The kind of ticket touting common to World Cups and rock group reunion tours has hit the West End. Tickets for Othello at the Donmar Warehouse are fetching up to £2,000 on the internet. Some starstruck fans may be forking out to see Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Iago, but lurking behind the billboards is another, quieter star: Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Ejiofor, 30, who plays Othello, has kept a low profile despite longstanding critical acclaim, perhaps because his name seems so unpronounceable (for the record it is “Chew-ih-tell Edge-ee-oh-four”, although friends call him Chiwe). Just ten years ago he was chosen by Steven Spielberg for a part in Amistad when he was only months into drama school and was soon heralded as “Britain’s first genuine black movie star”.

Although his time in LA was short-lived (“I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was on holiday from my life”), he went on to do an extraordinary variety of films in Britain and the US. He has worked with Stephen Frears, Woody Allen and Spike Lee; shortly after playing Keira Knightley’s husband in Love Actually he donned a dress and high heels for Kinky Boots. “I don’t believe in limiting myself to one oeuvre,” he says. He has won Best Actor at the British Film Awards and Outstanding Newcomer at the Evening Standard Awards in 2000.

He doesn’t discuss his personal life, although he does concede that his reprisal of Othello (which he last played at the age of 17) has been improved by a personal encounter with “memorable jealousy”. His award-winning part as a Nigerian doctor in Dirty Pretty Things also owes much to personal experience. His father – who met his mother in their native Nigeria before emigrating to Britain after the civil war – was a doctor, who died in a car crash when Ejiofor, who was in the car with him, was 11.

His mother, a pharmacist, determined to give her three sons a good education and Ejiofor, the middle child, attended Dulwich College in South London. His mother describes him as “a sweet child who did what he was told, but independent and artistic – the child most like his dad”. He began acting at 13 and was soon performing in National Youth Theatre productions.

Ejiofor’s Othello has been described as “very human”, “agonisingly bewildered” and “in the front rank of modern Othellos”. Even The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer – the one critic to savage the play – acknowledges him as “the one bright spot”. The director Michael Grandage says that the production would not have gone ahead without him. “Some actors are born, not made, and I think he’s definitely one of them.”

If you have not got tickets, you can still catch Ejiofor at cinemas in American Gangster, in which he is so good that his co-star, Denzel Washington, allegedly joked that he’d like to have him “assassinated”.

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