Kiefer Sutherland was born in London in 1966 to Canadian actor parents, Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas. His acting career took off in films such as The Lost Boys, Flatliners and A Few Good Men. He has starred in the award-winning TV show, 24, since 2001. Twice divorced, he has a daughter, Sarah Jude, from his first marriage

Kiefer Sutherland gets irritated when people criticise his drinking. Take the occasion when he wrestled a 16ft Christmas tree to the ground in the foyer of the Strand Palace hotel in London the Christmas before last.

All right, he may have enjoyed a festive glass or two. But Rolling Stone magazine followed it with an interview that made it appear he viewed the world through the bottom of a glass. If that were the case, he says, how could he maintain his filming schedule? “24 must make itself while I am in a bar somewhere,” he says, shaking his head.

“Look, we’ve made 128 episodes. That’s the equivalent of 65 films in 5½ years. That’s as much as most actors’ entire career. I maybe deserve to get drunk just once in a while. But I have never once been late for a day’s work.”

Even so, he can sometimes get into a bit of trouble. Like when they sent him the wooden prototype for the Jack Bauer action doll, based on the planet-saving secret agent he plays in 24, the TV thriller now showing on Sky.

“I approved it and later that night me and my friend took him out for a couple of drinks and well, we lit him on fire,” he grins like a bashful schoolboy. “And we did a little action sequence. We got pictures of it with him lit on fire and he’s still got his phone and his gun and he’s going up in flames. And then the next day someone called and said: ‘You really need to send us that doll. That’s the only one. It’s hand carved, it took the guy a year and we need to use that to make the mould.’

“Hopefully they can forgive me now, but at first I denied everything.”

You suspect he’d be getting up to that kind of thing even if he were teetotal. Life just has a way of happening to Sutherland. In 2001, for instance, he was driving his Porsche Boxster down Atlantic Boulevard in Los Angeles when he noticed two guys mugging an old lady. He pulled over and steamed in, before realising that he was breaking up the filming of a short by the Lonely Island comedy trio. The old lady was an actress. “I don’t know how well the film did but they put the clip of me attacking their actors on YouTube and that did pretty well,” he laughs. His Porsche even features in the movie’s end credits.

Cars have always been important to Sutherland. His first real memory of his movie star father Donald Sutherland is when he drove him to nursery with his wild hair, big beard and long leather coat behind the wheel of the Ferrari he’d won in a poker game. By his mid-twenties Kiefer was dressing in much the same way, although he drove a 1970 Porsche 911 rather than a Ferrari.

His first car was a 1967 Ford Mustang. After growing up in Canada, running away from school a few times and landing the lead in a coming-of-age film The Bay Boy (1984), he was nominated for a Genie award, the Canadian equivalent of an Oscar. With a $30,000 cheque in his pocket he headed for New York and then LA where the work didn’t exactly flood in. For a few months the Mustang became home.

It wasn’t the last time a Mustang saved his life, although the second time it was a horse rather than a car. In 1998 his career was, in his own words, “dead, dead, dead”. A public break-up with Julia Roberts (they split just five days before their planned wedding) and a series of turkeys meant it was time for some smart career choices. So he bought a ranch and became a cowboy.

“Those two years on the ranch were my college years,” he says. “Three or four guys riding around in a truck from rodeo to rodeo. It was fantastic. We won the national team roping championships twice. What I lacked as a roper I made up for in horses. Roping is a sport, like polo, where you get infinitely better the better your horses are. I had some great horses.”

It was a good move. Coming out of the rodeo, the next role he walked into was Jack in 24 and now he’s a star all over again, winning the Emmy for best lead actor last summer. “I always got more from jumping on a horse and taking off into a canyon for a couple of hours to figure stuff out,” he shrugs. “The answers are generally very simple.”

He still has a yearning for white-knuckle action — he rides when he can, spent Christmas heli-skiing in the Rockies and plays ice hockey on Sunday nights with other Canadian exiles. His other love is music. Apart from his collection of vintage guitars — including a 1959 Gibson Les Paul, a 1968 Gibson ES335 and a 1967 Fender Telecaster — he’s set up a record label called Ironworks and signed a band called Rocco Deluca and the Burden. (It was while touring with Rocco that the Strand Palace “incident” occurred.)

Last month, however, he briefly acquired a new role: adviser to the US army. After a media flurry over torture scenes in 24, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan asked the show’s producers to tone it down because of “the impact they are having on troops in the field and America’s reputation abroad”. Sutherland was invited to give a lecture to cadets at West Point military academy explaining why torture is wrong.

He hasn’t yet accepted but clearly finds the whole thing slightly exasperating. “I’m opposed to torture,” he explains. “But to say that I support everything Jack Bauer does is ridiculous.”

So what’s his strategy for dealing with all the headlines, from drink binges to torture? “I don’t read them,” he says simply. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. Sometimes I screw up and then I’ve got it coming but if I do something wrong, or I upset someone, I apologise. Apart from that there is no plan. I’ve never had a plan in my life,” he grins. “I’m the luckiest bastard you’ll meet.”

On his CD changer

U2 – “This song held me together while shooting in New York”; Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie, right; and Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) by Marvin Gaye – “One of the great political writers of our time and this is a perfect example”

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