Peter Capaldi: my humiliation as Rada told me I wasn't good enough

Capaldi, 52, found fame in Bill Forsyth's 1983 classic Local Hero, and he is now best known for his Bafta winning role as political spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the TV comedy series The Thick of It and the film In the Loop.

But he has revealed how his first attempt to become a professional actor ended in rejection.

Capaldi, whose short film Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life won the 1995 Academy Award for Live Action Short Film, said he ended up at Glasgow School of Art in 1976 after being given short shrift at his London audition.

He said: "I didn't get into drama school. I wanted to go to drama school and be an actor and they basically said 'you are too big; your eyebrows are too active and your face expresses too much'.

"Let's put it this way, I was slightly larger than life in my Shakespearean acting.

"I didn't know anything about Shakespeare, or anything about acting. We didn't get acting or anything like that at school.

"I just fancied being an actor, I wasn't really interested in the theatre or Chekhov or anything like that - Francie and Josie, that's what we used to see.

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"I really didn't have a clue. I applied to drama school and me being me, I decided to apply to Rada, but I was off their radar very quickly.

"I went down to London and was humiliated and felt terrible. I thought I'd better do something, so I went to art school."

Speaking on a new Artworks programme to be broadcast on BBC Two Scotland on 8 March, Capaldi said he had been part of an amateur dramatics group, the Antonine Players in Bishopbriggs, but was playing in punk bands when he met Forsyth and found fame as an actor.

He said: "I'd met Bill Forsyth and had this amazing stroke of luck. He said, 'Do you want to be in this film?' and it turned out to be Local Hero.

"So suddenly I went from hanging about Sauchiehall Street trying to get gigs, to being on a beach with Burt Lancaster, in a film with proper actors.

"It was terrifying but wonderful, too."

He later returned to London and "gradually got jobs in the theatre", including a season of bit parts at the Young Vic. "That's where I started to understand a bit more, on the hoof."

Capaldi said he was lucky to win the Oscar for Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life.

He said: "That was an accident really. It confused a lot of people because I was an actor."

l When Peter Capaldi met John Byrne is on BBC Two Scotland on Tuesday, 8 March at 10pm.