Despite a warm, genial personality, actor Robert Carlyle made a career out of playing dark, crazed and often brutally violent characters – or as he liked to call them, “f***ing nutters.” Whether playing a drunken thug, a homicidal vagrant, a sadistic sex slave trader or a down-and-out steelworker compelled to earn cash by stripping in an all-male review, Carlyle fully inhabited each role with such force and conviction that many were led to believe that he was indeed crazy in real life. While his bohemian childhood – he and his father lived on communes throughout England – might have infused in
