INTERVIEW DAVID DUCHOVNY: FROM TV HERO TO ROMANTIC LEAD;  IN MAKING THE LEAP FROM TELEVISION TO BIG SCREEN, DAVID DUCHOVNY TOOK SOME SOUND ADVICE OFF AN OLD PRO AS ALISON JONES DISCOVERED.

George Clooney would be the first to admit he knows a thing or two about the difficulty of translating a successful TV career into movie stardom.

So when David Duchovny found himself on a plane sharing first class with the former ER doc, he was more than ready to accept his prescription on how to pep up a rather anaemic looking post X Files film career.

'I hate this story, it's so showbiz,' said David, who has the grace to look embarrassed as he recounts how he came across his latest project Return to Me .

' I was on a flight from New York to Los Angeles with George Clooney and we started talking, We are 'famous people' so of course we all hang out together in 'the famous building', although he is a couple of floors above me,' he added tongue in cheek.

'Anyway he asked me if I'd read (the actress) Bonnie Hunt's script, I knew Bonnie since we had worked together on Beethoven and I'd invited her to my wedding reception. As soon as I landed I called my agent and said get me this script.

'I read it and it was a very beautiful, heartfelt story and I knew when this was merged with Bonnie's comic sensibility this was a movie I wanted to do.

'I rang Bonnie and said 'I want to be in your movie, why did I have to hear about it from George Clooney?'

'What she tells me, and what I choose to believe, is that she didn't want to impose on our friendship in case I didn't want to do the film. So apparently the best thing to do if you want your friend in a movie is not to tell them about it.'

The target of this mock indignation, familiar to anyone who has seen Jerry Maguire as Renee Zellweger's wisecracking, divorced sister, is sat laughing next to him.

The Bonnie/David/Minnie Driver/Joely Richardson roadshow had rolled into town (in this case Edinburgh) the day before the premiere of Return to Me.

It was being held in Scotland in deference to David, whose mother is Scottish, and half of whose family had been invited to the screening and post premiere thrash to come and meet their famous cousin.

After veering between soft porn (Red Shoe Diaries) megalomaniac MDs (Playing God) and being upstaged by Brad Pitt (Kalifornia), David picked this film to explore his potential as a romantic leading man.

It is the type of chaste, sentimental, slyly humorous role that Tom Hanks used to, and Bill Pullman still does, excel in.

David plays an architect whose wife (Joely Richardson) is killed in an accident and who agrees to let her organs be donated for transplant.

A year later the grieving widower falls for Minnie Driver's sparky waitress who, unknown to both of them, was the lucky recipient of his late wife's heart.

Essentially a love story its serious undertones pricked the consciences of the cast who, after meeting transplant recipients, now all carry donor cards.

'On my first driving licence I said I would be a donor and I assumed that would carry on throughout all my subsequent licences,' said David. 'Apparently that's not the case and you have to renew the agreement every time, which I am going to as soon as I get home.

'I would be glad to donate anything, I don't even have to be asked. I'll just give them away.'

Anyone hoping to be the recipient of Fox Mulder's gimlet eyed, conspiracy spotting stare would be disappointed, however, as they would be getting damaged goods.

An old basketball injury has left David visually impaired in one eye and he has to use drops to make them both look the same.

'The muscle that contracts the pupil was ripped so they often look a different size. If I am feeling vain I can put drops in and just make the pupil smaller that way.'

It was his skill as a basketball player that helped David gain a place at the prestigious Ivy League college Princeton and then a scholarship to Yale.

Academically inclined, he planned to become a professor and write in his spare time. He was half way through his PhD (the title of his dissertation was Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction and Poetry) when his best friend, actor Jason Beghe, persuaded him to start auditioning for television commercials.

A cheque for $ 9,000, nearly twice his annual teaching salary at Yale, which he received for being filmed throwing a pretzel in the air and catching it in his mouth, convinced him his talents could be more handsomely rewarded elsewhere.

David admits that his mother's frugal up-bringing in Scotland during the depression had left him with a cautious attitude towards money.

'My mother has never got over the fear of not having any money and she has, I think, instilled that in me. Immediately I made some money the first thing I would do was to put it away against a rainy day. I am always afraid of it all disappearing and ending up in the gutter.'

If there were any lingering doubts left as to his financial shrewdness, they were exorcised when he recently brokered a $ 10 million deal to do another series of the X Files, even though he will only appear in half the episodes.

Negotiations were tense with David claiming at one point that he felt 'like a prostitute'.

'What I meant was more like a kept woman. Sometimes producers seem to think that actors can be assuaged with gifts and baubles - 'oh we are not going to honour your contract but here's a trip to Hawaii instead'.

'My opinion is I can afford my own trip to Hawaii if I so choose to do that. The only dispute I ever had with Fox (the TV Studio) was over my interpretation of my contract monetarily. I always said when their interpretation matched mine the lawsuit would be over, and that's what happened.'

It will be hard to convince the fans, or X-philes, that the show can go on without its chief truth seeker, unless he himself falls victim to a particularly prolonged alien abduction. 'I don't know how they will do the episodes without Mulder. That's a decision the programme makers will have to deal with,' he admitted .

'The most important thing to me is that it will give me time off to do other projects and also time to be with my wife (actress Tea Leoni) and watch our daughter grow up.'

One year old Madelaine West, or Westy, is the apple of her Daddy's eye and the inspiration behind a new tattoo on his left ankle. It shows the sign of the compass with the points N,S,E in initials and West written out in full.

David admits that, like his child loving namesake David Beckham, he is fully prepared to have permanent reminders of any other offspring indelibly inked onto parts of his anatomy.

'I look forward to Madelaine being old enough to read my ankle. If we have another child I'll get another tattoo, but Tea says if we have too many I'll end up like The Illustrated Man.'

This small act of youthful rebellion in a man who is 40 this year, demonstrates a perverse streak to his nature that he shares with the emotionally buttoned down, intellectually superior connoisseur of pornography Fox Mulder.

Another example comes when I ask if he and Tea share a romantically significant song, just as Return To Me is for his lovelorn architect.

'When we first started dating Tea sent me a song by the band Ween. The lyrics are really beautiful but it doesn't get played on the radio much, I think because they'd have to censor it all.'