Scotland's other national hero

put together.''

Ned being about winning the lottery, one naturally wonders whether he does the lottery, and what he would do if he won. He says he won $78 the first time he tried it in America and he does it twice a week when he is in Britain, but so far only the odd #10 has come his way. As to what he would do were he to win #7m, as the villagers in the film do, he reflects about his time in East Africa which made a deep impression on him. ''The blacks are so wonderful,'' he says. ''We would ride out into the bush to film, to little townships where they have nothing at all, and yet we were welcomed.

''The whole place is run by the politicians with their Swiss bank accounts. They don't care a rap about the people, so it is no wonder there are bandits going around the country. We were given a man with an AK20 to look after us. The East African government put #800,000 into the movie so I guess they didn't want to lose us. We would go out at 5.30am and there were people waving and cheering, you feel like the Queen of Sheba. I would use some of it to help people like that.''

Bannen, who was born in Coatbridge, is thinking of buying a house in Scotland. His wife, Marilyn, who he met when he was with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford and who he calls the ''factotum delectata'', wanted him to buy one when he did Doctor Finlay on television, but he has three other homes and it did not happen. As to where it might be he says she would like one in either Fort Augustus or Glasgow. His other homes are in San Diego - which is handy for Hollywood - the Isle of Wight, bought in 1954 for his parents, and a flat in Dolphin Square in London, because hotels are much too expensive when you are working in the theatre.

He bought the Isle of Wight house in Ventnor for #2008 (money features quite a lot in his conversation) because he found his elderly father one night returning home drenched from a walk in Scotland and told his mother to find somewhere in the South of England where it was sunny.

His father, a solicitor, sent him first to St Aloysius in Glasgow, then to a Roman Catholic prep school in Leicester. After that he went to Ratcliffe College where his contemporaries included Norman St John Stevas and Sir Gordon Reece. He acted with them in school plays before going to do National Service with the Royal Engineers. But he had already become an actor by accident.

In Dublin for a holiday, he met a man from ICI and they set out to get some popsies. ''I asked him how we would go about it,'' he says. ''He told me he knew a film producer's wife who might introduce us to some. 'We will ask her to have a Guinness with us and she will invite us back to dinner.' I said, 'Oh yes?', but that is what we did. In the middle of dinner she asked if I had ever done any acting and I said I had at school, and she said there was a role going in Amulet of Jade by Lord Longford - the present lord's brother - and did I mind auditioning? I got the part, went home, got some clothes, and took the boat back. They also gave me a part in Volpone, but that was the end of my acting career because I had to do National Service.''

In Egypt, where he was posted, he saw a poster for an Army production of a Rattigan play and telephoned the major producing it to ask if there were any roles going. The major asked why, and Bannen told him that he had been at The Gate in Dublin. The major arranged for his transfer to a depot nearby, and in no time at all Bannen had talked his way out of the engineers and into being an army press officer. It was a safer place to be than defusing mines. His photograph of HMS Amethyst sailing up the Suez Canal after the Yangtze incident made the front pages of the British dailies.

On demob he went to Stratford, carried spears, got small roles like Flute in Midsummer Night's Dream and rose to become one of the company's leading players. He was Orlando to Vanessa Redgrave's unforgettable Rosalind in one of the great productions of As You Like It - in those days he was pretty skinny and they had to pad him out for the wrestling scene - played roles like Hamlet, and went on to establish himself in a whole series of classic dramas. He was Jamie Tyrone in a legendary Edinburgh Festival staging of Long Day's Journey Into Night with Gwen Ffrangcon Davies, played Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, Judge Brack opposite Janette Suzman in Hedda Gabler. At the National he was in Translations and Sergeant Musgrave's Dance and won the Critics' Circle award for his role as the aircraft spare parts manufacturer in Arthur Miller's All My Sons. He was also in Peter Brook's celebrated production

of A View From the Bridge. ''It was a one-act play - you won't find this in Miller's book - which Brook persuaded him to take away and write more to, so that it ended up as a two-acter. That was my big break and the movies came from that.''

Bannen is notorious in the profession for his bad judgement, having turned down a whole succession of roles which have given other actors great success. They include the lead in John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday, which eventually went to Peter Finch. But Bannen and Schlesinger did not get on: he thought the director shouted too much, and the writing of the script to be banal - and two weeks into the production, he quit.

His mistake, he reckons, came when he was making the maximum amount of money in Hollywood. ''I decided I would wait for exceptional scripts,'' he says. ''I thought Michael Caine was out of his mind doing everything he was offered, but he was right because the good comes along as well as the rubbish.''

Bannen is a great man for changing the subject, and suddenly announces that it was around then he thought of becoming a monk. Just what his wife, a vet he met while he was at Stratford in the 1950s, had to say about that is anybody's guess. ''I just felt maybe I was cut out to be one,'' he says by way of explanation. ''I didn't try it, obviously.''

He knew the glory days were over when he made Too Late The Hero with Caine, who got $700,000 while he got $100,000. But that hasn't stopped him working. This is not because he needs to, although his accountant did lose a lot of his money in the mid-70s, but because he likes it.

The anecdotes flow and one starts to get the suspicion they are well rehearsed. He recalls doing Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic in the West End with ''the bun woman'', who turns out to be Wendy Hiller and Diana Wynyard. The production had trouble with the director and Hellman, he says, eventually moved in, sitting in the theatre with a huge pile of cigarette packets to keep her going and rattling away like a Gattling gun. ''Suddenly she yelled, 'The trouble with you two dames is you are just plain common','' he says.

''One of them rose to her feet and threw a fainting fit, falling onto a bed which was handily in the wings.'' But before he tells which of the ladies it was, he suddenly embarks on a long tale about being in Private Progress which includes a devastating impersonation of Terry Thomas uttering his immortal line to the National Servicemen about their being an absolute shower.

The problem with Bannen is making him stick to the point, and the factotum delectata (''she does the VAT and keeps the accounts'') was not present to see that he did.

He got an Oscar nomination, of which he is very proud, for Flight of the Phoenix starring James Stewart. But his Hollywood career never really recovered from Penelope, a mid-60s caper movie with Natalie Wood. If his leading man status had gone, he remained a much sought-after character actor with a reputation (even although he says some of the films went down the toilet) for doing good work.

His roles have included Jim Prideaux in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the tippling grandfather in John Boorman's Hope and Glory, and it would not have been Braveheart without Bannen in it, although he hated his role of a leper who only got to speak to Robert the Bruce and never met Mel.

One of his most memorable performances was as the child abuser in The Offence with Sean Connery, which leads him into a long tale about just why he thinks Connery fell out with Saltzman and Broccoli who made the Bond films. It seems Connery used to send him postcards asking him to ''Give my love to Shitface'', a reference to Broccoli who he detested. Bannen's explanation for it all is that at one point Connery was told his expenses for a film would be $1000 a week, and that they would be working for 11 weeks. But sometime later when he saw the producers they told him he would be getting $10,000. ''When Sean came out he said to me: 'Does that bugger think I can't count? The bastard.' He was in a terrible state.''

Like all Bannen's tales it has clearly improved in the telling over the years. He admits happily that he has had a marvellous life. As to how he will celebrate that birthday on June 29, it seems only

Marilyn knows.