Byline: MIRANDA SAWYER

If you spend a couple of days working your way through Tim Roth's cinematic CV, from his furious 1983 debut as bovver-boy-next-door Trevor in Alan Clarke's Made In Britain through to the Tarantino years (1993's Reservoir Dogs, a very gutsy performance; then hapless heist wannabe in Pulp Fiction), you will conclude that Roth is, without doubt, one of Britain's most talented and committed celluloid clog-poppers. He's terrific at dying. Tip-top at topping himself; a faultless murderee. Dead good. The gorier and more unlikely the demise, the better.

Tim Roth lives each death as if it were his last.

There was his beautifully off-beat send-off in The Hit, his second feature: shot bang through the middle of the left lens of his Aviator shades by an ungracious John Hurt. Some Shakespearian noose-swinging in Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead. Then an affectingly gruesome suicide in Vincent And Theo (aesthetic blood-sopped stagger through whitewashed French streets, final puff on trusty pipe, fin). But Roth's most glorious penultimate moments are undoubtedly to be found in Reservoir Dogs, where he manages to drag out his last gasp for the length of the entire film.

So it comes as a surprise that Roth cops it in only one of his three new offerings (Captives, Little Odessa and Rob Roy ' let's not ruin the plot by identifying which one). Still, it's a worthy addition to his repertoire. He milks his moment of gory glory in such a spectacularly over-the-top manner ' staggering, buckling, haemorrhaging ' that the film's preview audience, who are by nature an undemonstrative lot, actually laughed out loud. Some whooped. Even for those of us who wanted him to live, it was a definite highlight.

Of course, virtual termination is one thing, but the off-screen experience is far more final and, therefore, worrying. Does Tim Roth ever think about that? Sprawled across a pastel sofa, Roth considers real-life death, as he does most things, in depth, for about three seconds.

'Men go through it at 30, the death thing,' he pronounces. He'll be 34 on 14 May. 'Before that, you think you're immortal. When I started worrying about death, I thought about pain a bit ' enemas ' but really it was in terms of no longer being able to have fun.' He flashes an all-teeth smile, genuine enough, but disturbingly reminiscent of Trevor the skinhead's maniacal snarl or of rotten, puking Mitchell in The Cook, The Thief, The Wife And Her Lover as he cheerily hands a knife to Michael Gambon, even of the smugly vile gaiety of Rob Roy's Archibald, the vicious English fop. Roth's talent for big screen death is not entirely solipsistic: he tends to take a few out with him when he goes, and usually does it smiling. That grin makes you wonder what he really means by 'fun'. The deliberate crippling of orphaned baby bunny rabbits, for example, seems a distinct possibility.

Disappointingly, Tim Roth turns out to be entirely affable. Swears a bit,...