Andrew Lincoln

You couldn’t move for hype about Love Actually when the film opened last December. However, Andrew Lincoln, who played Mark, the man secretly in love with his best friend’s wife, in Richard Curtis’s monster box-office hit, couldn’t be doing with all that. "I’m not particularly good at all that pomp and circumstance," the actor sighs. "So when the film came out I was on Bondi Beach learning to surf. I needed time out to find out what I wanted to do and not feel so in thrall to this business.

"That’s one of the problems of being an actor. You feel constantly at other people’s beck and call. I thought, ‘wait a minute, it’s not like people don’t know who I am’. I realised I could take time out and take stock. Whatever walk of life they’re in, people need to do that from time to time."

So, who is this Andrew Lincoln?

Lincoln, whose father is a civil engineer and whose mother is a nurse, was born in Hull, before moving to Bath at the age of ten. He attended Beechen Cliff, a single-sex comprehensive where his love of acting was first ignited. He recollects that "the maths teacher got me off the rugby pitch and into auditions for Oliver! I played the Artful Dodger and our sister school was at the bottom of the hill, so rehearsals were the only time we got to meet up with the girls - that was a bonus." On leaving school, Lincoln was accepted at RADA and soon after landed the part of Egg in This Life.

The only fly in the ointment was that his agent was adamant that he had to change his name from Andrew Clutterbuck. "He told me it sounded ridiculous, like I was some Dickensian poorhouse worker," recalls the actor now known as Lincoln. "My dad was really upset and my grandad didn’t speak to me for a while."