Death, dancing and dogma

Yet here I am in Hampstead, that verdant part of north London that is the natural habitat of luvvies, where Conti is sitting on his sofa telling me he's always loved B-boy culture and body-popping. Nah, not really. The fact is, very disappointingly, that while Tom does appear in Streetdance 2 (stop laughing at the back), he doesn't actually do any hip-hop dance moves. "It was part of my contract that I didn't have to," he tells me. More than that, he's not even wearing a baseball cap this morning. Forwards or backwards. Instead he's decked out in a blue-striped shirt, with silver foxy hair, a grandad's beatific smile (he has two grandsons; they've been staying with him and his wife Kara for the past week) and propounding the odd "controversial" argument about the mendacity of politicians and the evils of the Catholic Church.

But let's not dive in at the deep end straight away. I'm still trying to get my head around the fact Tom Conti is in a film called Streetdance 2. Tom, I ask (because I never dodge the big questions), why did you decide to appear in a movie full of body-popping, head-spinning yout'? "I was free, so why not?" he says. Really? That's it?

Actually, yes, that is it. Tom – I don't want to call him Mr Conti because my Northern Irish accent (or what's left of it) twists his name into a most unfortunate shape – is an actor. And that's what actors do, it seems. Appear in films. If it's any help, he says, he does do a dance scene. And he didn't even use a body double for it. Then again, it is a rather sedentary cha-cha-cha. (Or maybe it was a pasadoble. Don't ask me. I'm normally watching You've Been Framed when Strictly Come Dancing is on.)

"It was like a sword of Damocles over my head throughout the shooting that I had to do this wretched dance, because a dancer I'm not." Not even in his younger days? "I never went up dancing, no." Ladies, you'll have to reimagine your starting point for that particular fantasy, I'm afraid.

Conti is 70 years old and has been acting since the 1960s. He's appeared in everything from Z Cars to Friends, as well as his best-known roles in The Glittering Prizes and Shirley Valentine. He says he doesn't act as much these days. Then again, he's got three films out this year (including the new Batman movie, but he's not allowed to talk about that). "What else are you going to do? Go to the bowling green? I don't want to do that." Anyway he says, most actors are "resting" half their working lives so why would he stop?

Growing up in Paisley, he wanted to be a musician but found his way to drama school in Glasgow instead. "I said to my father, 'What do you think?' He said, 'Perhaps it's very nice to be an actor.' He liked the theatre and opera."

Dad was Alfonso, a hairdresser, as was his mum, Mary McGoldrick. Life as a child felt more Italian than Scottish, he thinks. Even the food. "There was a time shortly after my father arrived and he met up with other Italians and they were starting to date local girls and they very quickly discovered that the local girls couldn't cook. Anything. So they had a meeting and said, 'Look, if we're going to marry these girls we're going to starve to death.' All the men could cook because Italian boys, they help their mothers in the kitchen. So they gave the girls cooking lessons. All the girlfriends would come and they would teach them how to make basic pasta sauces."

His father had fought in the First World War and was interned during the Second. Did he ever talk about his wartime experiences? "There was only one story he told me. He was in the trenches and he was sent out one night in a reconnaissance unit to find out how near the next line was. And he met his opposite number. They both went for their guns and my father got to his first and killed this boy. A German boy. He was 17. They were both kids. I think he never got over it."

In comparison, his son feels he's never had any real challenges in his life. "Other than trying to get work as an actor. I haven't had to face anything gigantic. We've never had a war." He pauses, reconsiders. "We do fight wars, unfortunately. Pointlessly. Tragically." Conti is not very taken with our adventures in Afghanistan or Libya, it seems. "Blair said, 'Education, education, education,' and instead of educating us he decided to kill tens of thousands of people and spend the money on that instead. I think it was probably the worst government this country has ever had. It was disgusting." Tom, don't hold back, please. Say what you really mean.

He doesn't seem to have a lot of time for politicians. Every five minutes he's having a go at them for something or other. Given that he's lived in London since the 1970s he doesn't feel qualified to talk about the possibility of Scottish independence but he's not sure how you would separate two countries. "I do wonder: if it did cut itself off, could it actually be a model for a new way to run a country?" He doesn't wonder very long, though. "I doubt it because the same dunderheads will always be in power." There you go.

Anyway, back to the acting. After graduating from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow he headed off to the Citizens Theatre, where he worked with the likes of Iain Cuthbertson and Roddy McMillan. "They were so entertaining all the time. And they were nice. Actors are nice people. There's a liberal tradition in the business. They didn't shout at you because you were young. You were one of them."

