These are busy times for actor Christian Bale. There’s The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan’s latest addition to the Batman franchise, partly shot in Hong Kong and scheduled for global release this month. Bale’s now working in Chicago on Michael Mann’s Public Enemies with Johnny Depp and Oscar-winning actress Marion Cotillard (La Vie En Rose), playing FBI agent Melvin Purvis, and from there he’ll move directly on to Killing Pablo, a film charting the life and death of Colombian drug dealer Pablo Escobar, co-starring Javier Bardem. For good measure, Bale has been in New Mexico shooting a character as iconic as the caped crusader in the fourth instalment of the Terminator series, Terminator 4 (Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins).

Thirty-four-year-old Christian Bale should be a huge star. With a tonne of acting talent, good looks and plenty of screen presence, he has the makings of a movie idol but has never been able to consolidate it – or never wanted it. A risk-taker and convention-breaker, Bale, a child star at age 13 in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987), would rather deny publicity and its attendant spotlight than celebrate or glow in it. So spooked was he by the media furore surrounding his success at such a young age that he grew to hate publicity, promotion and the revelation of the interview process. In the 21 years since Empire, there have been scattered successes such as Little Women (1994), American Psycho (2000), which prompted Entertainment Weekly to name him one of the “Most Creative People in Entertainment,” and Batman Begins (2005). Peripheral, never a mainstream player, dwelling in the shadows of Hollywood’s movie-making machinery, Bale by disposition seems born to play the troubled Batman he helped reinvent with Nolan three years ago.

Born in Wales, Bale entered the world with showbiz blood. His grandfather doubled for John Wayne in two movies and his mother was a circus dancer. His father was a commercial pilot who later married feminist icon Gloria Steinem. He has three older sisters, one of whom, director and actress Louise Bale, was a huge influence on getting him into acting. Bale appeared in television commercials for breakfast cereal and carpet cleaners when he was just eight years old and made his professional debut in 1984 opposite Rowan “Mr Bean” Atkinson at London’s West End in The Nerd. Two years later he auditioned for the role of Jamie Graham in Empire of the Sun, along with 4,000 other young hopefuls, and was cast as the upper-crust English boy who gets separated from his parents and is forced to endure a Japanese concentration camp during the Second World War. Bale carried the picture, so much so that he was awarded Best Performance by a Juvenile Actor, a category specially created for him by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. At 13, Bale had become a global icon (a sort of Daniel Radcliffe pre-Harry Potter and the Internet) but a reluctant one.

Bale has often spoken of how he was close to tears during promotional interviews for Empire, pretending to go to the bathroom and then just disappearing, and how the media attention ruined the fun he had making the film. (His parents divorced soon after the film, and boys at his school in Bournemouth, England bullied him.) As a result, Bale considered giving up acting when he’d barely started. He stopped acting for two years and was coerced back when hot young British theatrical talent Kenneth Branagh approached him for Henry V in 1989.

Bale went on to do eclectic film work that earned him recognition for acting prowess but little box-office success. The pictures were mostly forgettable (Disney musical Newsies, Swing Kids, Royal Deceit) until 1994, when Winona Ryder insisted he be cast for the coveted role of wealthy playmate Laurie in Little Women (Ryder’s personal assistant, Sibi Blazic, married Bale in 2000 and they have one child). Audiences took to Bale’s energetic and easy charm as he wooed Ryder, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst and others in the film, and US moviegoers embraced him as their new heart-throb. But Bale being Bale, he bailed out from going the throb-throb route, played against type and retreated into his natural psyche (The Secret Agent, The Portrait of a Lady, Metroland). Then there was Velvet Goldmine (1998) and an unmemorable Shakespearean outing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999).

