Edward Norton is a versatile actor with a string of interesting roles behind him, and with two period films out this month. But he's also a privileged Yale graduate for whom the Oscars are vulgar, fame is a burden, and the inner Ed is a closely guarded secret. He talks to Donald Clarke

NOTHING more forcefully dispels the myth that the US is a classless country than a meeting with a Yale man. George W Bush, William F Buckley and Tom Wolfe all attended the prestigious Connecticut university. Fictional Yalies include Niles Crane, brother of the more famous Frasier, and Mr Burns from The Simpsons. The combined alumni of Oxford and Cambridge look like a gang of street sweepers by comparison.

"I grew up going to public school in the suburbs," Edward Norton says. "It wasn't a rich cultural life. I did have a bohemian family. But the world around me wasn't rich in culture. When you go to Yale from that environment you suddenly encounter a richness. Suddenly there is the spectrum of opportunities."

Ed Norton is a versatile actor, to be sure. His breakout performance as a devious psychopath in 1996's otherwise unimpressive Primal Fear showcased an uncanny ability to swing from sweetness to ferocity. He executed a similar form of psychological alchemy in Fight Club. He travelled in the opposite direction - from racist skinhead to caring brother - in American History X. But despite all this mayhem, Norton has never quite lost the straight-backed self-confidence of a man who has schooled well.

Sitting upright on a sensible chair in the Dorchester Hotel, Norton speaks in the slightly pinched voice that Yalies undoubtedly use when upbraiding Harvard grads for wearing white after Labour Day. His job today is to promote two fine new films. In The Painted Veil, an adaptation of a W Somerset Maugham novel, he stars as a repressed English doctor sweating his way through 1920s China. The Illusionist, slighter, but more entertaining, casts the actor as a magician at odds with powerful forces in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Norton, a true professional, is impressively articulate and open to jokes, but gives the impression that he is - to journalists at least - reluctant to reveal too much of the inner Ed.

"Well, you know this is a necessary evil," he says, gesturing towards my notebook. "How I feel about this side of the business depends on how I feel about the film. If I feel that the film provokes interesting discussions, then that's not so bad. That seems to be the case here."

Edward Harrison Norton was raised in middle-class Maryland by a father, who was a prominent lawyer, and his late mother, an English teacher. The piece of familial trivia quoted most often in profiles of Norton tells us that his grandfather, James Rouse, developed America's first shopping mall. Edward studied history at university, but, as the years progressed, found himself drawn to the arts.

"I was not the sort of guy who would have known instinctively what he wanted to do at 21 or 22," he says. "It was all very compelling at that age: travelling, learning languages. And I never had that sort of tunnel vision where I saw only one way forward. But eventually you find yourself turning down one option in life so that you can pursue another - acting in my case - and then you realise maybe that is what you should do."

Instilled with an interest in classical theatre after catching a performance of Ian McKellen's one-man show on Shakespeare, Norton made his way to New York to dream of Coriolanus while ushering and waiting tables. Two breaks - one modest, the other huge - eventually propelled him into the top rank of actors. Firstly, Edward Albee, one of America's most revered playwrights, caught a glimpse of Ed and cast him in a production of his play Fragments.

Then, in 1996, Norton delivered a near-legendary audition to secure the role of a disturbed altar boy accused of murder in Primal Fear. Stuttering and twitching, his tone veered dramatically from pacific to ostentatiously demented. He reputedly scared the casting director half to death. Norton's performance in the humdrum thriller secured him his first Oscar nomination. Rapidly hailed as one of the great actors of his generation, Edward went on to date a dazzling array of famous women. Courtney Love, Salma Hayek and Drew Barrymore have all accompanied him up red carpets at one time or another. Yet, like many performers of his generation, he claims to hate all the celebrity palaver. (He never answers questions about his love life, so look away now if you're seeking the skinny on life with Courtney.)

