In 1961 Ernest Hemingway, struggling with ill health and depression, shot himself with his own gun, bringing to an untimely end the literary career that had produced such robust American classics as A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea. However, nine years after his death, another novel appeared. Islands in the Stream, which was written in the 1950s but never published, told the story of Thomas Hudson, a character closely modelled on Hemingway — right down to the three sons by two ex-wives, the hunting, the fishing and the drink problem.

Over the years, film makers have struggled to turn this sprawling 400-page novel into a punchy Hollywood blockbuster. Franklin J Schaffner, director of the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes, made a stab at it in 1977, but what the book needed was someone more like its author: an all-American man’s man, with a hint of danger, a hunger for a challenge and the ability, like the writer’s most famous characters, to exhibit “grace under pressure”.

Enter Tommy Lee Jones, thrice-married son of a Texan oil worker, expert horseman, cattle rancher, dab hand with a lasso, and a rare actor who still prefers an old-fashioned vodka and orange to a macrobiotic smoothie. A man after Hemingway’s heart.

For the past year Jones has never been far from a well thumbed copy of Islands in the Stream, and in recent months he’s even been spotted with a “Papa” Hemingway-style white beard creeping up his famously craterous cheeks. Jones has only just started working on his screen adaptation of the novel, but already the 61-year-old actor appears to be morphing into his muse.

Filming is due to start early next year and Jones will co-write, co-produce, direct and play Hudson. “It was made into a bad movie in the 1970s, starring the admirable George C Scott,” he says in his thick Texan drawl. “But I have always been convinced that there’s a great movie in this book, and this is the one we are going to make.”

Hemingway wrote the novel in the early 1950s and The Old Man and the Sea, his 1952 Pulitzer prize-winning novella, was originally to be the concluding chapter. It begins as Hudson enjoys a relatively carefree summer with his three young sons on the Bimini Islands (in the Caribbean north of Cuba, where Hemingway spent a lot of time during his latter years), but soon takes on a darker tone with America’s entry into the second world war, and as Hudson struggles to come to terms with a string of personal tragedies.

Jones is attracted to tough, troubled characters and clearly sees something of himself in Hemingway’s rough-edged hero. Looking out of place in the luxuriant suite of a hotel in Cannes, he peers intently from beneath his heavy, hooded brows and you can’t help thinking he should be swigging from a large daiquiri (Hemingway’s poison of choice) as he describes his mission to track down the 1930s wooden-hulled motorboat on which much of the action in his film — from marlin fishing to shark attacks to wartime naval battles — will be played out.

“It had to be the right kind of boat,” says Jones. “I said from the start, if we got the boat right then the rest would fit into place. It has to go from being a fishing boat in the first half of the film to a war vessel in the second half. It was vital, to me, that it was genuinely built before the second world war. So the hunt was on from the moment we got the go-ahead for the movie.”

Jones follows his obsessions much as his characters have followed theirs on screen in films from The Fugitive to In the Valley of Elah. The search began for the perfect boat as described in the book — similar to Hemingway’s own vessel, called Pilar, which he used to hunt for German submarines in the Gulf Stream during the second world war (another exploit that is mirrored in the novel). It eventually became a worldwide hunt that ended in a perilous night-time voyage in open seas.

Directing the search from his Texan ranch, Jones finally tracked down a 1938 motor cruiser in College Point in the New York borough of Queens, “It was a tub, a wreck,” he says.

“It’s a 38ft American motor cabin cruiser. A wooden hull, 11Åft beam, 3Åft draught, a perfect match to the boat Hemingway described.

“It used to have a four-cylinder flathead Chrysler diesel engine, but someone replaced it with a V8 General Motors gasoline car engine. It turned the boat into a virtual bomb. It looked like a bucket of rusty bolts so I sent some guys to move it to a good boatyard.”

The boat had to be navigated from Queens through Hell Gate down the East River and down the coast to a yard in Florida where repairs could begin.

“It was 12 knots on a boat which was not seaworthy. After a nine-hour journey, we navigated in by torchlight to the new yard.”

It now sits in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where painstaking restoration has been been carried out for the past 15 months.

“We are going to have our sea trials soon,” says Jones, who will be onboard. “We will then take her to an undisclosed location and protect her, like an unborn child.”

Jones gives the impression that none of his 60-odd movies quite match up to this one. He won’t pick up one cent of his usual multi-million-dollar pay cheque for Islands in the Stream, which is being backed by Gary Smith, the chief executive of Intandem Films of London. Jones is on a profit-share deal, so if the film bombs he gets nothing.

“I can’t ask others to do it for free,” he says. “But it means that you will see $27m of the $32m [on the screen]. There are certain things that are meant to be, and if you’re lucky enough in life to eventually get there, then that is a great achievement. This is the project that is meant to be for me.”

Jones’s most recent films have confirmed his attraction to offbeat characters, who are often loners and always single-minded. In 2007’s In the Valley of Elah, for instance, he played Hank Deerfield, a patriotic army veteran fighting to track down the truth about his soldier son’s death after a tour of duty in Iraq.