The year 2000 brought a change of fortune and a role that many felt would make or break the career of the actor who took it: the lead in director Mary Harron’s American Psycho, from the book by Bret Easton Ellis. Leonardo DiCaprio was attached to the project at one point, with Oliver Stone directing. But budgets began to spiral, the studio got nervous and Harron and Bale got the nod. Pundits had pronounced the book unfilmable due to its high-octane violence and deviant sexual content, but that hadn’t dissuaded Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and others from wanting to play the prime role of Patrick Bateman – one part Gordon Gekko, two parts Hannibal Lecter – a dysfunctional Wall Street financier and prototype metrosexual with an unhealthy obsession for brands, torture, serial killing and human dining. Psycho’s opening dialogue with Bale standing half naked in front of the mirror has become iconic cinema:

“My name is Patrick Bateman. I’m 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself and a balanced diet and rigorous exercise routine. In the morning if my face is a little puffy I’ll put on an ice-pack while doing stomach crunches. I can do 1,000 now. After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a water-activated gel cleanser, then a honey-almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial mask which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturiser, then an anti-ageing eye balm followed by a final moisturising protective lotion.”

Bateman was Batman gone mad, the beast inside Batman released, and out-branded Ian Fleming’s James Bond by 10 Bill Blass suits to one. Bale played the impeccably dressed Manhattan slaughterer with insouciant panache, chain-sawing detachment and narcissistic glee. He also spent months perfecting his body, three hours a day with a trainer, exhibiting the same level of commitment and authenticity he was to show again in nightmarish thriller The Machinist (2004), for which he lost 28.5kg, a third of his body weight. Asked about violence, Bale told a press conference, “You can’t help but find violence endlessly fascinating – and I mean true violence, not action-movie violence, just because it is used as the answer to so many problems. We’re all taught as kids not to be violent, but you can’t help but also see that violence is what works very often. Bullies thrive.”

BPsycho met with approval due to Bale’s performance and his boldness for taking on the part in the first place. But rather than capitalise on the new-found fame, Bale, uneasy with all the attention, bailed again and did a series of so-so films (Shaft with Samuel L Jackson, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with Nicolas Cage, Equilibrium and Laurel Canyon). All mediocre, they failed to trouble the scorers at the box office. In a recent interview with Details magazine, Bale admitted in his typically candid style that he faced financial ruin after American Psycho and was so deep in debt that his house was repossessed. As a result, he claims, he accepted film roles because he was broke. “The motivation was keeping the head above water,” he said. Then came Nolan with Batman Begins, an attempt to get the franchise back to its comic-book authenticity by showing how industrialist Bruce Wayne had seen his parents murdered as a young boy and vowed to fight crime as a result. Bale said at the time, “Batman is someone who is fanatical. If you think about the obsession that somebody must have to retain the pain and anger from an incident that happened 20 years previously and is still in the forefront of his mind . . . that’s an incredible obsession. That’s an unhealthy obsession. So there’s always a conflict.” Bale might as well have been referring to his own experience with and reaction to Empire. “Batman’s the one who is really on the edge. He’s not a knight in shining amour, he’s a dark knight. It should be like you’re witnessing a very dangerous creature in the jungle or something. He’s as messed up as half the people he’s fighting against. I attempted to become a different creature that just kind of ceases to be human at that point.” Sounds like Bateman made his way into Batman. In The Dark Knight, he’ll also be better dressed than any of the villains. In a nod to the sartorial elegance of Bateman in American Psycho, Batman – or rather Bruce Wayne when he’s not being Batman – will be decked out in made-to-measure Giorgio Armani black wool coats, single-breasted suits, three-button suits and tuxedos. Marketing being the medium these days, a brand advertising campaign featuring Bale in Armani is tied in with The Dark Knight promotions.

The film carries a real-life message of tragedy, too, as actor Heath Ledger, who plays The Joker, died of a drug overdose during the production cycle. Speaking of the experience, Bale told EW.com, “Heath was a joy. A unique man. I enjoyed watching him and working with him. What was so great to see with Heath is just how seriously he took it. And we don’t mean in any way to sound sort of pretentious with that, but just in the fact that if we don’t take it seriously, then how can any audience ever take it seriously? He did one hell of a job.” Bale continues to do one hell of a job himself. In the past couple of years he’s starred in 3:10 to Yuma with Russell Crowe, The Prestige with Hugh Jackman and Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn. Herzog had lavish praise for the actor. “I find him one of the greatest talents of his generation,” the director told reporters. Christian Bale may not be Hollywood’s most financially successful actor, or its most recognisable, but the release of The Dark Knight and the subsequent slate of projects to which he’s attached should ensure that his acting talent continues to light up the screen even if the man himself would rather remain out of the spotlight, unknowable, ready to be summoned from the shadows.