IT'S hard to imagine Peter Sellers, not Warren Mitchell, as Alf Garnett, but he was first choice for the part.

Mitchell, with his bulky frame, bald pate, mean-spirited moustache and Gestapo specs, oozed belligerence before he even began one of Alf's tirades against Jews, blacks and scousers. Sellers, a great comic and character actor, undoubtedly could have done the part justice, but it's hard to picture anyone more convincing as Alf than Mitchell, who will appear in Arthur Miller's The Price at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford later this month.

Speaking from his hotel room at The Randolph, Oxford, where the play is on tour, Mitchell reveals: "I was fourth choice. The first was Peter Sellers. He messed them about. Then they wanted Leo McKern (Rumpole) but they couldn't find him, and then I think they wanted Lionel Jeffries and I got it by default.

"In those days I wasn't inundated with work so when a job came along you grabbed it with both hands. I often had to do things with indifferent scripts, but when I got to Alf I didn't have to do that - he was a master writer Mr (Johnny) Speight."

A left-leaning Jew, who confesses to having made a career of playing "funny or sinister foreigners" (with the exception of Alf), he had no qualms about playing a racist right-wing bigot.

"If I had to play Adolf Hitler I would have had to have had a tirade against the Jews, but my views didn't impede me playing King Lear or Shylock, whose views I don't agree with. That's my job as an actor."

But the public has a habit of confusing a well-known character with the role he or she plays. As was the case when a fellow Tottenham fan, down at White Hart Lane one Saturday, slapped Mitchell on the back for, in his view, telling it like it is. The actor retorted that Speight's scripts for Till Death Do us Part and In Sickness and in Health were actually sending up, not celebrating, people like Alf.

Despite the writer's intent and, more significantly, 40 years of multiculturalism, Mitchell thinks there are still plenty of Alfs still out there.

"There are just as many as there ever were and they don't all speak with a working class accent; a lot of them speak with upper class accents," he says.

Whether it's an aversion to talking to journalists or his dislike of being away from home - he admits to not liking touring - the interview falters like a car left out in the cold.

Starting off by quizzing him on the Miller play he's touring with prompts uninterested, desultory responses.

"Having played Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman and now Solomon in The Price, you seem to be attracted to Arthur Miller. Why?" "Because he's good isn't he."

This was after (incorrectly) accusing your journalist of not reading the synopsis of the play. (For the record, Mitchell plays furniture dealer Solomon who finds himself at the centre of a dispute between two long-estranged brothers in Miller's comedy.)

It was only when talk turned to Alf, when one might have expected bored responses to the same tired old questions, that Mitchell began to warm up, but not for long.

"I suppose people ask you about Alf all the time?" "Yes, and journalists."

Warren Mitchell was born Warren Misell (pronounced Mysell) in 1926. He changed his name while briefly standing in for Pete Murray on Radio Luxembourg. He was advised to change his name because people wouldn't be able to correctly pronounce it "just like you", referring to my mispronunciation.

His Russian Jewish mother fled to London to escape Cossack persecution and set up a fish and chip shop in Stoke Newington. Mitchell grew up in the north London suburb before moving to Leyton, and later, Southgate.

From an early age he displayed a fondness for entertaining. He says he was clipped round the ear by his father for telling a dirty joke at the age of four.

By the time he was seven he had joined a children's theatre in Walthamstow but thought it "a bit cissy", preferring to watch his beloved Spurs on a Saturday afternoon.

It was Richard Burton who eventually persuaded him to pursue a career on the stage. The pair first met at Oxford, where Mitchell was reading nuclear physics. They joined the RAF together, but finished training just as the war ended. Rather than return to his unfinished degree, Mitchell joined RADA.

After two years of "learning posh" he became a jobbing actor, taking a variety of "crappy" jobs such as Granada TV's Shadow Squad, which, he says, John le Mesurier referred to as "Shoddy Squad".

He got the part of Alf Garnett in 1965, and can point to an impressively thespian CV with plenty of Shakespeare, Miller and Pinter. He has also appeared, mostly as minor characters, in countless films, which, he says, the public seems to remember but not him.

Two of his grown-up children are actors, one of whom he co-starred with in The Price in Australia, his son taking the lead role.

Mitchell has been married for more than 50 years to Connie, who he met at the left-wing Unity Theatre in Mornington Crescent.

He does not like being away from her and their Highgate home, but confesses that, like many loving couples, they have their ups and downs. "We argue. We just have to fit the arguments into a shorter period. I'm away on tour and I don't particularly like to be on tour,so when I get home I shall embrace my wife with some fervour."

The Price is at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre from Monday, October 25 to Saturday, October 30.