Simon Russell (63) having spent playing some of the great ( and many minor roles) Shakespearean roles,  on stage, film, televisions and Radio – ranging from Winston Churchill to Stalin, George Smiley to King Arthur. But ever since his appearance at school as a glamorous Desdemona, complete with false eyelashes that rendered him half-blind, he has been captivated by Shakespeare.

In A Piece of Work, Russell Beale tries to get under the skin of the playwright and find out what interested him. Was Shakespeare an instinctive “conservative” or, rather, gently subversive? How collaborative was he? Did he add a line to Hamlet in order to accommodate his ageing and increasingly chubby principal actor, Richard Burbage? Did he suffer from insomnia and experience sexual jealousy?

He has played over the years, starting with the lonely Roman, Cassius, and moving through some of the great comic and tragic heroes, Benedick, Richard III, Macbeth, Leontes and Lear. He finds it impossible not to think of the characters he plays as less than living, breathing men and women. His chosen characters are typically loners or outsiders in some sense, looking for acceptance and, redemption. His meditation on the crippling grief of Leontes, the Jealous king who is responsible for the death of  a beloved child, turns upon Beale’s memories of the death of  his younger sister, Lucy, who suffered from a congenital heart defect and died at the age of four.

His early career at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre and his 30 years working in British theatre have given him an unusually acute understanding of the relationship between what he describes as the “work in the study and the work on the stage”.

“I have met scholars who believe that Macbeth and King Lear should never be performed, because any attempt to do those plays justice will fall” he writes.

Beale describes what it is to approach and live with some of the Shakespeare’s most famous characters. Some of the actor’s inspiration comes from surprising sources, Watching Coronation Street gave him an ideal for how Richard III might react on hearing of the death of the two princes in the Tower;  a visit to elderly patients in a local hospital gave him insights into King Lear’s descent into madness; and the memory of childhood family holidays led him to a spectacular plunge into an ornamental pool in Much Ado About Nothing. Beale also writes fascinatingly about his friends Sam Mendes, Nick Hytner, Stephen Sondheim and Lauren Bacall.

A Piece of Work:Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale, Abacus £25, 288 pages