Nicholas Hytner: Sheer Hytner

He paved the way for other British theatre directors to make it big in Hollywood but, when it came to his own career, he had a different goal in sight. This week he takes over the top job at the National Theatre. So how will this passionate, private man perform in the spotlight?

In 1994, on the first shot of the first day of the eight-week shoot of The Madness of King George, fledgling film director Nicholas Hytner was so terrified that he couldn't call "Action!" (His first assistant, Mary Kenney, did it for him.) He recovered fast enough, however, to manage to shout "Cut!" at the end of the take. The scene in Windsor Great Park was set in a piggery and, despite not having ridden since childhood, Nigel Hawthorne made his entrance on a horse that turned out to have a severe dislike for pigs. Finally, they got the shot and, several years before Hollywood even heard the names Sam Mendes and Stephen Daldry, Hytner's movie wound up with transatlantic success and four Oscar nominations.

Timing, as we know, is everything. When applications for the top job at the National Theatre were invited in spring 2001, Hytner, unlike those two illustrious followers in the stage-to-screen game, had already crested the wave of his movie success. Commentators who had tipped either Mendes or Daldry for the post had ignored the fact that movies take at least a year to make, which ruled out shaping and shepherding a building with three separate theatres and a staff of 800. Hytner, partly to his own surprise, found himself ready and waiting.

Cut back 14 years to a lunch meeting with a rising star, as recalled in the diary of Richard Eyre, who back then was the National's newly appointed artistic director designate. "He has a face like a mime – Barrault from Les Enfants du Paradis: oval face, arching eyebrows, animated, almost over-animated. Flights of ideas and gossip, riffs of enthusiasm, indignation, then repose; latent violence, subverted by a child-like smile. He's prodigiously talented and has a great appetite for work. He's from a different constituency from me and thinks I should work with new people." The star in question, of course, was Hytner.

On Tuesday morning he too will become artistic director of the National, following Eyre and Trevor Nunn. In fact, this is something of a formality. Aside from a few months staging a new musical based on the 1950s movie Sweet Smell of Success on Broadway last winter, Hytner has spent the past 18 months unostentatiously but assiduously preparing his future.

A few months ago, he announced his opening season. His self-confidence is echoed by having the strength of mind to return to the pre-Trevor Nunn system of having an associate director in Howard Davies, plus a wide group of artistic associates. And the work? Expect new plays from Mike Leigh, Michael Frayn, David Hare, Martin McDonagh, Nick Dear and newer names Owen McCafferty and Kwame Kwei-Armah. At Christmas, out go old musicals and in comes a two-part adaptation of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. Better yet is his bullish new ticketing policy.

Seats in two-thirds of the Olivier Theatre for four of the biggest shows will cost a tenner, the rest £25. That leaves Premiership football standing. That audacity is emblematic of his determination. Take his opening production, Jerry Springer – The Opera. When the concert version grabbed the headlines at last year's Edinburgh Festival, producers were all over it like a cheap suit but Hytner stole a march on them. Even before he took the National job he'd been encouraging Springer through its development in workshops at BAC (Battersea Arts Centre). And if the collision between Springer's foul-mouthed, trailer-trash farce and theatreland's cathedral of culture sounds dodgy, Hytner won't be the slightest bit worried.

"He makes no distinction between high and low culture," observes the director and composer Jeremy Sams, who knew him at Cambridge and remembers him as something of a star. And an organiser. "He did a celebrated production of Brecht and Weill's Mahagonny and when we wanted to get it to Edinburgh he wangled funding from the East German government."

The power of persuasion must be hereditary. Born in May 1956 in the Manchester suburb of Didsbury to Benet Hytner, formerly a QC, now a judge, and his wife Joyce – an indefatigable fundraiser for theatre and the prime mover behind the campaign to rebuild the Royal Court – Nicholas Robert Hytner grew up as a markedly bright, nice but not particularly Jewish boy. He attended Manchester Grammar School with Steven Pimlott, another director whose career has mirrored his own, and the pair of them went to Cambridge. The university must have had something in its water supply, as contemporaries included Declan Donnellan, creator of theatrical success story Cheek by Jowl, and Roger Michell, whose hits include My Night with Reg and Notting Hill.

Hytner's first paid job was as assistant director at English National Opera, playing to his musical strengths – he was a good flautist. He learnt how to animate the largest stage in London. Hytner can create and control audience responses by the way he moves people across a stage. That hallmark is all over Miss Saigon – and his percentage of the gross ensured he need never work again.

Bracingly intelligent, he also knows when to hold back. Late in rehearsals for Ghetto, a powerful drama about the ill-fated ghetto in Vilna, which he staged at the National in 1989, he spent a day creating a vast sequence with the cast dressed as Nazis. "It was amazing," remembers Sams, "really astonishingly good. Then, the next morning he scrapped it because he knew it was wrong. And he was right: the staging was brilliant, but the cutting of it was genius."

That technical skill and his love affair with choreography led to the accusation which used to be levelled at his work: nice technical rehearsal, shame about the show. Some argued that in common with his manner – often interpreted as chilly – his productions were unemotional. He'd shot to fame directing Schiller's Don Carlos, Marlowe's Edward II and Shakespeare's As You Like It at Manchester's Royal Exchange but, exhilarating though they were, they were not noted for their heart. Criticism collapsed, however, in the face of his Carousel, which delivered an overwhelming emotional punch, won awards galore and went in triumph to the Lincoln Center in New York.

That location provided some of the settings for his biggest flop, the 2001 film Centre Stage about the lives of young dancers. Perhaps what Fame did for showbiz could be done for ballet? No such luck. A traditional backstage story embracing the clichés of the will-the-kids-make-it genre, it boasts jaw-dropping dancing from American virtuoso Ethan Stiefel but barely achieves dramatic lift-off. One scene, however, sticks out. At crisis point, one of the three heroines speaks her mind. "I'm just being honest," she says. "That's what friends do. They tell you the truth." Which is what you get from Hytner himself. "You don't go to him for blanket sympathy," says one. "He's incapable of lying."

That degree of honesty is a refreshing strength in a business bedevilled by egos and evasions, but it could also be a serious weakness. Famously, he has little small talk. Even his friends speak of oddly strained silences which, coupled with a low boredom threshold, might augur ill. He isn't good at suffering fools and one colleague describes him as tactless but "endearingly so". He has been known to lose his temper but he regains equilibrium quickly and is not given to buffing and honing grievances. Nonetheless, he has never steered an organisation solo, and running the country's flagship theatre will put this quietly unrelaxed, extremely private gay man under intense pressure to develop his diplomatic skills.

Thus far, outside of a rehearsal room, he's had little chance to prove whether or not he's a team player, but one winning quality has made itself evident: he's unembarrassed by his passions. As one of his new colleagues remarked, "You can't quite believe he's 46. All that energy ... he's more like a precocious 16-year-old."