Beverley Morrison talks to the Olivier Award winner about his career and his latest challenge

Parts for older actors are like gold dust in our youth obsessed society – but Olivier Award winner Julian Glover is bringing a nugget of sheer brilliance to Bromley with the play Maurice’s Jubilee.

The 77-year-old star has had a hugely successful stage and screen career, appearing uniquely in all three major movie franchises - Star Wars, James Bond and Indiana Jones - generally playing a villain!

He’s currently enjoying success as a key character in HBO’s fantasy TV epic, Game of Thrones, which has been a huge hit in both America and the UK.

But it’s the role of Maurice, a man approaching his 90th birthday in writer and actress Nichola McAuliffe’s award-winning play, which he finds really compelling.

Maurice’s dream is to live long enough to welcome the Queen to tea on her Diamond Jubilee – but his seemingly fanciful obsession is driving his family mad.

“It’s the most beautiful play - it’s very funny but also very moving,” said Julian.

“It gives us great pleasure and it seems to give the audience great pleasure. It deals very much with people’s expectations and how they cope with being old. It examines those things really interestingly and funnily, and I hope the audience go out with a little tear in the corner of their eye.”

Maurice’s Jubilee, which comes to the Churchill Theatre, Bromley, at the end of March, is about a curmudgeonly Victor Meldrew-type character dying of cancer who is desperate to live until his 90th birthday.

A retired jeweller, Maurice tells his family he met the Queen shortly before her coronation, when he was in charge of the crown jewels at Westminster Abbey.

He claims they got on so well she promised to come to tea with him at his bungalow in Penge on her 60th Jubilee.

The family are fed up hearing the story, until Katie, a palliative-care nurse, played by writer McAuliffe arrives.

The role won Nichola The Stage Award for Best Actress at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last August, which led to the UK tour this spring.

“I’ve got to say Nichola is simply wonderful in it - such a delicate performance - and I know Bromley is really going to like it as it’s just up Bromley’s street,” said Julian, who has performed many times at the Churchill Theatre over the years.

As an actor who has played the entire canon of Shakespearean roles, Julian does acknowledge that there have been more interesting parts for older actors in recent years, like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench.

But such good roles are still hard to find... and often go to his peers – and friends – Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon and Ian McKellen.

“Derek Jacobi did the wonderful Last Tango series on TV, which has a part for an older man - so you get the occasional one,” said Julian.

“But when you reach a certain age as an actor you do think it’s all going to run out, and a lot of it does because there aren’t the parts around... but when I read Nichola’s script I said to my wife, I have to do this.”

Julian’s wife, Isla Blair, is a celebrated actress, and their son Jamie, 43, is also an actor, and the star of the TV series Waterloo Road.

So acting is clearly a family business.

Indeed Jamie will shortly be starring in a TV drama about the making of the first series of Dr Who – a show Julian has appeared in three times.

“I’ve been terribly lucky as an actor – and it’s still going on!” said the actor who lives in Surrey.

“I even had a little bit in Harry Potter as the voice of a spider.

“Now I am in Game of Thrones - which is absolutely enormous in America.

"There’s a sex scene about three times in each episode and somebody gets their head chopped off in most of them – so it’s very funny.”

He’s played the baddie so well that the Broccoli family – who produce the James Bond franchise – even toyed with the idea of bringing Julian’s villainous character Aris Kristatos back from the dead for a second film.

“I love playing baddies – the only problem is you never get the sequel by definition, because you’re always killed off.”

Acting is clearly in Julian’s DNA and even as a spritely septuagenarian he can’t conceive of giving it up.

“Acting isn’t just a passion, it’s a matter of need really,” he told me. “It’s what I do - it’s my life.

"My family and working life are inextricably bound up and I couldn’t do without either.

"And when I am not working as an actor, I become a lesser person - I irritate my family enormously.

"They say my head's gone down and ask, ‘you don’t have any work coming up?’ Nooo.

"Then the next job comes along, and up I go!”

Maurice’s Jubilee is at The Churchill Theatre from Tuesday, March 26, to Saturday, March 30.

For more information and tickets visit www.atgtickets.com or call 0844 871 7644.