While most Hollywood actors think buying a common-or-garden Toyota Prius makes them an environmental activist, Woody Harrelson has raised the stakes. The star of Cheers, Natural Born Killers and No Country for Old Men, drives an all-electric vehicle and, what’s more, it’s no milk float. It’s a plug-in Toyota RAV4.

It’s his pride and joy; moreover, he can’t understand why everyone isn’t driving one. Actually he knows the reason and quickly tells you: Toyota stopped making them in 2003. It’s a trigger for a fully fledged rant about the car industry. “That whole thing [with the film] Who Killed the Electric Car?’, it really is true,” claims Harrelson. “They did try to stamp it out in many ways . . . My RAV4 drives like a normal car. It goes 70mph. You could maybe get it up to 75mph. There are no drawbacks at all except that eventually you’re gonna have to plug it back in.”

Harrelson keeps the Toyota in Los Angeles, but his main home is in Hawaii, where he has a VW Beetle that runs on biodiesel, and a motorbike, which he presumably has no choice but to run on dirty old petrol.

His Hawaii home is off-grid and he can generate his own solar power. “Everybody in the neighbourhood is on solar power,” he says. “People get the concept that it’s like a commune, but this was a neighbourhood that’s been there long before I got there, and they just never wanted power lines.”

Electric cars and solar panels are just two of the more mainstream causes that Harrelson, 47, has been involved in. A vegan and raw-food enthusiast, he once scaled the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco to protest against deforestation, and is a campaigner for the cultivation of industrial hemp. In 1996 he was arrested in Kentucky after symbolically planting four hemp seeds to challenge the state law that failed to distinguish between the type of cannabis plant that can be used in food and materials, and cannabis the drug.

“Theoretically, you should be able to do whatever the hell you want as long as you’re not hurting someone else or hurting their property,” argues Harrelson. “Hemp is for farmers and they grow it for clothes and buildings and paint. To me it’s been a David and Goliath issue.”

Harrelson has found plenty to battle against over the years, beginning with a difficult childhood. Born in Midland, Texas, in 1961, his parents split when he was three and he and his two brothers were raised in Ohio by their mother. His father, Charles Voyde, was a contract killer. He was arrested in 1979 for shooting a federal judge and imprisoned for life. He died in his cell in March 2007.

Given his upbringing, Harrelson could easily have gone off the rails. He moved to New York in 1983 to pursue his acting career and spent two dismal years feeling increasingly demoralised, getting into brawls and, he says, wallowing increasingly in self-pity, until in 1985 he landed the role of Woody Boyd in Cheers, the cult barroom sitcom.

His first film was Wildcats, with Goldie Hawn, in 1986 but his breakthrough role didn’t come until Indecent Proposal in 1993. Roles followed in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, The People vs Larry Flynt, for which he got an Oscar nomination, and most recently No Country for Old Men, this year’s Oscar winner.

A notorious ladies’ man during his Cheers days, Harrelson has been married for 10 years to Laura Louie, his former assistant and a co-founder of Yoganics, an organic food delivery service. They live mainly in Hawaii and have three young daughters. “There is so much feminine energy around,” he laughs. “I mean I’ve got three daughters, then my wife, and the nanny, and my dog is female and our two kittens are female. I feel just like drop-smack in the middle of all these amazing goddesses.”

The only thing getting Harrelson down right now is the US election. “I just find it hard to believe that there’s going to be any evolution of politics from within,” he says. “I just think the system is so corrupt. And now we’re still stuck in this Bush-like quagmire nightmare. I like [Barack] Obama. He seems a little outside the norm. But we’ll see what happens.”

MY STUFF...

ON MY CD PLAYER

One of my co-stars gave me a CD full of Frank Sinatra. I was thinking, “I’m never going to listen to this”, because I’m a rock’n’roll guy. But man, I’m loving it. I also love Radiohead

ON MY DVD PLAYER

Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman. I think Into the Wild was possibly the best movie of the past 12 months

I WOULD NEVER THROW AWAY

Photographs and family pictures

WOODY HARRELSON: MY LIFE IN CARS

VW BEETLE He keeps his Bug at home in Hawaii and runs it on biodiesel

BMW R1200 CLASSIC He finds a bike ideal for dodging the paparazzi

TOYOTA RAV4 EV This electric car went out of production in 2003, but Harrelson still cherishes his