Jeff Bridges wins the best actor Oscar in 2010.

Jeff Bridges wins the best actor Oscar in 2010. Photo: GABRIEL BOUYS

Even if you adore Jeff Bridges – and is there anyone in the world who doesn't? – you probably shouldn't see his latest film. Despite his entertainingly cavalier flourishes as Roysephus Pulsipher, a 19th-century, stetson-sporting Wild West marshal, even Bridges cannot rescue R.I.P.D. from a noisy mess of CGI explosions and cartoonish silliness.

The film teams Bridges with Ryan Reynolds: together they must hunt down villains in the afterlife and send them to hell. The whole thing is dumber than dumb, but the moment Bridges walks into the room I know I'm not going to be able to take him to task for it.

The Dude is in the house: Jeff Bridges.

The Dude is in the house: Jeff Bridges. Photo: Getty Images

He has the kindest face, the sweetest manner. He responds to much of what I ask him with an expansive, generous "Yeah!" A high-pitched, two-note giggle frequently escapes this 63-year-old master of gruff-voiced gravitas.

What Bridges has isn't quite charm – charm suggests a degree of affect, something calculated or performed and, despite more than four decades in this business, he remains as guileless as a child.

I can see why he's widely regarded as the loveliest man in Hollywood. He's also, though, one of its most talented, duly treated to a degree of veneration reserved for a few: Nicholson, De Niro and Pacino among them.

Bridges celebrates his best actor Oscar for his role in <i>Crazy Heart</i>.

Bridges celebrates his best actor Oscar for his role in Crazy Heart.

Bridges was nominated for his first Oscar at the age of 22 for The Last Picture Show, but it took another 37 years (and six more nominations) before he finally won for 2009's Crazy Heart, the low-budget, deeply beautiful portrait of an ageing country singer. What, I ask him, did it feel like to hear Kate Winslet open that envelope and read his name?

"Ah, that was great," he exclaims, as though it happened five minutes ago. "I couldn't believe it. Pretty surreal. And man, I didn't know what I was going to say or anything like that, it was just a stream of consciousness. I felt my folks there very much."

He gave one of the most endearing acceptance speeches you'll see from a leading actor, wiggling the statuette in the air, looking skywards and yelling, "Mom 'n' dad! Yeah!" There followed some whoops, many giggles and a rush of exclamations that ended in "man". I tell him he seemed like a teenager.

"Well, I felt a bit like a teenager, you know. Kinda young, giddy."

While there is no denying his magnetism as Crazy Heart's world-weary, alcoholic Bad Blake, The Big Lebow-ski, that cultiest of cult movies, is the film for which he'll forever be known.

The Coen brothers' comedy, which immortalised Bridges as a dressing-gown-wearing, white-Russian-drinking, bowling-enthusiast slacker, has spawned its own pseudo-religion, Dudeism; its own annual festival, Lebowskifest; and, just months ago The Little Lebowski opened shop in Manhattan. Since interviewing Bridges I have seen no fewer than five men wearing "The Dude abides" T-shirts in New York.

Do people still quote the film at him, I ask. "I was called the Dude today," he says, sounding genuinely thrilled about it. "You know, I quote it as much as other people. Because it applies. Especially having worked with Bernie on it, you see another layer."

The Bernie in question is his friend Bernie Glassman, a Buddhist teacher with whom he wrote The Dude and the Zen Master. "An odd and wonderful little work," according to the LA Times, "that makes use of the transcendentally funny characters and language of [The Big Lebowski] as the starting point for a relaxed philosophical discussion."

"It's a great movie," Bridges says, "probably one of my favourites, not even counting the ones I was in, it's just one of my favourites. Gosh those brothers, man," – he means the Coen brothers, or rather "Koan" brothers as he likes to think of them. "They know how to make 'em, don't they?"

Bridges comes from a showbiz family. His father, Lloyd Bridges, was famous for his role in Sea Hunt, the television series in which Jeff and his brother Beau appeared as small boys. Later, as teenagers, the brothers came up with an ingenious way of finding an audience. They'd rent a truck, park it in a supermarket, then stage a fight.

"People would come try to break us up," Bridges explains, "and we'd say, 'No, we're just kiddin', we're putting on a show.' And we'd jump up on the flatbed truck and we'd do our scenes. Inevitably the police would show up and we'd try to incorporate them in the scene, pretend they were part of the act. Yeah, they didn't like that. We'd jump in the truck and go to the next supermarket. We played the supermarket circuit."

It was good practice for Steve Kloves' 1989 film The Fabulous Baker Boys, in which Jeff and Beau had a notable fight scene.

"Oh, man!" exclaims Bridges, remembering. "I sent him to hospital. Oh, it was terrible. We made one terrible error – we didn't have an out word, a safety word, you know. So when he said, 'Ah! You're hurting my hand!' I thought he was acting and I just kept going, thinking, 'Mmm, he really is acting well.' "

Beau is the elder brother by eight years and has worked more in television than film. "People often ask, 'is there competition,' and there's not, it's really being on the same team," says Bridges. "My brother's my teacher, my mentor, and we both learnt all the acting basics from our father."

