The boy loves a camera.

And the camera loves him. With his Furby looks and carefully dishevelled off-screen style, Colin Farrell is still young enough to look good when photographed drunk . . . which he has been countless times. Late last year, he was admitted to rehab. A spokesperson said that he had become addicted to prescription painkillers which had been prescribed for a back injury. By an extraordinary coincidence, this is exactly how Elizabeth Taylor became addicted to drugs. Celebrities seem to have a disproportionate amount of spinal problems. But Colin Farrell was honest enough . . . or plastered enough . . . to admit to having used heroin as a very young man.

The actor Joe Taylor, of Tribunal fame, lives next door to Colin Farrell's house in Irishtown, Dublin. He has no tales of wild parties. "The tabloids were round here and they didn't want any good stories about him. But everyone here said that we are good neighbours, we don't talk about each other. Colin is an excellent neighbour. Any time he's home, the invitations arrive, for premieres or whatever."

Farrell may have appeared opposite Al Pacino (The Recruit, 2003); Kevin Spacey (Ordinary Decent Criminal, 2000); Samuel L Jackson (S.W.A.T. , 2003) and Cate Blanchett (Veronica Guerin, 2003) but he still came home for the funeral of his maternal grandfather, James Monaghan, in Drimnagh. Colin's son, James, is said to have been named after him.

Farrell's swarthy pretty-boy looks have led to him being cast as an Italian (in Ask The Dust, with Salma Hayek, 2006). This dark beauty runs through his family.

Unusually for a film star's family, any one of Colin Farrell's siblings . . . two sisters and a brother . . . looks good enough to be in the movies, even when they are snapped by photographers coming out of Shanahan's on the Green in Dublin. Or leaving their uncle Robbie Fox's nightclub, Reynards.

His mother, Rita, is a handsome woman.

"I adore my mother, " says Farrell. "And she is everything to me." Mrs Farrell reads all the newspaper reports about him, he told an interviewer. "She puts half the s*** in her scrapbook."

However, press photographers at a family funeral are a price to be paid for one family member's fame. His father Eamon, once a footballer, now co-owns and runs the Down To Earth healthfood shop in Dublin's South Great George's Street. Mr Farrell certainly does not want to talk to the press. "No, no, no, " he says down the phone. "He's my son and I love him, he's brilliant, but I won't talk about him. That's his business."

Recently, Colin Farrell said that he is not going to have a relationship in the near future. A statement of such global significance that the story was run in the Hindustan Times. Colin Farrell may not be an A-list star, but he is tantalisingly close to it. "The kind of guy you want to knock back a few pints with, " purrs the online magazine Askmen. "He oozes working-class heroism." Working-class heroism is rather rare in people who have attended Castleknock College and Gormanstown, but there you are.

He has become such a byword for male heterosexual success that a mockumentary shown on RTE television some years ago, entitled The Unbelievable Truth - Colin Farrell's Darkest Secrets, showed a priest handing out Viagra tablets like communion wafers and saying 'Body of Colin Farrell'.

(The scene was the subject of several complaints to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, which upheld them.

The makers of the mockumentary said that their motives had been misunderstood. ) It is Colin Farrell's appeal to straight men . . . as well as to women and gay men . . . that has guaranteed this glittering career. His carefully nurtured Irish wild-boy image has had its biological cost, but it makes him a regular guy. "Being Irish is everything to me, " he has said. "I take it everywhere with me." Which sounds somehow uncomfortable. "He is a night-crawler and a tomcat, " trilled Vanity Fair in a 2002 interview.

The same article also called Farrell "the Irish Brad Pitt".

In an industry where actors are either eating organic vegetables or consuming expensive narcotics . . . often in the same day . . . it must have been nice to see a boy who knows how to drink alcohol and look cool smoking a Marlboro. Presumably these offscreen skills are part of what has made him a credible action hero, despite his diminutive size. Now, post-rehab, he has said that he wants to live more calmly, for the sake of his three-year old son, conceived with Kim Bordenave, another Playboymodel.

"I have a new found appreciation for my life, " he said last week. "Now I want to watch my son grow up, be his friend and his father, and hang around with him. So he's the greatest priority in my life." Farrell is currently shooting the new Woody Allen film in London, with Ewan McGregor. His is a career which, like many actors' careers, has been built on replacing bigger stars. In Minority Report, he replaced Matt Damon. In Hart's War, he replaced Edward Norton. In Phone Booth, his first starring role, he replaced Jim Carrey.

He has also survived the car crash that was Oliver Stone's Alexander, a film so risible that it could certainly be nominated for the Worst Stinkers Of All Time Award. In fact, Farrell was nominated for a Raspberry Award for Worst Actor.

Alexander was not helped by the fact that the Macedonians all spoke with Irish accents . . . and not in a good way. Farrell is actually good at accents and at first Americans were surprised to hear him in his expletive-strewn interviews . . . they had thought that he was American. In American Outlaws (2001) he played that American icon, Jesse James. It has recently been reported that he has lost the role of Bob Dylan to another non-American, Heath Ledger.

It remains to be seen whether Farrell can do a Brad Pitt and transform his pretty boy looks in to an A-list career. Those who saw him in Tigerland (2000) and the Irish film Intermission (2003) think that he can. He has started to intersperse the action movies with more low-key films such as A Home At The End Of The World (2004) and The New Wo r ld (2005), directed by the legendary Terrence Malick and a box-office disaster.

His sheer workrate since he appeared in Ballykissangel (1998-1999) has been phenomenal, and his rise extraordinary.

C.V.

Born: 31 May 1976, Dublin.

Family: Father Eamon, ex-Shamrock Rovers player, mother Rita. One brother, also Eamon, and sisters Claudine and Catherine. Lived in Castleknock, Co Dublin.

Married: To British actress, Amelia Warner, for five months in 2001.

Children: A son, James Farrell, born 12 September 2003.

In the news because: He always is.

He's a Hollywood star.