I don’t remember Dad saying anything about lines being cut from his Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, but I’m sure they were. Even Sir Tom’s screenplay for Robert Harris’s Enigma was not considered sacrosanct, as Ed discovered when he met one of the producers.”He told me that everyone in the cast from Kate Winslet downwards admitted that they would change or take out some of my father’s words if they thought no one talked like that. Although one of these days I might write a very second-rate script just to get it out of my system.”Yet like any other screen actor with his wits about him, he often has his own input into a script. “People keep asking me if I want to write, but you can only be a writer if you have no choice about it So no, I don’t write.

“His response was, ‘Jesus, how are you going to pay the phone bill?’ Because he knows it’s a fickle business. The reality is that 99.9 per cent of us are jobbing actors; people I know from my dad’s plays struggle to meet their mortgage payments. The frustrating thing is that it’s not purely meritocratic: you can be a fantastic actor and yet really struggle, or you can be an average one and yet have a very easy life financially. Either your hair is the wrong colour or you’re a bit too short for the role.

The randomness can be so insidious.”Nevertheless it was important to Stoppard to strike out in a different direction to his father; and so far he hasn’t put a foot wrong in a steady rather than heady ascent up the ladder, with good notices for everything from Konstantin to his role as Adrien Brody’s hotheaded younger brother Henryk in Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning film The Pianist.”I hang on to that distinction of being an actor rather than a playwright like my father; that one degree of separation was really absolutely essential for me,” he admits. We weren’t told to put on our best outfits and parade like the Von Trapps. And the only thing I can recall about a dinner we had for Princess Margaret was the fact that my brother Olly cooked it; I don’t remember ‘Er Indoors, down the other end of the table, demanding something or other. Or was it Princess Michael?”Nepotism was never, therefore, on the agenda.