"I don't think I am unique in being that way about fame," he says. "It is a generational thing. My peers from the New York school of actors - Phil Hoffman, Sam Rockwell, Adrien Brody - have always had a more ambivalent attitude to fame. We have a more cautious relationship with 'All That'. But, you know, I think that world is changing a little. Some of the shine seems to have gone off it. Just look at the Oscars this year. It is beginning to look overcooked and vulgar."

Be careful you don't bite the hand, Ed.

"That sounds contemptuous, I know. I am not contemptuous of an industry celebrating itself. But once a year is enough. We seem to do it 18 times a year. Also, I hate to say it but the taste being reflected doesn't reflect my own generation's taste in film. Sometimes a great film like Capote will end up in there. But we seem to be looking at a baby boomer's take on things that has nothing to do with our own."

I'm tempted to point out that The Painted Veil, which Norton produced with his co-star, Naomi Watts, looks like the sort of film a baby boomer's parent might have made, but I refrain. It's a decent piece of work, and I have read that Norton can turn flinty when professionally challenged. Nobody has quite suggested that he has Sean Penn Disease or Russell Crowe Condition, but reports from the set of his films do tend to use words such as "uncompromising". So, does he regard himself as difficult to work with?

"No, I don't think so. Difficult is a strange word. If you mean difficult in terms of objecting to the size of your trailer or how cold the M&Ms are, then you are talking about something that deflects energy from the work. But, to me, challenging the assumptions that may be in the work is putting energy into the project. A good actor has to do that, and a good director knows the difference between those two definitions of difficult. I would say this: the films people respond to most are those where I have had a good relationship with the director."

Really? The dispute between Norton and Tony Kaye, the director of American History X, has formed the basis of a minor Hollywood legend. Kaye has suggested that, after the studio objected to the director's cut, Norton took it upon himself to re-edit the film to his own tastes.

"He's an east coast privileged young man whose grandfather invented the ice-cream cone, or whatever," Kaye, a famously immodest English commercials director, said of Norton a few years later. "Which is why he's on the cover of Vanity Fair, or Vanity 'Unfair', a little quicker than me. I was going to take Hollywood by storm, and I would have, but for that buffoon."

Norton smiles wryly when reminded of the dispute. "I think what was going on there was to do with Tony projecting what was going on inside himself onto other people. The process of that film was great. Then he got into this dispute with the studio and lumped me into it all. He did an interview recently and somebody suggested he thought that American History X was shit. He said 'oh no, I think it's great'."

Maybe so, but Kaye still called Ed a buffoon. That's not nice. "Oh, I think it is a performance piece for Tony. Actually, I think his whole life is a performance piece."

Edward Norton is now successful enough not to have to worry about what Tony Kaye thinks. Currently living in New York, where, in between environmental work, he is writing a film adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn, Norton can rest easy in the knowledge that his name appears towards the top of every casting director's wish list. Yet he insists on seeking out less mainstream projects. In 2005 he produced and starred in Down in the Valley, an eccentric amalgam of urban satire and existential western. Now we have The Illusionist and The Painted Veil. What drove him towards these two projects?

"Well, I think that the interesting thing about these two characters for an actor is that the way they are, at the beginning, is very different to how they are at the end. They change, but not in big dramatic moments. The changes happen in very fine shavings. That is very challenging. The work I did here with Naomi Watts is more intimate than the work I have done with any other actor."

The key to Norton's success is, perhaps, his stated determination to turn every part into a character role. Though he takes the lead in both films, there is a notable lack of showiness to the performances. From time to time he allows himself to sink into the background.

"The generation of actors that included Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro and Gene Hackman all inverted the paradigm that a leading man had to look like Tab Hunter," he says. "My friends in the business, people like Liev Schreiber, take the same attitude. We think of ourselves as character actors."

Thank you, Dustin and Gene. Perhaps the baby boomers weren't such a bad influence after all.

The Illusionist opens today. The Painted Veil opens on April 20th