Terminator with a temper

Next Thursday sees the premiere of Terminator Salvation, the fourth in the Terminator film franchise and the first in which Arnold Schwarzenegger does not appear.

Instead, the responsibility for box-office success falls on the rather tense shoulders of the 35-year-old British-born actor, Christian Bale. Despite a career that already stretches back more than 20 years, and includes top billing in two Batman films, Bale is perhaps best known for a performance that never made it on to the screen.

While shooting a key scene in Terminator Salvation, Bale let rip at the film's cinematographer, Shane Hurlbut, who had unwittingly wandered into the actor's line of vision. The tirade lasted almost four minutes and was decorated with range of expletives, including 37 uses of the F-word. It also contained a threat to walk out of the film, which caused the filmmakers to consult its insurers. It has been suggested that someone at the insurance company was responsible for the subsequent leaking of an audio recording of the rant on to the internet.

Whoever was guilty, they brought a jaw-lowering pleasure to millions of listeners. Connoisseurs of the form quickly confirmed Bale's entry into the pantheon of epic meltdowns, alongside Alec Baldwin's phone call to his daughter where he called the 11-year-old "a rude, thoughtless little pig" and Basil Fawlty's attack on his Austin 1100.

Bale has described the outburst as "out of order beyond belief", by way of apology. That's as maybe, but one of its more impressive and yet unsettling qualities is that the diatribe was delivered in an American accent. As the film's director, Joseph McGinty Nichol (McG), recently noted, Bale remained "very much in character" throughout the onslaught, threatening to kick the director of photography's "f***ing ass" and "trash" his "f***ing light".

And here, perhaps, is the clue to why Bale is favoured by so many directors and why McG, the creative visionary behind Charlie's Angels, calls Bale "the most credible actor of his generation". Not for him the easy recourse to the familiar vulgarities of his homeland. For even in the depths of what to the casual observer might resemble a psychotic episode, Bale is determined to stay focused on his character. It's this kind of dedication that caused Mary Harron to fight for Bale to play Patrick Bateman, the yuppie monster in American Psycho.

The financial backers wanted Leonardo DiCaprio, who wisely opted for The Beach. Somehow, the boyish DiCaprio never seemed the appropriate choice to run around naked while chasing a prostitute with a chainsaw. By contrast, Bale, all pumped up and preening, took to the job like a natural, as if this was what he did in his downtime. Bale has acknowledged that sometimes he takes the roles home. How his wife, Sibi Blazic, coped with this habit during the shooting of American Psycho is not known. But as a former assistant to Winona Ryder, Blazic must presumably have been aware of the psychic toll that acting can take on even the most stable of personalities.

Four years later, in 2004, Bale played a disturbed factory worker in The Machinist, a role for which he lost 28kg in just a few months. Hardly anyone saw the film, but the story of Bale's almost suicidal physical transformation - he was so weak and emaciated he could scarcely walk - travelled far and wide. It's that kind of extreme statement of intent that can earn an Oscar nomination.

On this occasion it didn't but Bale was, instead, rewarded with the role of the Caped Crusader. Having played Bateman, he was now Batman, both gothic visions of, respectively, an American psycho and an American hero. Yet Bale was born in Haverfordwest in south Wales, in 1974. His family seem to have been dreamed up as characters from a novel. Bale's grandfather was a ventriloquist and magician, apparently, as well as a boxer and jockey. His mother was a circus performer and his father a pilot, animal rights activist and entrepreneur. Bale was the youngest of four children and the family moved around during his childhood, finally settling in Bournemouth, via Oxfordshire and Portugal. He took ballet lessons and learned to play the guitar. When he was 8 years old he landed a part in an advert for a fabric softener.

A couple of years later he acted with Rowan Atkinson in a West End production of The Nerd. Then, at 13, came his international breakthrough, a role in Empire of the Sun, Steven Spielberg's grand adaptation of JG Ballard's autobiographical novel. Showing early signs of a career- long discomfort with journalists, he spent the course of one press junket for the film sullenly stabbing an orange with a pen.

Judging by many of the interviews that have since been published, those holding the tape recorder give the impression of closely identifying with that harmless citrus fruit. Back at school, he resented the attention he now received. The girls, he recalled, were "all over me, boys wanted to fight me and I was being asked to open fetes when all I wanted to do was ride my BMX bike in the woods". As a result, he became withdrawn and self-conscious, able to relax only when he was being someone else. Around the time of Empire of the Sun, his parents split up and at 17 Bale moved to Los Angeles with his father, David. "My entire life," Bale once observed, "has been kind of just moving on ... to somewhere else, changing and adapting to whatever situation I find myself in."

Despite this ability to adapt, Bale has nevertheless maintained an uncompromising streak, a characteristic he seems to have inherited from his father. "He was never like any other parents that I came across," Bale has said. "He just kinda never accepted situations as they were if he didn't like 'em." His father died of brain lymphoma in 2003, but not before marrying the celebrated feminist Gloria Steinem. After his father's death, Bale was cast in Batman Begins and suddenly he had moved into another league.

Between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Bale appeared alongside Russell Crowe, the assertive Australian star, in the western 3:10 to Yuma. Playing a Civil War veteran who'd lost part of his foot, Bale got to try out a limp, which, since Midnight Cowboy, has been seen as a benchmark in method acting.

Better still, he got to wear a 19th-century prosthetic device - not something Dustin Hoffman can ever claim to have done. Nonetheless, Crowe stole the show. "Acting with him certainly makes things simple," said Bale. "You don't have any unnecessary distractions." We can only imagine why. Still, it hasn't all been enlarged trailers and nervous cinematographers.

On Rescue Dawn, he worked for Werner Herzog, the infamously demanding German director who is said to have once pulled a gun on Klaus Kinski. "He doesn't give a damn about what anybody else is doing," said Bale, approvingly, of Herzog. The film, shot on location in the Thai jungle, could easily have been the inspiration for the spoof Vietnam movie Tropic Thunder. Bale spent a lot of time eating fried insects and pigswill and managed to shed another 16kg from his slender frame. Then in Harsh Times, he played an army vet suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who kills several gangster, ends up first paralysed, then dead. It's the kind of role for which screenplay writers have come reflexively to envisage Bale.

The charming lead in a romantic comedy, the hesitant lover in a drama of social manners, these are parts that are simply not marked with his name. If Bale ever was interested in that line of work, and it's not an ambition he's voiced in public, then he had to forget it after the Dorchester incident. In July last year, he was called to a London police station following an allegation that he had assaulted his mother, Jenny, and sister, Sharon, during an argument at the Dorchester Hotel. The actor denied the allegation, was released on bail and all charges were later dismissed.

Nevertheless, the merest suggestion, however wrong, that he might have mixed it with his mother rules out "cuddly" and "warm" as adjectives that could be applied to Bale. Following the recorded rant, Bale's mother said: "People might now realise that is his temper. They might understand a bit more." And we do. The question is, will this understanding lead to a greater appreciation of Bale as a large, risk-taking talent or overshadow his career? Will it terminate his attraction or prove its salvation? "My father admired troublemakers,"

Bale once recalled. "He always said to me, 'the greatest sin is being boring'." By this measure, at least, the son is undoubtedly more sinned against than sinning.

* Terminator Salvation opens at cinemas on June 4

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