It was something of a culture change from his upbringing. He returns to the word liberal. "The way you live your life is entirely up to you. Nobody cares. You had entered an area which was more forgiving of anything. The first time I ever heard a girl say 'f***' was in the Citizens Theatre. It was so shocking. We hardly said it as students. It wasn't a word that was used much."

Hard as it may be to believe, Conti says he wasn't a girl magnet when he was young. "It was always desperately difficult to get a girlfriend. It's awful. I don't think any boys find it easy. You never know what to say or what to do."

He was 24 when he met Kara. He was in a play and a colleague brought her to see it. "They came around afterwards to say hello and this girl walked in and I thought, 'Oh my God.' She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. We went for coffee and by the time we'd finished we were both smitten." It turned out they had been cast in the same radio play. "We met again, went out for dinner and here we are, 45 years later." Show-off.

It was their daughter Nina who inadvertently revealed that their parents had something of an open marriage. He's confirmed as much since. This will be an example of that liberalism he mentioned earlier. Nina has now revealed she once had an affair with the actor Ken Campbell (she was 26 at the time, he was 60), so they're clearly an open-minded family.

You once said there are worse things than infidelity, Tom. What might they be? "Well, apart from killing one other, the worst thing they can do is harm each other. Lots of people are unhappy in the way they lead their lives. We never felt marriage meant ownership. It shouldn't mean ownership."

Do you think we confuse sex with love? He laughs. "Yes! Big problem. Yes." Well then, what's your definition of morality? "Not harming. Paul Eddington was asked on Desert Island Discs what would he like on his tombstone and he said, 'I hope I would have: "Done no harm."' That's a very powerful thing. Try not to harm. Doesn't mean to say I don't want to kill the whole of the Cabinet. But still - they don't count."

My, for such a seemingly contented man he gets quite angry, doesn't he? I'm trying to remember. Has he ever appeared on Grumpy Old Men? Tom, with age comes experience. True or false? "It does. In fact it's one of the most irritating things about age – how often you are right. Which is frustrating. How can I make them understand?"

There's nothing good about getting old, he says. "I can't find a damn thing." And yet most of the time he feels 40 rather than 70. "Yes, and that's extremely irritating to feel one thing and look another." Well, it's surely better to feel fortyish than feel seventyish. "Oh yes," he says, "even if it makes you feel a fool sometimes."

Mortality, I say. How large does it loom? "It looms larger and larger the further along the road you go. It definitely does. I have no time for it at all. I'm not religious or anything like that." And yet he was brought up in the Catholic Church and attended a Catholic school. "My father hated the Catholic Church. I remember saying, 'One day I want to be an altar boy,' and he turned and looked at me and said, 'You're not going to be an altar boy.' I didn't know why. He said, 'No discussion.' And then years later you realise why. Because he knew what was going on. Maybe he had an experience himself with a priest. He didn't go to Mass.

"My mum took me because of her family – just to shut them the hell up. They were rosary swingers. So it was never anything that was a huge part of my life. It didn't make a lot of sense to me."

And yet he insisted that he and Kara get married in a chapel. "That's the interesting thing. That's the Jesuit thing. 'Give me a child -' I suddenly thought I wasn't going to be married unless I was married in a Catholic Church. It was a disgraceful thing to do to Kara because all her family had been married in University Chapel, Glasgow. And she should have been married there. But because this imbecile failed pape dragged her into church - I feel very bad about that."

He does have the apostate's bitterness towards the religion he was brought up in. "The preaching from the Catholic Church was disgraceful – that no other religion knows God and God pays no attention to other religions." Don't all religions say the same? "I don't think the Protestants said that about the Catholics." Hmm. Did he ever hear Ian Paisley preach? "That was one little pocket of the world. But that's what the Catholic Church preaches: separatism." Hmm. I somehow feel we've travelled some way from Streetdance 2.

Acting, Tom Conti says, has nothing to do with hiding yourself. "You're standing up in front of 800 people. It's bloody silly to talk yourself into the idea that you're hiding." He's writing his second novel, he's never had psychotherapy and he thinks he's good at accents. Who is Tom Conti, I ask him? "That old bloke? I don't know. I have no idea. It's of no interest to me."

After a morning with him in Hampstead, what can I add? I'm pretty certain he's not much of a dancer. I can tell you that. n

Streetdance 2 (PG) is in cinemas now.