cinematically launched in Sam Spiegel's Nicholas and Alexandra (suggested by no less an expert than Laurence Olivier for the role of Rasputin), plucked out of the National Theatre and given the whole extravagant razzmatazz of a promotion trip to America with Janet Suzman and Michael Jayston. He appeared in Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales, and is now to be seen as the villain Prince Koura in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.'

As far as films are concerned he's been a casualty of the lack of finance: three major. films for which he had signed in starring roles were cancelled in the space of six weeks - Isabella of Spain with Glenda Jackson, Three Men Went to War with Anthony Quinn and Jackson's War.

And yet he clearly has the potential to become a great movie star: he has enormous presence, his huge bear-like frame, his giant bursts of laughter and a face which, far from suggesting the menace of Rasputin, is all smiles and kindly furrows. Those blue eyes which dominate on the screen seem less overpowering when you are face to face with the man. He is vastly humorous, full of deliciously wicked and unrepeatable stories and his life to this point has been a polyglot of extraordinary experiences.

Tom Baker was born in Liverpool, the son of lower working class parents.

"I think one of the attitudes I have is that probably I could get used to anything," Baker says. "Except possibly playing Macbeth every night. Tonight is the 54th performance and I don't think I could get used to that, I've shot it now. I've measured it out until tomorrow night and that's it. But as far as conditions of living and conditions of work, I could put up with anything."

"When you come from nothing, from nowhere, with no background, no security you often become very careful with money and obsessional about security. I understand that."

"It was difficult to break the pattern of my childhood. I consider that an achievement. Not because I didn't like it, but because I wanted to do something else other than grow up in that city and do something unskilled, because that's what would have happened to me."

His escape route was to answer the call when the local priest was recruiting for novice monks. "It wasn't a vocation if the test of a vocation is whether one sticks at it, but I stayed for six years. When I look back I think the reason I did it was because it offered me a way to break the pattern. There is something intensely dramatic about the notion of being heroically religious. Actually the vows of 'poverty, chastity and obedience' were very meaningless to me then. I'd grown up in poverty, anyone who wanted to could kick my arse and chastity at that stage didn't enter into it."

Six years later Tom went straight from the monastery into the Army which in anyone's book must have been quite a contrast, it must have been pretty shattering?

"Yes it was, sort of. Six years of chastity. My God, I thought I'd had a stroke the first time I got laid. I can remember that I can tell you!" He shakes his head and laughs.

"The Army was quite a shock, but I'm a pretty good survivor. I don't mean I was a good soldier or anything like that, but I could have been, everyone finds his role. However my Army career was a disaster from beginning to end. I simply feigned my way right through my National Service and got away with murder. My last job, was feeding the C.O.'s pigs. They gave me no responsibility whatever. I was so keen to have responsibility, that was the ploy, whenever they said: 'We want' I'd put my hand up."

"Finally in my second year I was able to turn up on muster parade in red leather slippers! You see, village idiots, yorricks of all kinds, have an absolute impregnability. In a curious way, except in very rare circumstances, harmless idiots are always looked after. Harmless dementia is considered something sacred, as long as there's no violence in the unhingement. I didn't entirely feign it: I was incompetent, because there is nothing in my personality that could possibly allow me to make contact with the Army. I went around saying preposterous things, I'd say 'I won't be shouted at by a bunch of professional murderers' and of course they'd shout at me, so I'd proceed to cry. And that simply unhinged them, I mean they can crack hard men like cracking hazelnuts, but they can't crack people who cry on parade, so thev stopped shouting at me because I embarrassed them. Finally they just left me alone because I was too much trouble."

"It was during my period in the Army that I decided to act as a career, if one can be said to take a decision like that I decided to try. When I came out I tried everywhere and finally was accepted by a drama school. I had to wait seven months so I joined the Merchant Navy."

He smiles at the memory, "The Bohemian existence is as nothing, it's like a Presbyterian existence compared to the Merchant Navy," he says with authority. "There is nothing odder than the working alleyway of the Queen Mary. I met people there who hadn't seen the sea for twelve years and who hadn't been ashore in New York since the war! You've been on a ship, it's an extraordinary liberating experience. On the Queen Mary I used to get girls who wouldn't have glanced at me ashore, I was just a common sailor. Of course I was slimmer then and tanned, and because of the job I was doing I had access to all parts of the ship. I used to have to go and lie down and recover. People behave very oddly on a ship."

However all good things come to an end, and seven months later found Tom at drama school. "I stayed there a couple of years and then did what everyone else does, I tattered around. Until I was winkled out of the National by Sam Spiegel and suddenly people were saying 'Christ, he might even be interesting'."

I think Tom Baker is underselling himself: with the National Theatre he made a very positive impact. As he did in Nicholas and Alexandra. Did he find it unnerving working for someone like Sam Spiegel in his first film?

