AT THE beginning of the 1990s, Stephen Rea was a low-key stage actor who commanded a highlevel of respect. Heading then towards his mid-40s, his back catalogue included work in the National and Royal Court Theatres in London with writers such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard, while among his directorial collaborators were the radical, awardwinning Howard Davies and the visionary John McGrath, who set up the socially-conscious 7.84 theatre company.

A decade earlier, he had returned to Ireland to form Field Day Theatre Company with Brian Friel; the company's first production, Translations, stunned audiences - initially in Derry's Guildhall and later in small towns and venues across Ireland - and solidified both Rea's and Friel's presences at home and abroad as intellectual, politically aware innovators on the Irish theatrical scene.

Subsequently, when the Field Day Board was set up, it incorporated writers and intellectuals - S�amus Heaney, S�amus Deane, Tom Paulin, Thomas Kilroy, David Hammond. Rea had spent most of his acting life exactly where he wanted to be, at the centre of a theatre of ideas.

He has stated, many times, that he was fulfilled and engaged by what he was doing. Then came The Crying Game.

Neil Jordan's seventh feature film was a sensation in the US, becoming, for some time, the most successful non-American film ever released in the country.

A clever marketing campaign swearing audiences to silence in relation to the movie's twist fuelled the hype but there was much more to this eloquent and fanciful arthouse film than simply a pivotal sex scene - the New Yorkermagazine, for example, described it as "amazing" and likened its dreamlike qualities to those of great fairytales and the most memorable pop songs. It was a political film, but indirectly so; at its heart was a deeplyfelt, humanist story about characters in need of redemption. It won Jordan an Oscar for best screenplay, giving him a licence to work in Hollywood, and it nearly turned Stephen Rea - also Oscar-nominated for his restrained turn in the lead role of Fergus - into a star.

Ask a range of passive moviegoers if they have heard of Stephen Rea and many will look at you quizzically. "No." Yet since The Crying Game in 1992, Rea has worked almost constantly in cinema, collaborating over and again with Jordan on internationally recognised films such as Interview with the Vampire, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy and The End of the Affair.

He has also starred in bigger budget films such as V for Vendetta with Natalie Portman and John Hurt, and more recently he worked alongside Mena Suvari in the forthcoming Stuck and Hilary Swank in The Reaping, due out in the US this spring.

Moving into filmmaking had been a deliberate decision - "theatre uses up a lot of irreplaceable energy" - but he had been sated, to some extent, by the early, idiosyncratic work he did with Jordan on the films Angel (1982) and The Company of Wolves (1984), particularly as Irish and British cinema-making was virtually stagnant at the time.

Indeed, he had reached a point where he barely expected to work in movies when the Hollywood thing happened, and Rea found himself protesting during a circus of publicity interviews:

"I wasn't any worse an actor before The Crying Game, it's just that people notice what I do now."

Those post-Crying Game interviews - "Honestly, I don't know that much about Hollywood, " he says in one, "But I guess I'm going to get an agent" - also indicate a reticence to fully embrace an industry that would require his private life to become public property and may have forced this actor, who has always believed in "doing what you know", down uncomfortable routes of romantic leads and whimsy.

Memorably, he made Angie, an amusing romantic comedy, with Geena Davis in 1994 but he quickly returned to the security of his relationship with Jordan - whom he describes as a "very great director". When he took the relatively small role of Santiago in Interview with the Vampire, also released in 1994, the film consolidated both his outsider status and his concern to continually seek out good writing in movies, much as he had done in theatre.

"Great texts are usually more interesting than any actor, " he says. His integrity kept the brightest glare of the limelight at bay, and is the reason he remains an obscure figure for casual film audiences, but his work with Jordan (they have made nine films together) enhanced his reputation as a serious actor of range and intelligence and kept the sort of roles he was interested in - many of them with an Irish aspect - coming his way.

Rea last took on a theatrical role three years ago when he played Cyrano de Bergerac in Howard Davies's flawed production for London's National Theatre. Meanwhile, although he began his acting career at the Abbey, it has been decades since he last set foot on its stage, having been one of the theatre's more high-profile critics along the way - in a 2004 interview with the Sunday Tribune he described it as "an institution that is absolutely bereft of ideas".

He is much happier these days, respectful of the route new director Fiach MacConghail is taking. "I think it seriously has turned a corner. Fiach has a background in performance art - he's not stuck in just old-fashioned proscenium arch theatre or literary theatre, he has a sense that theatre can be more than that now."

He is also pleased to work with his old friend Sam Shepard on his new play, which involves one man, a dead horse and a search for authenticity - and which Shepard allegedly wrote with Rea, whom he once described as an "extraordinary actor", in mind.

If there is a single consistent quality to Rea's acting style, it is his stillness. "Rea plays Henry with an abashed silence, " wrote the New Yorker, of his role as the cuckolded husband in Jordan's The End of the Affair, adapted from Graham Greene's novel of the same name.

Rea himself has said his interest when acting is to "avoid getting between the audience and the material". He says of his approach: "It has to be as if it is occurring to you. You don't want apparent effort. You have to be thinking. Acting is all about thinking. It takes incredible control and you don't get control without massive work."

His focus is on getting to a place where he can "yield to the material, see what it tells me, let the decisions happen" - for this, he insists on the importance of early preparation. (Weeks before Shepard - who is also directing the play - arrives at the Abbey, he is intent on being "in possession of the material". ) "I know it won't work if I'm working on the material, " he says, "you have to allow the material to work on you."

His humility in the face of good writing - he says he has had the good fortune to work with the best of English-speaking literary theatre - means he is the very antithesis of the egocentric actor, around whom work can become centred. In person, as on stage and screen, he is soulful and gentle, yet he has undeniable presence.

Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington described his portrayal of the lovelorn Cyrano as "infallibly moving", while Neil Jordan has recalled first seeing him on stage and thinking he was "like a movie actor, you know, one of those grand and impassive stars like James Dean or Robert Mitchum".

Rea's own favourites - Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman - are also those whom he considers to be disciplined and intellectual, rather than those who follow what he calls the "Olivier legacy" (whom he nonetheless thought was brilliant) and allow their acting to "hijack the play".

Rea's circuitous approach to his acting technique has been reflected in the roles he has chosen. Although he has gained a reputation as a political actor, in her book Acting Irish in Hollywood, Ruth Barton refers to him as "an articulate and politicallyengaged presence" within both theatre and film, who has consistently expressed his distaste for "balaclava plays" and for confrontational material. Instead, she says, he has looked for more human, intelligent, almost spiritual work he believes can have an impact on an audience. "I like the way you can have an oblique influence as an actor, " he says.

"You can discuss things. That was always the Field Day intent - to ask questions. It wasn't meant to be aggressive, it was meant to be challenging."

Despite his transatlantic success, Irish themes have remained at the heart of his work. He still lives in Dublin and he would agree, even now, with Brian Friel's famous quote that the Field Day collaborators were "talking to ourselves and if we are overheard in America or England, so much the better".

"I've taken that to heart, " he says, "I do believe that. I'm not familiar enough with America to be an American actor. I don't know what third grade is."

'Kicking a Dead Horse' begins in the Peacock Theatre on 12 March