He also starred to great acclaim as the sheriff in No Country for Old Men, which won the 2008 Oscar for best film. “I put a lot of myself in to those roles,” he agrees. “In the Valley of Elah was an important film because we were looking at how the Iraq war impacts on local communities across America, with the loss of family members. It’s a tragedy that carries on.”

One of his few fellow cast members to blurt out what he’s really like on set was Rosario Dawson, his co-star in Men in Black II. “He keeps on saying, ‘Don’t waste my time’,” she said. “He is so focused. Tommy never wants to waste time, and sometimes we were having a bit too much fun for him.”

Jones’s eyes narrow at the mere mention of time-wasters. “My belief is that we should never waste a day,” he says flatly. “And when you are working — and acting is our work — there should be total concentration on what you are trying to achieve. Anything less than that, then you are cheating yourself and short-changing others.”

Jones notoriously doesn’t suffer fools gladly. One overeager fan who interrupted him during dinner to ask for an autograph was reportedly given a lecture on manners. Then there’s the tale of the journalist leaving in tears after an interview with Jones. His steely glare gives the impression of someone who knows how to take care of himself and he has the battle-hardened face of someone who was dumped on a Texan ranch somewhere as a child and had to live by the seat of his Wrangler’s. And it might have turned out that way had Jones not been unusually bright.

His father was an oil worker and the family spent a lot of time moving around different oil fields in Texas. His mother was at various times a policewoman, teacher and beauty salon worker. His parents divorced when he was about 10, remarried not long after, then divorced again a few years after that. Jones dreamt of becoming an American footballer, but imagined he’d end up as an engineer in the petrol industry.

Then he earned a scholarship to an exclusive Dallas prep school — “the biggest culture shock” — later winning another scholarship to study English at Harvard, where Al Gore, the future vice- president, became his roommate (they remain friends).

Jones played university football as if his life depended on it, apparently, but an interest in theatre had been growing and he decided acting was a more realistic option.

“In the end I didn’t think I could make it as a professional sportsman, so I thought that acting could make a great alternative life,” he recalls. “It’s still sport of a kind, with winners and losers. You also have to be fit to survive. It’s not that first or second part — or even big role — which is so difficult. It’s maintaining it over years.”

Jones spent time working in underwater construction and on oil rigs, appeared in a few plays in New York, then landed a regular part in a daytime soap, before making his film debut in Love Story in 1970. Despite never having had an acting lesson, and without the gift of classic leading-man good looks, he has managed to stay at the top of his game at the same time as balancing a precarious personal life.

He doesn’t talk about it, but he was married for the third time, to Dawn Maria Laurel, in 2001 (she’s 18 years his junior). When a reporter for the Los Angeles Times once asked if Jones ever planned to write his autobiography, he was given short shrift: “No. I’m a private person. I hate everything about this business that intrudes on my life, including these interviews. But I do them to promote the movies because it helps people I’m fond of.”

Today, though still very much the straight-talking, no-nonsense Texan, he appears to have mellowed. When he’s not acting or directing he relishes running his own cattle ranch in San Saba, just a few miles from where he was born in west Texas. He has about 4,000 acres of land on which he also raises polo ponies — he has a polo field at his other property in Florida — and naturally is an accomplished player.

His former roommate Gore might have something to say about his recent decision to front an advertisement for the Texas oil and gas industry, but in the past Jones has spoken about “finding a way to keep from destroying the Earth”. He is also careful to use sustainable farming methods on his ranch and speaks passionately about water conservation.

Right now, however, and with characteristic single-mindedness, the actor just wants to talk about his beloved old wreck of a boat and his latest all-consuming cinema project.

“My new film is a family film,” he insists. “There is a terrific battle between an 11-year-old boy and a 1,000lb blue marlin which I am looking forward to filming. That is when the boat comes into its own.”

Jones can hardly wait to finally take the helm. “This movie might be set in the past, but it is about you and me now,” he says pointedly. “It is not a chick flick, not a thriller killer, not a quirky romance.

“I want it to be a really good movie, exciting from minute to minute, frame to frame. This is for people who want to see something different.”

Hemingway's unquentchable thirst for adventure

Ernest Hemingway’s life reads like a sort of Ultra Dangerous Book for Boys. Born in 1899 he dispensed with such tame pursuits as treehouse-building early on, progressed to marlin fishing and hunting, then ran away from his middle-class Chicago home to work as a reporter on The Kansas City Star in 1917.

When America began its mass mobilisation of troops in the first world war the following year, poor vision prevented him from fighting, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver. He was dispatched to the Italian front, where his experiences formed the basis of A Farewell to Arms (1929). Three years later he published Death in the Afternoon, a non-fiction book about bullfighting, having tried the sport and toyed with becoming a professional matador.

His thirst for adventure unquenched, he travelled to Africa in 1933 to go big game hunting, before returning to Spain in 1937 to report on the nation’s civil war — the inspiration for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). During the second world war he patrolled for German submarines off the coast of Cuba and the United States, then reported on the D-Day landings. He survived a plane crash in 1954, but by 1960 was in poor health and battling memory loss, which he said had been caused by the electroshock therapy that had failed to cure his depression. In 1961 he took his own life, quickly and brutally, with a shotgun to the head.