Like many Hollywood stars Danny DeVito has seen the future and it’s green. The diminutive star of films such as Romancing the Stone, The War of the Roses and Get Shorty claims that after years of loving big and fast cars he is now a fully paid up member of the Los Angeles green brigade.

His conversion happened after his wife gave him a General Motors electric car for Father’s Day some years ago. “I used to drive a big gas-guzzling BMW but the EV1 was great,” he says. “It was all just electricity but you could go miles without recharging it.”

When the car was recalled by General Motors at the end of the lease period, DeVito immediately signed up to drive the Toyota Prius. “It’s a wonderful car. The idea is that in town you get a lot more gas miles out of it because of the electric motor. But you can still go really fast — up to 80mph on the highway.”

The maximum speed limit on most Californian highways is 65mph, but DeVito is no stranger to breaking the law. “I’m from New Jersey where the legal driving age is 17, although between you and me I was behind the wheel long before that,” he says with a confidential wink.

“I always liked to drive, and my mother was very liberal with the car, so while she was having coffee with my aunt I’d drive the car back and forth to the store.

“I really dig getting in a car. I go fast but I’m very safe. When we were kids, nobody ever had seatbelts — we used to be thrown in the back seat. Today everyone is very cautious, which I guess is a good thing.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly his first run-in with the law wasn’t long in coming. “In the US you first sit a written driving test and, after you pass that, you do the real test where you get behind the wheel with the test guy.

“At 17 I’d already taken the written test and had a date for my driving test so I already had my permit, which allows you to drive with a licensed driver. One night I was driving across a bridge and I had the music blasting through the roof. And I was doing like 75mph in a 40mph zone and I got pulled over and got a speeding ticket.

“My court date turned out to be literally two days after I passed my (full) driving test and got my licence, and when I went to court the judge says, ‘You just got your licence! What are you doing?’ “So I told him the story and he tells me that the fine for this is you lose your licence for three months, so I say, ‘Well look, your honour, if I may, there was nobody on the road, it was a clear night, I was paying attention to the road and it wasn’t like it was raining, it was really safe and there was not another car coming in either direction when the cop pulled me over.’

“The judge asks me, ‘What are you going to do with your life? Where are you going to go to school?’ and I tell him, ‘I don’t know.’ And he says, ‘You should become a lawyer,’ before taking my licence away for one month. It hurt to give my licence back after only two days.”

Despite the career advice, DeVito enrolled on a cosmetology course at New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts with the aim of becoming a hairdresser, having already worked in his older sister’s beauty salon. The course included mandatory drama classes, and the overweight 5ft-nothing DeVito became bitten by the acting bug.

After treading the boards on the New York theatre circuit and securing small roles in films such One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest he eventually landed the role of Louie De Palma, boss of the Sunshine Cab Company, in the hugely successful television series Taxi in 1978. Six years later his movie career took off with the romantic adventure Romancing the Stone, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, and its sequel The Jewel of the Nile the following year.

Today he’s one of Hollywood’s most successful players, his work as an actor, director (Hoffa, Matilda) and producer (Erin Brockovich, Pulp Fiction) placing him among the rarefied company of Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood and Michael Douglas.

He says that he is proof you don’t have to look like a leading man to get on in the movie business. “I’ve never let my lack of height get in the way,” he says. “When I was younger, in high school, it was a little tough sometimes — I was a little bit intimidated about dating girls at first — but once you get past that you understand that it’s more than how tall you are.

“As an actor it was a little jarring in the beginning, but it was also a good thing because there was a uniqueness about it. When I’d come in to audition they were either going to go crazy over me or I wasn’t going to get it. But it was positive in a way because they’d always remember me.

“Obviously it’s no problem now but in the early days in New York, going for theatre, I’d go in and you didn’t know what the hell people were thinking. I would go up for anything I thought was remotely interesting. It didn’t matter. I’d just go for it.”

His latest film, Deck the Halls, sees DeVito play an obnoxious car salesman on a mission to create the biggest Christmas light display in the world and make his house visible from outer space. The film has hardly been a critical success — “excruciatingly awful” says one review — but DeVito says that unlike some of his other films at least the younger members of his family will be able to enjoy it.

“My family have seen me in films like Twins and stuff like that, but I feel Deck the Halls is a movie all the family can see and the grandparents won’t come to me with remarks like, ‘Pulp Fiction? You made this movie?’” And Christmas in his own house is likely to be a well oiled operation. “Each Christmas we have friends come by and decorate the tree,” he says. “My wife’s Jewish so we spend every holiday doing stuff. Passover, Hanukkah, Christmas, Easter . . . you name it, we do it all.”

On his CD changer

Anything from my hometown boys Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi or Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes