THE ACTOR and director Sir Richard Attenborough is someone who greatly impresses me, and there are two main reasons for my admiration. The first is his passionate enthusiasm for work, which is unwavering although he's now 83 years of age. I find anyone who is committed to communicating a passion for what they do to others to be interesting. It's a trait that seems to extend to other members of his family, such as his brother David, who is well known for his work on the natural world, and his son Michael, who is also a director.

The second reason is that I've worked with Richard in the past, and found him to be warm, sensitive and tremendously encouraging, and an extremely decent person to work with. Michael is the same - they're both full of respect for your own personal integrity and have what I would call a great natural grace. Richard directed a film I was in called Closing the Ring, which is due out soon, and was partly filmed in Belfast last year. My own son Matthew played a younger version of me in the film, and Richard's way of dealing with a young lad who is keen on acting but has limited experience was so sensitive. It made Matthew's first experience in front of the camera a very positive experience, rather than a daunting one.

Richard was born in Cambridge in 1923, and he trained at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Arts (Rada). He was always a very fine actor and has appeared in an extraordinary amount of films, and while he played a surprisingly wide range of parts as an actor, I suppose he was always going to be primarily a character actor. His film career began in 1942 in In Which We Serve, and he played the role of a psychopathic gangster in Brighton Rock, a role he played to great effect on a West End stage first, even though he was only 20.

Richard formed a production company called Beaver Films with Bryan Forbes, and their first film was The League of Gentlemen in 1959. He made his film directorial debut in 1969 with the screen version of the musical Oh, What A Lovely Wa r .

You can see the type of person he is to work for by looking at the team of people around him on set. There's a group of older men who are his first and second assistant directors, and they all work really well with together. The fact that they've stayed around for years is an indication of the camaraderie and excellent working atmosphere on set.

It's quite staggering to think that Richard is currently the president of Rada, Bafta, the Gandhi Foundation, and the British National Film and Television School, and is also chairman of Capital Radio. He has won many Academy, Bafta and Golden Globe awards for his work, but still remains extremely humble. I think, like a lot of people in this industry, while it's nice to win the awards, it's the actual work that's important to him.

Richard passionately believes in education, and particularly non-racial education, and is very committed and supportive around racial issues. He's always been very encouraging of people to go on and develop themselves, irrespective of creed or colour. This comes through in his work on films such as Cry Freedom, and Gandhi, which won many awards including the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1982. It took Richard 20 years to get the film made, because nobody wanted to know about it for a long time, but his persistence demonstrated his determination, single-mindedness and vision, along with his gambler's instinct.

The film was made brilliantly, and was put out without distributors, but it sold all over the world, and he made his money back. He had the courage of his convictions to see his dream through, which takes some bottle.

It has been said that Richard is a great actors' director, because he's sensitive, encouraging and supportive, and I found that to be true. He also knows what he wants, and gets it, in his own decent, goodmannered way. His manner has been passed on to his son Michael; I've just come back from doing Frank McGuinness's play There Came a Gypsy Riding at the Almeida Theatre in London, where Michael is artistic director. It was the best theatre I've ever worked in, and I'd attribute a lot of that to the style, vision and personality of Michael, who has great organisational skills and establishes a lovely working atmosphere, just like his father.

Richard's family experienced a terrible tragedy during the 2004 tsunami, when his youngest child Jane was killed, along with her daughter Lucy and mother-in-law, also called Jane. The family was devastated, and Richard and his wife of 62 years, Sheila Sims, founded the Jane Holland Creative Centre for Learning in Swaziland, in memory of their daughter. There is a line that the father, whom I played in the production at the Almeida, says, "Working is our way of coping, " and perhaps it applies to this family as well.

I think it's wonderful that Richard still retains a boyish enthusiasm for an industry that he first entered in his 20s. It was a pleasure to watch him in action during Closing the Ring, because he was climbing up and down hillsides for scenes, and it was clear that even though he's 83, he has no intention of stopping any time soon.

Ian McElhinney stars in the two-part drama, 'Single Handed', tonight and tomorrow night on RT� One at 9.30pm