Hollywood veteran Sam Elliott's filmography is as long as it is varied: having made his debut in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he has, in the past decade, established himself as a character actor, starring in the Coen Brothers' oddball hit The Big Lebowski and Thank You for Smoking, the satire on modern American spin culture.
His latest career move has him diving headlong into computer-generated fantasy flick territory, as he provides gravitas to The Golden Compass, the first of three films based on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.
Elliott came to prominence in the 1970s with starring roles in The Games, Lifeguard and The Legacy (a 'not very good horror movie' that at least brought him and Katharine Ross together - the couple have been married since 1984).
From the 1980s onwards, he began to be cast in American period dramas, such as Gettysburg, Tombstone and The Hi-Lo Country. More recently he has also specialised in playing the modern military commander, with roles in Vietnam war film We are Soldiers and then Ang Lee's Hulk, in which he plays a general.
The roles have varied, but Elliott looks strangely the same in most of his recent films, playing an archetypal cowboy, with a flowing grey mane, handlebar moustache, a Stetson and a Texan drawl that makes him one of Hollywood's most recognisable voices. In his only voiceover job, for last year's part animated and part live action feature Barnyard, he played a cow who's the patriarch of a collection of farm animals.
'I used to kind of think, 'God, why do these people think all I do are Westerns?',' says Elliott. 'But I've grown up, I'm just thankful I've had this career, rather than wishing I had the opportunity to do a few things outside the Western box.' He quickly adds that he's had 'a few more' offers of non-Westerns than he would have anticipated in recent years - even if most of them still require him to play up the cowboy image to some extent.