Actors are not, by their nature, the most punctual of creatures, at least when it comes to doing interviews.

It is their prerogative to keep the journalist waiting. But not Tommy Lee Jones. This good old-fashioned Texan is, today, running his schedule to the minute, and woe betide anyone who arrives late. "He doesn't tolerate fools at all," notes his actor-friend John Lithgow. That's putting it mildly: at 68, Jones had not mellowed with age.

Still, while a meeting with Jones is akin to gingerly stepping around a minefield, it is hard not to leave admiring him. The talent and achievements are there for all to see: an Oscar for his resolute lawman in The Fugitive, and further Academy Award nominations for his firecracker roles in Oliver Stone's JFK, Paul Haggis's In The Valley Of Elah and Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. And that's just scratching the surface of a career that has seen him work with everyone from Clint Eastwood (Space Cowboys) to the Coen Brothers (No Country For Old Men).

We meet in a dimly lit hotel suite so Jones can talk about The Homesman, his second feature film as actor-director (he has also helmed two TV movies) following The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, which won him the Best Director award at Cannes in 2005. If that Tex-Mex border thriller was inspired by the grisly side of Sam Peckinpah, this latest effort feels like a distant cousin to something John Ford or Howard Hawks might have once directed.

An adaptation of the novel by Glendon Swarthout, it is nevertheless far removed from your usual horse opera. Set in the Nebraska Territories, Jones plays George Briggs, a boozy army-deserter who is saved from a hanging by the pious spinster Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank). The price for his freedom? To accompany her on a mission: transporting three mentally unstable women, battered by the harshness of life on the frontier, back to Iowa in just a covered wagon.

Already, the film has been dubbed a 'feminist western', although any mention of this to Jones produces a sour look. "I don't like those labels. If you're going to put a label on it, call it humanist. Feminist is somehow ... it's comforting to people who need labels to feel comfortable. These are real human issues, but I would really like to stay away from categories, labels. They're somehow trivialising." So is it a western? "There you go again," he says, dryly. "Yeah ... it has got big hats and horses! And that's about what that term means, isn't it? You know it's a western if it's got big hats and horses."

The film was inspired largely by the 1853 Homestead Act, which saw the government promise US citizens heading out West the deeds to land if they set up home and farmed crops there for two years. Many pioneers, however, met bleak conditions. "It was very hard on the women in particular," says Jones. As a study of female struggle, it is here that the reasons really lie in making the film. "I believe the present is derived from the past," he notes. "I think it is important to look upon and reflect upon history. I think it is crucial. How important? On a scale of what? Ten? I'd say it's a nine."

Given that he began acting in the 1970s, just as the western was on the wane, Jones has starred in his fair share, from TV mini-series Lonesome Dove to Ron Howard's Apache-centric The Missing, and there is something of the Old West ingrained in that weathered skin of his - not least because he owns two cattle ranches in Texas, and one in Santa Fe. "He's a horse man," Swank tells me. "He knew exactly how you ride a horse." Her eyes widen as she adds he even owns his own wagon and mules. "The only reason his mules aren't in the movie is because that breed he has was not available then. He has huge mules."

Jones is simply far too complex to pigeonhole as a latter-day cowboy. An eighth generation Texan, he is the only child of Clyde Jones, an oil-rig worker, and Lucille Marie, a former schoolteacher and policewoman. A self-described "oil patch kid", his was a stormy upbringing. Prone to drunken arguments, his parents were married and divorced twice; enough to scar anyone.

Yet Jones was always smart: he won a scholarship to Harvard, where he studied English Literature, rooming with future US Vice-President Al Gore. He also played football on the university's undefeated varsity team. "He was a unique student," says Lithgow, another friend from college (who briefly appears in The Homesman), "because he was both a football player and an actor - probably the only one with that dual Harvard career in Harvard history! He was also a Texan at Harvard - he was a man full of contradictions, as he still is."

It is the perfect description, just as his coin-flipping villain Harvey 'Two-Face' Dent in 1995's Batman Forever seemed like the ideal character to embody Jones's many-sided nature. A cowboy by nature, he is just as adept on the polo field (he is a regular on the south Florida scene, owning two polo ranches), evidently at home with blue-blood as he is blue collar. He is similarly old-school in his approach to acting; never attending drama school, he does not hold much stock in any techniques beyond reading the script, research and saying the lines.

"I can't improvise," he explains, in a rare candid moment. "My mind doesn't work that way. I've never seen any good come of it ... I'm a literary guy. Improvisation is highly entertaining, I'm certain, for some people but I don't see much value in it, for myself or my work." Put that down to his early text-loyal days on Broadway, post-Harvard, before he lurched on the big screen in 1970 in Love Story, playing Ryan O'Neal's roommate, and into a decade playing supporting heavies (punctuated by the odd triumph, like the title role in 1977 TV film The Amazing Howard Hughes).

Breaking through as the volatile husband in the 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter, which saw him nominated for a Golden Globe, his early screen years were not exactly Adam Sandler-like. And yet, while his own sense of humour may be buried canyon-deep and drier than the Sahara, he is adept in this arena - notably in the Men In Black franchise, playing the deadpan alien hunter, a character he riffed on recently in a series of ads for a Japanese canned coffee, playing an Earth-bound extraterrestrial.

While the humour is there, Jones's bite-worse-than-bark reputation obscures it. The Variety review of The Homesman noted: "In the past, people have whispered about Jones's attitudes toward women"; his Men In Black co-star Linda Fiorentino didn't so much as whisper as spell it out, calling him "very mean" to the fairer sex. And certainly Jones has been through some rough personal patches - divorced twice (with two children, Austin and Victoria, from his second marriage to Kimberlea Cloughley, daughter to the former mayor of San Antonio).

Since 2001, though, he has found stability, marrying Dawn Laurel, a professional photographer who worked as an assistant camerawoman on his directorial debut, 1995 tele-movie The Good Old Boys. Theirs would seem a good match; he tells me he accompanied her on an expedition to Antarctica, with Climate Reality Project, an eco-group involved in education and advocacy surrounding climate change, started by Al Gore. "She took some beautiful pictures there," he says, tenderly. "Of course, the ice is melting, and these pictures dramatised that somewhat."

Since completing The Homesman, Jones has returned to his day-job - acting in CIA thriller Criminal (with his JFK co-stars Gary Oldman and Kevin Costner) and Jason Statham sequel Mechanic: Resurrection. Both seem run-of-the-mill, not befitting a man who juggles cattle-ranching and polo playing with the business of writing, producing, directing and acting in the "motion picture industry", as he charmingly calls it. Doesn't he ever get overcome with it all? "I'm immune to pressure," he says. "I don't respond to it." And that sums up Tommy Lee Jones more than anything.

The Homesman opens in cinemas on November 21