Southern rebel, Billy Bob Thornton

He's a dyslexic from Arkansas. He's Mr Angelina Jolie. He's the 'Hillbilly Orson Welles'. He's Billy Bob Thornton, and he's a troubled man, reports GEOFFREY MacNAB

No, Billy Bob Thornton sets the record straight, he did not install a barber's chair in his Beverly Hills home in preparation for his role as the lugubrious haircutter Ed Crane in the Coen brothers' new 1940s-set The Man Who Wasn't There. The truth is much more morbid.

"The way that got started, about me having the barber's chair in my house, is that I am getting the electric chair they used in the movie," he explains.

A lean, long-jawed man with tattooed arms and black leather trousers, the 46-year-old, Arkansas-born polymath looks very different from the buttoned-up, small-town American he plays in the Coens' movie.

In Hollywood, Thornton leads a strange Jekyll-and-Hyde-like existence. On the one hand, he's the outlandish celebrity whose marriage (his fifth) to Angelina Jolie is a source of endless fascination to gossip columnists. He's also a character actor in big Hollywood fare such as Armageddon and his upcoming heist film with Bruce Willis, Bandits.

On the other, he's the Oscar-winning director of Sling Blade, and the brilliantly accomplished character actor and writer once dubbed "the hillbilly Orson Welles" by Robert Duvall. He's also a songwriter who last year released Private Radio, a surprisingly good alternative country album.

Hillbilly Orson Welles? He frowns at the term. The San Diego-born Duvall, after appearing in films such as Tender Mercies and To Kill A Mockingbird, can just about get away with it, but not many others can.

"One hillbilly can call another hillbilly a hillbilly. It's actually a term of endearment. But if someone from New York calls you a hillbilly, that's not okay," Thornton says. He takes his Southern roots very seriously and fiercely resents being patronised because of them.

"There is a certain stigma attached because you're from the South. It's assumed that you're a bigot or you're maybe slow," he says with a scowl.

In many of his films, Thornton has played characters perilously close to the good ol' Southern stereotypes he so dislikes. Whether as the mad garage mechanic in Oliver Stone's U Turn, the mentally retarded brother in A Simple Plan or the Boo Radley-like outsider just released from psychiatric hospital in Sling Blade, he is often cast as the idiot savant. It's as if he is defying audiences to belittle him. (He even used to start his one-man show with the line: "Okay, y'all know my name's Billy Bob, so you probably think I married my cousin and screw goats.")

As a Southerner, Thornton is passionate about Elvis, country and blues. ("If it wasn't for the southern parts of the United States, America wouldn't have any modern music," he boasts.) He is best buddies with Dwight Yoakam and has drummed for Carl Perkins and performed alongside Hank Williams jun.

His other great passion is Southern literature. He claims kinship (through his mother) with the Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner, and seldom misses an opportunity to proselytise on behalf of his favourite authors: Faulkner, his brother John Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers and Erskine Caldwell. However, it hasn't been easy for him to read their work.

"The thing is, I have dyslexia and attention deficit problems," he admits. "When I was growing up, they didn't have terms for all this stuff. It was like you're stupid. I never knew what was wrong with me until recent years. I have a hard time reading. If I was to read a page, I have to read it over five or six times to retain any of it. As a result, I would read the same books over and over. You'd be shocked by how few books I've read in my lifetime. I've read very few books."

One guesses it won't be long before somebody makes a biopic about him. Even by Hollywood standards, where the myth of hardships and lucky breaks is central to the star-building process, Thornton's story is extraordinary.

He's the backwoods boy made good. Born in Arkansas in 1955, the son of a high-school teacher and basketball coach, he harboured early dreams of becoming a baseball player, but after injury scuppered his hopes of a sporting career, he festered in a series of dead-end jobs. He worked in a sawmill and shovelled asphalt for the roads department, while playing in a band at weekends.

In the late 70s, he went to New York with the dream of becoming a rock star, but was back home within days. In 1981, he hit the road again, this time to California to "make something of myself", but his first years in LA were harsh in the extreme. All that kept him going was a Micawber-like optimism.

"I always knew something would come up. That was mainly out of naivety and ignorance, which is probably my best friend. If I had known how hard it was going to be, how long it was going to take, I might not have stuck it out."

By 1984, he was destitute. "It was so bad that I was embarrassed to tell anybody that I didn't have any money. I was down to eating potatoes because that was the last thing I had. I went for days and days without eating and ended up in the hospital."

From that nadir, his career slowly began to pick up. By 1991, when he co-scripted and starred in Carl Franklin's brilliant B thriller, One False Move, he was established as a character actor. Five years later, he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Sling Blade, and his future seemed assured.

This particular Cinderella story isn't quite as straightforward as it seems. Ironically, his worst professional experiences came after the Oscar, not before. "I'm not fond of the studios. I don't like the way they work," he mutters as he recounts his turbulent relationship with Miramax and Sony, the backers of his Cormac McCarthy adaptation, All The Pretty Horses. "They [Miramax] mess with your movie every time. I've never known them not to," he says. "But they're no different from any other studio."

His mistake, he believes, was in showing the studio a three-hour-50-minute rough assembly of the film, thereby allowing them to claim he had made a wildly indulgent four-hour cut.

"They were hell-bent on cutting the movie to shreds ... they wanted to make a movie of under two hours for 15-year-olds so they could make a lot of money, but it's a book for adults and it's an epic story," he says. "The film was supposed to be about the end of the West and changing times, and if there was any love story in it, it was really the three boys, and they cut the last scene. I'd love for everybody to see the final scene, it's my favourite scene in the movie."

Whether or not he ever gets to make a director's cut, Thornton has learned from his mauling. For a start, he doesn't plan to direct any more literary adaptations.

"Books were intended to be books. I learned this with All The Pretty Horses in a hard way. If you're adapting a book for the screen, you're changing what it was."

He also believes that, to avoid studio interference, it's necessary to keep the budget as low as possible: "The more money they throw at you, the more they tell you what to do."

Thornton remains one of the most prolific actors in Hollywood. In his mid-40s, he has even belatedly become a major star. He is now busier than ever, with half a dozen new movies in the pipeline. To his bemusement, he and Angelina Jolie are treated by the media as if they are latterday counterparts to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

"It's funny to have a dual life, one as a serious artist and one as this circus-like thing," he says. But he doesn't mind the attention. "I guess you have to look at it as a form of flattery."

Just don't expect to see him in any more blockbusters like Armageddon. Even talking about the sci-fi extravaganza makes him squirm. His agents advised him to take his part as "the patriotic bullshit guy in a suit and tie who works for Nasa" to boost his profile overseas. "And I had a divorce to pay for, frankly," he adds with typical candour.

"I didn't realise exactly what a superficial experience it was making those movies. I'd never done one. So I have to claim a certain bit of innocence. I'd be ashamed of myself, I'd be a hypocrite to do those kind of movies again. It's not what I preach about."

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* The Man Who Wasn't There opens on February 21. Bandits opens on March 7.