Timothy Spall was so enraptured by playing the artist Turner, he even learned how to paint, he tells STEVE PRATT –  “I got to the point where I was probably as good as Turner when he was nine. Turner at nine wasn’t bad!”

AFTER he’d completed filming Mr Turner, Timothy Spall sought out British artist J M W Turner’s grave in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. “I did go and kneel on his grave. I just said, ‘look, I hope that was all right’,” recalls the actor who won the best actor prize at this year’s Cannes film festival for his performance.

“He didn’t answer back and a tear fell out of my eye right on to his grave. I was a bit embarrassed. I started to pretend to do my shoelace up and wiped it off with the sleeve of my shirt.”

It wasn’t his first visit to Turner’s grave, having visited it three years previously while preparing for his seventh film with director Mike Leigh. “He’s buried in the crypt among a load of other artists. I asked this lady, who was sitting with a duster having a rest, if she knew where Turner’s grave was because the crypt at St Paul’s is enormous. She said, ‘hang on, let me think about it. I know he’s in here because I’ve just washed him down. Turner would have liked that,” he says.

Leigh first asked him to be part of the project seven years ago after they met in the street. Cut to four years later when Spall was in a pub and reminded of Leigh’s invitation. He phoned the director who asked if he was still up for it. “I said, ‘yeah’ and he said, ‘would you do me a favour and start learning how to paint’. So I did for two years,” says Spall.

Leigh’s method has the actors researching, improvising and building their characters for months before rehearsals begin, he writes the script and filming commences. Learning to paint was part of Spall’s preparation. He already had a limited knowledge of the artist whose life spanned the 18th and 19th centuries.

“I wouldn’t say I was an enthusiast but I knew of him because my school was in Battersea and the only subjects I was any good at were art and drama. I used to sometimes stroll over to the Tate Gallery,” he says.

“I was obsessed with Surrealists at the time as you always are when you want to be an artist because you can draw what you like. I ran into the Turner paintings one day, had made the assumption they were Impressionists, then saw his date and put it all together.”

Turner was obviously in his thoughts as he learnt to paint on what amounted to a fine arts foundation course where he experienced all forms of art. He ended up painting a full size copy of Turner’s Steam Boat in oil and canvas which now hangs on his wall at home.

“I look at it in the morning and think, ‘How the hell did I do that?’. I did it, but I couldn’t do it again,” he says.

“In the process I started to understand there was something much more going on in this man’s ability than just skill. Then we started on the six-month rehearsal period and it was our job as a group, and my and Mike’s job together, to read up and do a massive detective job obviously about Turner’s life but also the Victorians, well Georgians and Victorians.

“This was all pre-psychology. They were very good at not telling you much about themselves, so I had to read as much material as I could and try to piece together what he was psychologically and emotionally. The great thing is he was a mass of contradictions, like we all are. But he really was and the fact that he was a contradiction is a great thing in itself.

“He was a rough, mud-like creature with a massive intellect and incredibly well-read. Geniuses do carry a sense of destiny about them. It drives them. He felt his work couldn’t be judged on its own. He was knocking about with people who’d all have Nobel Prizes now – scientists or natural philosophers as they were then. It informs his work. Science and art are integrated.”

His art lessons showed Spall had a natural eye for painting. “It turned out – and this isn’t bragging – I have a bit of ability which made it worse because I knew when something I was doing was s**t. It used to drive me mad because I knew I was never going to be anywhere near as good as him. I got to the point where I was probably as good as Turner when he was nine. Turner at nine wasn’t bad.”

He and Leigh have been working together for more than 30 years on films including Secrets And Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Life Is Sweet. Ask how their relationship has evolved and he points to the fact that they’re both older and seen a lot more life.

“He’s prepared to tolerate me which is a very good thing as far as I’m concerned. It’s evolved in that we’ve got to know each other more and been through our own separate lives. He’s gone his way and I’ve gone mine. We meet every five or ten years and make a film.

“The characters become deeper and more representative of being made by someone who’s older. What he doesn’t do, what he never does, is take short cuts. He’s devised this formula of how you achieve what you do which is incredibly strict. It’s an invention of his own kind and has an absolute basis of rules, and even people like me who’ve been working with him for 33 years you still have to go through the same process.

“He’s always been the director who gives me the best shots. Mike Leigh is a man who puts the most unlikely people at the centre of his films. He’s great at creating unprepossessing characters who have a sense of majesty about them. He can make the mundane majestic.”

He finds it difficult to pick a favourite Leigh film although Secrets And Lies is dear to his heart – a masterpiece, he calls it.

“As it happens I got very ill afterwards and when I came back from being ill not only had I not died I also had a film career which was quite nice,” he adds.