On stage, your eye is involuntarily drawn to him; he is the centre of attention even when he is standing there apparently doing nothing. Does that sound at all familiar?”When we realised what was going on with Iraq, we thought it would be foolish to do the play in a medieval setting,” Lester explains “We had to do it in modern dress. Nicholas Hytner’s lauded modern-dress production at the National Theatre last year grabbed the headlines because Lester played the monarch as a charismatic, media-friendly war leader, complete with sharp suits, smooth press-conference manner and concerned televised addresses to the nation. He has presence by the shed-load.That quality was most evident in what may be his finest performance yet – as an eerily calm and automatically authoritative Henry V.

He first enchanted audiences in 1991 with a ravishingly seductive Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl’s iconoclastic all-male production of As You Like It. He went on to scoop Olivier awards for Sweeney Todd in 1993 and for Sam Mendes’s 1996 interpretation of Company. Three years ago, he won a Carlton award for a mesmerising Hamlet in Peter Brook’s f?d production.He has also turned in striking screen performances opposite John Travolta and Emma Thompson in his big Hollywood break, Primary Colors, Mike Nichols’s political satire loosely based on the Clintons, in Kenneth Branagh’s exuberant all-singing, all-dancing version of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and in the lead of Storm Damage, Lennie James’s searing film about children in care.Like Simon Russell Beale, that other actor whose most memorable work has thus far been in the theatre, Lester appears to have the best of both worlds. Dressed in a checked shirt, jeans and trainers, he laughs about one of the less distinguished moments in his career: a US sitcom called Girlfriends. Will we ever see it over here? “I sincerely hope not,” he says, flashing a megawatt smile.But Girlfriends was a rare blip, because over the past decade and a half, Lester has accumulated a string of acclaimed performances. He is easy-going, the opposite of the tortured-artist image perpetuated by so many thespians Two hours in Lester’s company fly by. Adrian Lester’s screen-acting career did not have an auspicious start.

In the 1980s, he was a regular walk-on in ITV’s impossibly tacky soap Crossroads, playing everything from a bellboy to a car-thief. Already a tricky task – just how much job satisfaction can there be in providing background support for a cheesy melodrama set in a deeply depressing Birmingham motel? – the gig was made even harder by the show’s legendarily wobbly set.
Lester looks back in amusement. “I remember, you did have to be very careful when opening and shutting doors, because the scenery really would shake. And they shot it so fast that the actors on reception used to have to tape their dialogue to the counter. They’d be on the phone, pretending to look for a pen while they read their next lines off a card.”From there, the only way was up – and that is very much the direction in which Lester has been travelling ever since. He may not yet be an instantly recognisable face, but he is very much on the verge of big things.In person, the 35-year-old actor wears his success lightly. He was always hugely supportive.” She gives a nostalgic smile.

“He wouldn’t have wanted me to sit and mope in any way.”The CVBorn: 27 July 1930Education: BA and MA in philosophy, politics and economics, Somerville, Oxford; Fulbright scholarship, Columbia UniversityCareer: 1950s, Journalist on Daily Mirror and Financial Times; 1964, MP for Hitchin; 1966-67, Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Labour; 1967-69, Minister of State, Department of Education; 1969-70, Minister of State, Home Office; 1974-76, Secretary of State for Consumer Protection; 1976-79, Secretary of State for Education and Paymaster General; 1993, Peerage; 1998, Party spokesperson on foreign affairs; 2001, Party leader in the Lords.. When she was a child, the leading female literary figures of the time, including Winifred Holtby and Rebecca West, stepped through her parents’ front door in Chelsea.Her introduction to such free-thinking and resourceful women at such a young age must have informed her firm views on the involvement of women in public life. Shirley Williams has long been critical of the Liberal Democrats’ failure to do more to elect more women MPs. In 1981, Shirley Williams broke away from Labour as one of the Gang of Four (with Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Bill Rodgers) to form the SDP.She admits there is “a certain irony” that she abandoned Labour because it was too left-wing and now was opposing a right-wing Labour party with an authoritarian programme. But she says she is now “thoroughly inoculated with liberalism”.Since her beloved husband, the distinguished American political scientist Richard Neustadt, died at the end of October, Lady Williams has continued her relentless schedule. She continues to work so hard, she says, because “he would have wanted it”.She adds: “I can hear Dick laughing, because he loved politics and we talked an awful lot about it.