FOOTBALLER Vinnie Jones was at home "having a bit of a dispute with QPR" - contractual not physical - when Hollywood came calling. At the other end of the trans-Atlantic call at ten o'clock one night last year was the assistant of top producer Jerry Bruckhimer, whose credits include the blockbusters Con Air, The Rock and Armageddon.

"He said, 'We're doing this movie Gone In 60 Seconds and we think there's a good part for you. Jerry would like to meet you tomorrow. There are some tickets for you on the 12 o'clock flight'," he recalls.

"I was literally up all night sorting things out. I flew over there, off the plane straight to his office. His office table is as long as Park Lane, it's quite daunting. I just met him for ten or 15 minutes with the director. He turned to the director and said, 'do you like him'. He said 'yeah' and Jerry said, 'okay, you're hired'. Out the door, back on the plane, home."

Jones said goodbye to football - he was player-coach with QPR at the time - and hello to acting.

The hard man of football whose stormy career was best defined by the famous photograph of him squeezing Gazza's wedding tackle during a match is making moving pictures now. "That picture of Gazza really tickles them out there. Everyone asks for a copy," says Jones, who's taking his new career seriously enough to move to Hollywood with wife Tanya to capitalise on the release of Gone In 60 Seconds.

It seems to be paying off. He has four or five movies either completed or planned, including one with John Travolta. His role as Sphinx in the car theft caper Gone In 60 Seconds is a supporting one - and also a silent one, apart from one lengthy speech at the end.

He's cast as a heavy just as he was in his debut film Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, the movie that brought him to the attention of Hollywood. He knows he has to escape from this typecasting if only to put distance between the present and his 'bad boy of football' past.

Apart from his not-always-sporting tactics on the field, his off the pitch aggression manifested itself in headline-grabbing incidents such as biting a journalist's nose. In another, he was sentenced to community service after being found guilty of assaulting his neighbour. Jones is prepared to subject his colourful past to public examination as part of his movie star duties to promote his acting work. "I have to live with my past. I'm trying to make a new start in life really," he says.

"So whatever people are going to throw up, they will. Unfortunately jealousy is something you've got to live with. In America they seem to want to put their stars on a pedestal and like having them there. Over here we stand them up and then cut their legs off. That will be with me forever. As long as it doesn't harm the family it's, as you say, if it's in the newspaper it's chip paper the next day."

He talks of the events, of being hounded by the press at his house and of a reporter infiltrating the intensive care ward while his wife was in hospital, that built up and made him crack.

"It's made me stronger because I realised I was ashamed of myself. It's really like an alcoholic. It's like saying you're off it but for how long? Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols out in LA is a very good friend. He hasn't had a drink for ten years but still has to go three times a week to AA," he says.

"I had to own up I was ashamed of myself. Could this keep going? The wheels were going to come off. The wheels nearly did come off with the neighbour because when you are sitting in a cell, they take all your clothes off you for forensics, and you're thinking 'has he died or anything like that?' and you're sitting in a cell and don't know. And it's frightening. I learned a lot in that cell and then with community service as well."

He's not only honest about his past but seemingly aware that being a movie star calls for a very different attitude. "There's a lot more at stake in football, lot more tension, lot more adrenaline. You're out there for an hour and a half with total adrenaline. That's what I used to live on," he explains. "Things happen, especially at that age. I saw Gazza at the airport a few weeks ago but as you grow older I can shake his hand and be more responsible. The red mist comes down a bit slower than what it used to."

He recalls a conversation with Bob Hoskins after Lock Stock came out. "He said you'll have this feeling you're going to get found out. He said, 'I've had it all my life. You keep thinking I've got away with that film'. But he said, 'Don't worry kid, you've got it. Keep going, enjoy it.' The good thing about this is I am enjoying it. The football became very hard in the end."

He's set his sights on winning an Oscar, just as he wanted to win the FA Cup after moving from Wealdstone to Wimbledon. That happened, so getting his hands on one of the prized acting statuettes is an ambition he'll acknowledge at the risk of being laughed at, even adding: "Fairy tales can come true."

At present he considers himself an apprentice rather than a movie star, someone who watches the actors more than he watches the films these days to see what he can learn. "I'm a lot cleverer than what people think and it doesn't take me long to cotton on to what you have to do to be successful," he says. "I've just done this little movie with Farrah Fawcett, only a small budget and I could have gone in there and given it Charlie big bananas. But I was early for every pick up and had all my lines learnt. Off the back of that I've got a big movie in Australia because they were so impressed I didn't come off Gone In 60 Seconds and as Charlie big bananas."

Although he's moved to Hollywood, the Joneses aren't keeping up with their Beverly Hills neighbours. "I really get on with my own thing out there," he says. "I have a lot of friends and family coming over to stay. But we keep ourselves to ourselves. We go and have dinner but in 12 months I've only been to two or three parties. It's there if you like it but it's not the lifestyle I want."

He likes the idea of flying the flag in the States as the first British sportsman to make a career as a Hollywood actor, seeing it as a prestigious thing, like being the first black person to play for England.

He's more conscious of being a role model as an actor than a footballer. "When you are a young fella you are going out mob-handed with the other players and it's pints and pints of beer. I probably haven't had a pint of beer in two years since I gave up football. You have to slow up."

He's feeling confident enough now to return to football - on the screen in a remake of an old Burt Reynolds movie The Mean Machine. The idea is to move the story from the US to England, changing the sport from baseball to English soccer.

"It will be completely different to the original. Not about dribbling past people but more about the way I used to play - Mean Machine crossed with Rollerball for the Lock Stock generation."

l Gone In 60 Seconds (15) opens on August 4.