Tom Conti doesn't have a drink problem anymore. Not since he stopped stashing it in his dressing room, at least. Such a decision wasn't, it should be pointed out, taken out of any murky, vodka-bottle-under-the-cistern, post-rehab past or anything. It's just that, on first nights gone by, whenever a

bottle was cracked open out of courtesy for showbiz liggers, all those in attendance presumed a party was on the go, and wouldn't leave until every drop was drained dry.

''I wanted to go home,'' Conti recalls, ''but could never get out of the building. That was when I realised keeping drink backstage probably wasn't such a good idea.''

It's doubtful whether such a sentiment would go down well with

legendary luvvie John Barrymore, but there'll certainly be plenty of bevvy onstage when Paisley-born Conti dons matinee idol pinstripe and trilby to play the great man himself in One Helluva Life. As a myth-making homage to this most colourful of Hollywood characters, the title of William Luce's play is a giveaway.

Here is a man, after all, who became the youngest of New York's premiere acting family who, alongside brother Lionel and sister Ethel, became its leading light. His

Hamlet of 1922 and 1925 was considered the best of his generation, and he shone, too, as Richard III and as Mercutio in Romeo and

Juliet. As with so many others, however, his artistry was overshadowed by an all too familiar litany of wives, mistresses, and wild nights on the town when anything could happen, and usually did.

''He was a tremendous talent,'' Conti chuckles, ''but he always said that he wasn't really an actor, but had just joined the family business and had no choice in the matter.''

Set in 1942, with Barrymore struggling to keep body and soul together as he prepares to tread the boards a final time, Luce's Tony award-winning mix of anecdotal homage is tailor-made for an actor as impish as Conti. His first encounter with the play came during a dinner at the home of film director Bryan Forbes and his actress wife, Nanette Newman. They'd seen it on Broadway, and suggested it might be a good vehicle for Conti. One script purloined later, and the project was in motion, with Forbes coming on board as director. Such was the canny seductiveness of the package that One Helluva Life became the hot ticket of last year's Dublin Theatre Festival. ''I think perhaps the Irish audience recognised a kindred spirit,'' he jokes.

Drink seems to have inadvertently fuelled much of Conti's work. From his Oscar-nominated pickled expatriate poet in the film Reuben Reuben, to his more recent turn as the sozzled Soho hack onstage in Keith Waterhouse's Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, Barrymore is just one more twinkle-eyed charmer on the make.

''There's a responsibility playing real people,'' Conti points out, ''and doing Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell was made all the stranger by the fact that Jeff was still alive at the time we first did it, and quite often would be watching from the front stalls.''

In an industry where hedonism these days is considered a career move for any C-list straight-to-video chancer you probably couldn't name, true characters such as

Barrymore and Bernard are all

but extinct.

''I think we've all become very dull,'' Conti states bluntly. ''Everybody loves an eccentric, in whatever profession, but there aren't many of them left now compared to when I started out. Then it was all about having fun. Things have all got a bit serious these days, and I think

people starting out in this profession quite often go into it for very different reasons than we did.''

Conti is careful, too, however, not to hark back to an idealised past. ''They were only glory days for some, remember.''

Even so, Barrymore's legacy has continued in the comely form of granddaughter Drew, whose rites of passage from child star in ET to dirty stop-out of the gossip columns eventually saw her rehabilitated as a major Hollywood player as co-producer and star of Charlie's Angels.

Like Barrymore, who played with his siblings only once, on film in Rasputin And The Empress, Conti has become the head of his own minor dynasty. He and his actress wife, Kara Wilson, have already appeared alongside daughter Nina in Neil Simon's Last Of The Red Hot Lovers. Conti Jr, however, has been branching out of late, and her stand-up ventriloquist routine at last year's Edinburgh Fringe proved as big a draw as her old man.

While this tour will bring Conti back on to a Glasgow stage for the first time in 30 years, apart from a tryout run of John Dowie's Jesus

My Boy, One Helluva Life, like

Last Of The Red Hot Lovers, is

rooted in an American sensibility one senses Conti embraces wholeheartedly during his infrequent sojourns to Hollywood.

''It's fashionable to knock America,'' he says, ''but there's a tremendous freedom for people who live there that doesn't exist here, especially in London, which isn't a terribly pleasant place to live these days. It's the same in Europe. It amuses me when you hear politicians talk about how we're an

integral part of Europe, and how Europe has so much to learn from us. Well, what are we going to teach them exactly? How to run the national health? Or how to run the transport system? I don't think so.''

Conti, you sense, would move Stateside on a permanent basis in a second. Family, however, comes first, and until Kara and Nina are swayed by such a move, it's not

on. Neither, it seems, might One Helluva Life make it beyond this tour. Because, for all Conti's love of some aspects of America, the fallout of September 11 on west end

theatre-going, combined with the threat of impending war, makes even such a combined draw as Messrs Conti, Forbes, and, of course, Barrymore, an unsafe bet.

''To do a west end show,'' Conti observes pragmatically, ''you're putting at least (pounds) 100,000 on the

line. That's quite a big risk, and if audiences aren't coming, there's not a lot you can do.'' As co-producer of the show, you can see his point. Even if One Helluva Life found a slot tomorrow, the decision to

run with it rests far higher up the food chain.

''Well,'' he says, when pressed, ''have you got a hotline to Downing Street? The trouble with this profession,'' he adds, ''is that you don't know how long a job's going to last. You're juggling a lot of balls in the air, and occasionally one of them lands in the right place. In the meantime, you just have to get on with it.''

Even Mr Barrymore might raise a glass to that one.

One Helluva Life is at the King's Theatre, Glasgow, from January 27 until February 1, and the

King's Theatre, Edinburgh, from February 3-8.