Tommy Steele is a mine of anecdotes, which is perhaps only to be expected given the scope of his career. At 77, he’s been in showbusiness for more than 50 years, first as a teen idol dubbed the British Elvis, then in scores of Hollywood films and Broadway musicals.

Name any stage or screen star of the past five decades and, chances are, Steele has worked with them. He recalls cocktail parties at Ethel Merman’s house, Duke Ellington on the piano, Sammy Davis Jnr tapdancing on the table. Frank Sinatra? “A great bloke.”Francis Ford Coppola? “The master.”

In Brighton for the launch of Scrooge – his tenth year in the title role of the Bill Kenwright production – he’s reminded of working with Lawrence Olivier on the 1969 BBC production of Twelth Night, which also starred Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson and Olivier’s wife Joan Plowright. “Olivier comes up to us in rehearsals and says to his wife, “Darling, you were wonderful! Alec – pure charm!

Rafe, your Sir Toby? Brilliant. And Tommy.... you wear a wig better than anyone I’ve ever known.” He grins at the memory, a man who still can’t believe what a life he’s led.

Steele grew up in modest circumstances in Bermondsey, south London.

His adored mother Elizabeth worked several jobs, including office cleaning and tin bashing in the Peek Frean biscuit factory. His father Thomas worked on the docks alongside being a bookmaker’s clerk at Royal Ascot. During the Second World War, Steele recalls great excitement when a limousine appeared on their street to collect his father for a mysterious dinner at the Savoy, where he dined with high-ranking officers. His father would later find out he had been used as a decoy for Winston Churchill when the Prime Minister was out of the country.

Steele had no ambitions towards stardom. He had enlisted with the Royal Navy at 15 and heard a new American star called Buddy Holly while on shore leave in Virginia in 1956. On his return to the UK, he was playing this new sound in a coffee shop in Soho when he was “discovered”

and transformed overnight – or near enough – into Britain’s first homegrown pop star. He was cutting a record for Decca within the week. Four months after his first chart hit, the clamour for Steele was such that he was asked to film his life story – “At 20!

We joked it was ‘Tommy Steele, from the cradle to the shave’.” When he married Ann Donoghue in 1960 (the couple are still together now), more than 20,000 fans turned up at the church.

But behind the scenes, Steele wasn’t too taken with the pop star’s lot. On stage at the Sunderland Empire, he resented the audience screaming for him. “I wanted them to listen to the songs.”He instantly preferred working in musicals and abandoned his pop identity for that of a committed “song and dance man”.

He went to Broadway for the first time with Half A Sixpence – which was written especially for him – and ended up in the Hollywood film adaptation. It’s still the film that means the most to him, he says. Hollywood was a revelation. “I met all these great names – Orson Welles, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly. I thought, I’m with the gods now. I’ve arrived in star heaven. But they were just normal people doing a job they loved.”

He went on to appear in films including The Happiest Millionaire and Francis Ford Coppola’s Finnian’s Rainbow. In 1968, he was voted the fourth most popular British box office star. His success gave him the means to repay his beloved parents.

“My mother and father were very hard-working. My mother particularly never stopped. She had four jobs yet was always home in time to cook our dinner. She had 20 great years in the end. Through my successes, they were able to live where I wanted them to live [he bought them two houses] and in the end, she wasn’t so tired.”

Their work ethic evidently rubbed off on their son. He’s been appearing in Scrooge – which runs to nearly a lot of tennis,” he says. “Two hours a day, five days a week. You have to stay fit. But I never get bored. I’d be quite content to do this every year.”

He’s also an artist of some renown – his work has appeared at the Royal Academy and he was commissioned by Liverpool City Council to make a permanent tribute to The Beatles.

Like his music career, it all came about by chance, he says. He only started painting to amuse himself on a cottage holiday. But after taking his artwork to a framers, he was told fine art dealers Frost & Reed had taken an interest and within weeks 250 prints were on sale.

He no longer has the time to paint in between performances as he once did, but he still makes a point of producing a series of prints for any company he works for.

He made the Beatles sculpture – a statue of Eleanor Rigby – in his back garden after suggesting her as a subject on a radio phone-in. “They wanted to make a commemoration statue for the city and I said I hoped it wasn’t going to end up being four blokes with guitars. So they asked me what I’d do and off the top of my head I suggested Eleanor Rigby, a woman you could sit down with in the street and share your problems with.”

There can’t be much Steele still longs to do – he appears to have done it all already. But that’s not quite true. We get on to an old rumour that Quentin Tarantino is a “huge fan” of Steele’s and has ambitions to work with him. “I wish he would! I’d love to kill someone on the screen.” He pauses, while we both consider the likelihood of this cheeky, chirpy song and dance man in a Tarantino film.

“I’d have to sing while I’m shooting.

That scene in Reservoir Dogs where he’s dancing on the razors – that should have been me! I’ll do Reservoir Dogs – The Musical.” We laugh at the idea but secretly, I wouldn’t rule it out.

*Tommy Steele stars in Scrooge at the Brighton Centre from December 23 to January 4. For tickets, call 0844 8471515.