In the small, plush lobby of the Covent Garden Hotel in London, Anthony Edwards sweeps through the doors, and his arrival is politely noted by a few inquisitive glances. Edwards is known for his entrances - bursting through hospital doors as his alter ego Dr Mark Greene to save the lives of crash victims and drug addicts in the phenomenally successful TV series ER. A cheerful, witty actor and executive producer, ever since he put on Dr Greene's white coat, Edwards has dazzled with his medical skills in the emergency room and sensitive, caring manner with patients.
In his new film, Don't Go Breaking My Heart, Edwards attracts further admiration when he is transformed into a US sports therapist for whom competition as opposed to commercialism is the essence of sport. Of course Don't Go Breaking My Heart is not a sports movie - although the British Olympic athlete Linford Christie has a small role - but a lush, witty, romantic comedy of the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl variety underlined by the conviction that love can change people's lives. For all its inoffensive humour and beautifully shot locations in and around the middle-class suburb of Hampstead in north London, Don't Go Breaking My Heart builds to a tense, cathartic race against time for Edwards's character, Tony. The sports therapist, down on his luck in London, is dumped by his British girlfriend and has a chance meeting with Suzanne (Jenny Seagrove), a recently widowed mother-of-two who is struggling to deal with her grief and that of her two children. He embraces this new relationship but the course of true love doesn't run smooth when Suzanne discovers her romantic behaviour is a result of being hypnotised by her dentist.
The film has a "look behind you" type of British humour, with a dash of New Age, crystals and hypnotism mixed in to alter the balance, but love eventually prevails.
"It's probably true that there are only 32 or 33 plots in the human story-telling world," says Edwards. "I always respond to that when a writer's voice is coming out - as opposed to what happens a lot, which is that people write what they think people will like. We all know that it's a boy-meets-girl and boy and girl are going to end up together, so the important thing is how that ride is to get there."
Edwards is deeply enthusiastic about the film, not least because his name and that of his business partner and schoolfriend Dante di Lorento appear in the credits as executive producers for their company, Aviator Films.
Leaning back into the crook of a comfortable sofa in the hotel suite, Edwards speaks with a confidence and patience which comes with incredible success and worldwide fame. He munches on cookies and sips his coffee and, surprisingly, the interview is conducted without the usual battery of PR people ready to cut the questions short should one stray into difficult territory.
He is the youngest of five children born in Santa Barbara, California, whose professional career began when he got his driving licence at 16 and drove to Los Angeles to audition for commercials. Okay, so his character didn't last long in the Tom Cruise vehicle, Top Gun, and most people probably don't remember him from Pet Sematary II or Revenge of the Nerds, but he has found his niche with Dr Greene and once admitted directing and developing projects was more fun than acting.
This admittedly "persistent" but not incredibly ambitious or agenda-driven actor says Don't Go Break- ing My Heart is nothing more complicated than "a good story to tell". If that formula sometimes encourages directors and writers to take a lazy attitude to the story, then this film certainly doesn't fall into that category. It is, he says, the fault of "stupid" TV networks and film studios that so many bad films are made and not that audiences are somehow less intelligent these days.
"It's been the film-makers and the networks that have underestimated their public. Thinking, `Oh well, no one will want to see something that they have to think about'. People use laziness and blame it on the audience as a way to say `it's not my fault'."
Don't Go Breaking My Heart is an attempt to define love, which itself is "completely indefinable", but the fun of it is telling the story along the way. "It's a rollercoaster," he says, a film that teases out the moments of love in our lives which let us now we're all here for a reason.