"Yes, it was a bit. They flew me in and out the whole time because I had two plays on at the National. I was amazed that anyone wanted to use me in a part like that."

But his credentials were good? "Yes they were excellent, but that's the worrying thing about being an actor because the credentials of so many people are impeccable. I mean British actors are the best actors in the world, that is unarguable, for very obvious reasons which we needn't go into, but it's the Americans who raise the biggest movie stars."

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, won't do big career anv harm either. Quite the contrary. He plays Prince Koura, a marvellously theatrical evil villain who will stop at nothing to outwit Sinbad. It's a glorious character, the kind you want to hiss and boo, which is apparently just what the children did at a recent Saturday morning screening.

"It's the first time I've looked at myself-it was different when I was younger, I used to look at myself an awful lot, now I glance at myself when I trim my beard, and then very modestly! But when I saw some of Sinbad I felt pleased. I think most actors are acutely embarrassed when they see themselves in films, but I'd given kids tickets and they liked it, which really made it for me."

Was it a difficult part?

"Not in the sense that it was worrying me. I think the gibberish worried me slightly because it's very easy to talk gibberish briefly but one tends to become repetitive. In fact I had to re-do some of it because even Charlie Schneer spotted it. It was a mixture of Bar Mitzvah and Roman Catholic Mass which is an uneasy alliance.

"Charlie Schneer is ferociously professional and backs you absolutely, making all the facilities on the set very easy. And that kind of acting to nothing, can be quite embarrassing. It really depended very much on Ray Harryhausen because you act to stage directions and I didn't know what Ray was going to do with the creatures.

"We would rehearse and talk about the sequence and then Ray Harryhausen who's an incredible man, a prince, would stand off camera and if there was no dialogue he would tell me what was going on. No wonder the cine buffs idolise Ray's work. I suppose the average audience wouldn't realise what a complex exercise it is for Ray Harryhausen to know nine months before we got to a sequence what he was going to do with it. And I think too that if you're playing the villain in a romantic piece like this then you're allowed a great deal of theatrical licence," he muses, "I've never played anyone ordinary. Or anyone like me, the suave lover," he laughs."

"I did the Pope in Luther, which was an interesting double after doing Rasputin. And then I did a deformed murderer in a picture with Donald Pleasence called The Mutation. We had a real freak circus, imported from Alabama. Donald was turning beautiful people like Julie Ege into flowers and I was snatching girls for him. I had this terribly deformed face which Donald was going to cure if I snatched enough girls for him. Of course I never did, in fact, I got eaten by dogs in the end."

"You know some people say I've got very large eyes, well we had a man on that film who made my eyes seem like gimlets. There was a man who could pop both his eyes out on his cheeks, he had total control over the optical nerves. He only discovered it as a child when the children wouldn't play with him and he went to his mother crying. She asked him what happened and he told her they were pulling faces and he popped out his eyes! His mother shrieked and ran away and he was left in Alabama . . ." With a chip on his shoulder, and his eyes on his cheeks.

Another bizarre film experience was Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales. Tom admits he hasn't seen the finished film (one of the few films he hasn't seen for he's an avid filmgoer).

"Pasolini was simply divine, a magician. So cool. He operates the first camera himself and sets up the second. You learn so much from a man like that. You watch him set up the shots and you begin to see how he's going to juxtapose the images. You see, he has it all in his head, like all fine directors do. You become very aware of how it's done. On that picture he asked me whether I had any objection to pornography. I said, 'No, I'm partial to it if it's witty, as partial as the next man' and he told me there was a scene which would be pornographic when we shot it but not once he'd cut it. Of course he can do magical things in the cutting room."

But the fact remains that when you read this Tom Baker, actor, appreciator of beautiful women, Guinness and collecting strange epitaphs on tombstones (his hobbies), will be painting walls or scrubbing steps.

"It's terribly insecure, it makes me a bit jumpy. I suppose I've had chances. I suppose I could have stayed in America after being on the Frost show and being considered, I'm told, rather droll. Apparently they thought I was a cute guy and my accent was just darling!"

"There are a nucleus of people in the film business and the theatre business who will survive, because they will survive. I mean before Nicholas . . . when I was at the National I used to labour on a site in West Hampstead. You see if you don't do television regularly and you're not in a West End play, and I'm not really a West End type actor, there's no source of enough money to tide you right through an entire year."

"The trouble is I never meet anyone who thinks I'm out of work. I don't do television, not from choice, but because I'm never asked to do television. I did a co:uple of days work on Jack Smight's Dr Frankenstein; I was reduced to taking two days work, one scene in a picture! I had no alternative. Actually it was rather a well written scene (the script is by Christopher Isherwood) and I was with good people but obviously there are certain things I would not do. I would rather scrub floors than do certain things, because one thinks in terms of going on a long time."

"There's nothing in anyone's career that three successes in a row wouldn't cure is there? And a great deal of applause and publicity."