‘Kapow! Cops nab Batman.” It was a tabloid newspaper dream when Christian Bale visited a police station over claims that he had assaulted his mother and sister the day before the London premiere of his film The Dark Knight. But for the Welsh-born actor, on his second outing as the caped crusader, the publicity has shattered the ramparts of secrecy that he has erected around himself.

Bale has much in common with the brooding superhero he portrays in the year’s smash hit. The actor manifests his distaste for contractual interviews by presenting a hunched, defensive posture. Wayne and Bale both put on costumes to strut upon the stage, then lock themselves inside their caves.

By his own design, one of Britain’s finest and most acclaimed actors receives little attention in his own country and in America, where he has lived for the past 17 years.

“You will never see me at a party. I’m not bothered by the paparazzi and I can walk around unrecognised,” the 34-year-old actor rejoiced recently.

A Hollywood reporter said: “He’s not a household name in America. Unlike George Clooney, the previous occupant of the bat suit, Bale hasn’t tried to win friends by being witty, charming and fun.”

Like Bruce Wayne, Bale is a multi-millionaire. The Dark Knight is swiftly recouping its $180m (£90.4m) budget, taking $158m in its first three days in the United States. The next film in the Batman franchise is expected to catapult Bale, a former child star, into the Alist league of $15m-$20m paydays. By then he will be starring in two mega-franchises simultaneously: he is currently filming the first movie in a new Terminator series.

By one account, money was at the root of Bale’s altercation with his mother, Jenny, and sister, Sharon, in his suite at the Dorchester hotel on Park Lane in London. “Legal sources” were quoted as saying he had snubbed his sister’s request for a £100,000 loan to help to bring up her three children and, after insults about Bale’s wife, it was alleged that he “pushed and shoved” the two women.

They accused him of assault, which he denies. After answering questions, the actor was released without charge.

The lucrative action films give Bale the financial freedom to make low-budget arthouse movies and to take smaller parts. His recent work shows his willingness to take a back seat to fellow actors.

In the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma, the classic western, it was Russell Crowe who played the legendary outlaw Ben Wade to Bale’s rancher. In The Prestige, about the deadly rivalry between two magicians in Victorian London, it was Hugh Jackman who shone as Bale’s nemesis. And in Michael Mann’s forthcoming film Public Enemy, Johnny Depp gets the star role as the bank robber John Dillinger to Bale’s FBI agent.

Perhaps inevitably, Bale’s Batman in The Dark Knight is overshadowed by Heath Ledger’s outlandish portrayal of the Joker - and by the Australian actor’s untimely death from an accidental drug overdose in January. Bale recognised Ledger as a risk taker after his own heart - “a great character, a great presence to have around”.

Bale’s sideline as a straight man would surprise anyone who saw his electrifying performance as the serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. “Once you get a glimpse of a nude, blood-covered Bateman chasing a prostitute with a chainsaw, you’ll never look at Christian Bale the same way ever again,” wrote one reviewer.

American Psycho sent critics wild in 2000 and Bale repeated the trick four years later in The Machinist, playing Trevor Reznik, a paranoid factory worker. With unusual candour, he revealed that he lost his sex drive when he shed 4½ stone for the part: “There was no romantic life at all. My poor wife. I really felt for her.” His mother, too, was upset: “He was a bag of bones. I told him not to do it again in no uncertain terms.”

Rumours of marital troubles have also been cited as the cause of Bale’s family spat at the Dorchester. Yet in a recent interview he spoke lyrically of his wife, Sibi, as a woman with “fire in her soul” who had brought stability to his “rootless life”.

The couple have a three-year-old daughter, Emmaline, to whom Bale is devoted: “The time I spend with my wife and Emmaline is the most important.”

He met Sibi at a barbecue thrown by the actress Winona Ryder, who had secured Bale his breakthrough Hollywood role in a 1994 movie adaptation of Little Women. Sibi, born Sandra Blazic, an independent film producer of Yugoslav origin, was a former model who had worked as an assistant to Ryder.

Bale probably owes his talent for inhabiting fantastic worlds to his mother. When he was young, Jenny worked as a clown and a dancer, riding elephants and introducing acts in a circus. The young Christian was mesmerised, surrounded by the show’s beautiful women wearing little more than fishnet stockings and peacock head-dresses. His first kiss was with a young Polish trapeze artist called Barta.

He was born on January 30, 1974, in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire. Although a Star Wars fan, he was not interested in comic books or heroic figures: “The only person I consistently looked up to and [who] inspired me was my own dad. He was always endlessly entertaining.”

His father, David, had grown up in South Africa and run away to sea. He later became a pilot stationed at RAF Brawdy, near Haverfordwest. Ill health grounded him when Bale was two years old and the family began a nomadic existence that took them to Oxford-shire, Portugal and eventually Bournemouth. By the time Bale was 15, he reckoned that he had lived in 15 different places.

Show business runs in the family. David’s father had played John Wayne’s double in the 1962 film Hatari!. Another relative, a cousin of Lillie Langtry, was a professional actor. The tradition was continued by two of Bale’s sisters: half-sister Erin became a musician and sister Louise an actress and theatre director. Sharon pursued a career in computing.

As a child, Bale took ballet lessons and learnt to play the guitar. Louise’s venture into acting inspired him to hire an agent and land a part in a breakfast cereal commercial. He enrolled at a Reading theatre group that was also attended by the young Kate Winslet, before making his West End debut alongside Rowan Atkinson in The Nerd.

Bale made his first indelible mark on the screen as Jim in the 1987 film Empire of the Sun, playing a fearless, ebullient British boy separated from his parents when the Japanese invaded Shanghai. He was cast ahead of 4,000 other hopefuls when the actress Amy Irving recommended him to Steven Spielberg, the film’s director and her husband at the time.

Peeved by the media’s repetitive questions on a promotional tour for Empire of the Sun, Bale disconcerted journalists by silently stabbing an orange with a pen. Then he sensationally walked out of a press conference in Paris. “It was such a wonderful day,” he recalled. “Just knowing about the panic that I had caused back at the hotel was fantastic.”

At home he suffered a backlash. He was bullied by schoolmates jealous of his success and vowed never to act again. It did not last long: within a year he rallied to Kenneth Branagh’s banner for his film Henry V, playing Falstaff’s lad.

A string of duds followed, from Disney musicals to a version of Hamlet that had him barking like a dog. Meanwhile, his parents separated and, with his father acting as his manager, Bale moved to Los Angeles. In 2000 his father married Gloria Steinem, the feminist activist, but he died of a brain tumour three years later.

Little Women turned Bale into a teenage heart-throb in 1994; suddenly a fan website run by a Canadian admirer spawned an army of “Baleheads” whose lobbying turned his turkeys into video hits.

From the killer Bateman to Batman was a bumpy ride. Now Bale has directors queueing up, but something about his career niggles. Batman will make him rich but not a true star like Daniel Day-Lewis, whose reclusiveness has never dimmed his candlepower. Perhaps, as one Hollywood critic suggested, Bale is not ready for stardom yet.

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