His brother has referred to him, with some affection, as "the sloth". "Yeah, I've got some of that in me," he says, "quite a bit of Dude in me. I consider myself pretty lazy but I look back and check out the stuff I've done and I say, 'God, that's a lot of stuff for a lazy guy'. It's a paradox I suppose, being both things."

Often after shooting, he'll, as he puts it, "take the governor off and just let it rip". Then, eventually, "I'll feel better to put the governor back on, give myself an assignment".

After all these years, he remains ambivalent about his profession.

"Sometimes," he says of movie-making, "it transcends all your highest expectations and you're like, 'Wow, where did that come from?' And other times you think, 'Oh, this is going to be a good one,' and then . . . it's just not quite right.

"Every once in a while I realise why I'm into it and it's pretty joyous, getting to play with other artists. It's that thing of acting as advanced play, you know when you were a kid you used to play pretend?"

He still suffers from chronic indecision when it comes to taking roles. "I think, 'God, there are so many other things I'm interested in doing and it means being away from my wife and kids.' I weigh all those things and I weigh them maybe more than I should. I do have trouble with choice. My mother used to use a cool word – abulia – she'd say I suffered from abulia."

It wasn't until quite late in his career, with 1973's The Iceman Cometh, that he committed fully to acting. When he was offered the part, he had just finished the sports drama The Last Amer-ican Hero and, exhausted, told his agent: "Oh no, I'm bushed, tell 'em, thanks, but I'm going to pass on that." He said, 'Really?' And I said, 'Yeah' – and I thought I was done with that."

A few hours later Lamont Johnson, the director of The Last American Hero, called him and, as Bridges puts it, "read me the riot act".

" 'I heard you turned this down,' he said, and I said, 'Oh, I'm just bushed, Monty,' and he said, 'Bushed? You're an ass!' and hung up on me. So I thought, well, this is kind of an interesting crossroads here, I'm wondering if I should make it a profession or not. So I decided to do a little experiment and just throw myself into the situation. So I did and I just had the most incredible time."

It was Robert Ryan's last film and Bridges recalls watching the then 63-year-old lift his hands from a table a moment before the cameras rolled revealing two palm print puddles of sweat.

"This old pro still had that performance anxiety that I had as a young kid. That's something you have to befriend, not let shut you down."

Does he still feel that fear?

"Well, I can feel it right now a little bit. Yeah, coming up with the goods for this."

For this interview?

"Sure, for these questions."

Oh come on, I say, that's ridiculous.

"I know, it is, isn't it? But there you go, you see. You go, 'Well, that's ridiculous,' and that helps."

He gestures to signify making a mental note, "OK, thanks, OK, ridiculous." One of the lines from the Dude is, 'Well, that's just like your opinion, man,' and these feelings we have, they can be sort of opinions too, you know?"

Perhaps one source and sign of this equanimity is the stability of his private life. Bridges has been married to the woman he still calls "my sweetheart" – Sue Geston – for 36 years. I ask him how he explains the success of their marriage.

"Well, being deeply in love," he says simply. "Love at first sight, you know, that was me."

They met in 1975 when he was filming Rancho Deluxe. Geston was waitressing at the ranch where they were filming and her broken nose and two black eyes led him to fantasies about saving her from an abusive boyfriend. In fact, she'd been in a car accident a few days earlier.

"I couldn't take my eyes off her. I finally worked up the courage to ask her out and I said, 'Would you like to go out with me?' and she said no. She said, 'It's a small town, maybe I'll see you around.' And her prophecy turned true, we met a few days later. I was just bowled over."

They have three daughters; their eldest, 30-year-old Jessie, shares his love for country music (Bridges released an eponymous album in 2011) and is about to go on tour with her father.

Country music, I imagine, has changed much more slowly than the movie-making industry. I wonder if Hollywood now seems like a different world to the one he started out in decades ago. There's the CGI for one thing.

"I have kind of mixed feelings about that," he says gently. "When you see 30,000 people and it looks really good it doesn't move you the same way because you know that's not . . . [real].

"So it takes a little of the magic away. But, it seems to be the natural flow of the art form and it's going to get more and more sophisticated. I imagine the day when movie actors will kind of be a thing of the past – they'll lease your image and they'll mix you up.

"You know, they'll say a little De Niro, a little Bridges, some Brando out of the archives, boom, and just a touch of Ryan Reynolds and mix it up and there's the new guy. Isn't that terrible?"

Nonetheless, he chuckles, tickled by the idea of it and he adds, somewhat Dude-ishly, "You just gotta let it rip and do what it wants to do."

His longtime friend T-Bone Burnett has said that the character Bridges most resembles is not, however, the Dude, but his character from Starman, the 1984 sci-fi film that earned Bridges another Oscar nomination for his performance as an alien come to Earth.

I ask him what Burnett might see in him to make him say that.

"I got a laugh when I heard him say that. It's kind of a compliment I guess."

He emits that two-note musical giggle again. "Yeah, I don't know why he might say that . . ." and he gazes out of the window and off into the middle Manhattan distance.

Maybe, I venture, it has something to do with his sense of wonderment?

"Oh!" he exclaims, with delight and, well, wonderment. "Oh, that's it, that's good. Yeah, seeing the wonder of being alive. That's good, I like that, yeah." He smiles a broad and satisfied smile. "Yeah, I'll take that."

R.I.P.D. is screening now.

Telegraph, London