JUDE LAW is looking dashing, of course.

Smartly dressed, his face is just the right amount of rugged, and his blue eyes are piercing.

But with his receding hairline and slight air of tiredness, the heart-throb is, finally, showing his age.

Law turned 40 last December, but the year hasn't been quite as eventful as he'd imagined.

"I've enjoyed the work so far, you know..." he says, sighing. "It started off with a bang, with all of these hopes and [thinking] 'My life's going to be different and I'm not going to do that any more, and do that...'

"Then as you head towards the summer, you start falling back on bad habits. You're not so interested in the new stuff that you've set yourself. But it's been eventful in areas."

Despite this, he remains an advocate of the motto: 'Do something that scares you every day.'

"We get herded into doing everything that's easy, rather than facing stuff that's hard for us, but you get more rewards for the latter," he says.

"I like the challenge of taking on something that scares you - it usually means it's the right job to take."

This could be the thinking behind his latest film, Dom Hemingway, in which Law plays the lead role as the boozing, smoking, eloquent, larger-than-life criminal Dom Hemingway.

At the start of the movie, Dom is released from a long stint in prison. Guided by his friend Dickie, played by Richard E Grant, he is coming to terms with being back out in the now very different world.

Daunted by the complex role, Law overcame his fears through plain hard work. The actor spent months discussing Dom's back story with the film's writer and director, Richard Shepard and gained 20 pounds in weight.

"I chose to play around with my physical appearance because it's helpful sometimes to assume the physical relationship the character would have with their body," explains a now slimmed-down Law. Putting on weight wasn't a hardship: "I just let go for three months, ate and drank what I wanted."

He'd already bulked up a bit for the Eugene O'Neill play Anna Christie, in which he was a burly sailor, but reversing the process, wasn't as simple.

"Yes, it was harder work to lose it," he says, with a twinkle in his eye.

There have been whisperings that this role might be indicative of the direction that Law's career will now be taking. "Playing alcoholic maniacs?" he retorts.

"I just take whatever I find interesting. This character reminded me of the part of London I grew up in. I love the contradictions of him, the violent eloquence, the passion and the sentimentality."

Law quit school to star in the sitcom Families in 1990, but 1994 proved his breakthrough year.

He won the Ian Charleson Outstanding Newcomer Award for his performance in a stage version of Les Parents Terribles, and starred in the film Shopping alongside Sadie Frost, who he'd later marry.

In 1999, having appeared in the movie Wilde with Stephen Fry two years previously, Law was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in The Talented Mr Ripley, which also earned him a Bafta.

Since then, he's appeared in a long list of films - Enemy At The Gates, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Cold Mountain (another film for which he was Oscar-nominated) and continues to appear on stage, recently starring in the West End as Hamlet, and soon as Henry V at the Noel Coward Theatre.

But while his professional life has been on a smooth trajectory, Law's personal life has been tumultuous.

After divorcing Frost in 2003 (the pair have three children - Rafferty, Iris and Rudy), he became engaged to Sienna Miller, his co-star in Alfie.

The couple split following his fling with his children's nanny, only to reunite, then part again.

In 2009, Law became a father for a fourth time, when American model Samantha Burke gave birth to Sophia.

Rafferty, now 17, may be following in his father's footsteps but, says Law of a showbiz career, "he's more relaxed about it than I was".