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Now 30 , Toby has already won rave reviews for his portrayal of Coriolanus, when, at the age of just 25, he became the youngest actor to play a Shakespearean role many fine performers in their 40s have not yet managed. It followed swiftly on the heels of an equally lauded performance in Channel 4's The Camomile Lawn, when he was straight out of drama school.

So it comes as something of a surprise that the Toby who greets you at a modest Chelsea diner near his home in downtown Manhattan, is neither self-assured nor trading on his famous name. Instead, he plays down his talents and is earnest and diligent in an almost old-fashioned sense.

"I get up at eight or eight-thirty, which I know is not early for most people, but it is for me, and I read a lot. I try to instill some kind of pattern in my day because it is incredibly easy for your mind to atrophy between jobs in this profession." He explains over a breakfast of granola, fresh fruit and yoghurt washed down by two double expressos. His current pattern revolves around reading – biographies are his genre of choice – and fitness, and positively no partying. His father Robert Stephens was an alcoholic who died, aged 64, in 1995, his liver and kidneys finally succumbing to years of abuse. Toby has been teetotal for 'one year and two months.'

Stephens and Smith were the Taylor and Burton of the British stage when they met at the National Theatre in the mid-Sixties. Stephens was still married to his second wife at the time, but the pair embarked on a torrid affair and wed in 1967, ten days after the birth of their first son, Christopher.

The duo acted together in Dame Maggie's signature film, The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, but by the time it was released in 1969, and second son Toby was born, cracks were already beginning to show. Through a combination of Stephens's alcoholism and extra-marital affairs the pair divorced in 1975. Four months later Dame Maggie Smith wed playwright Beverley Cross, the man she had been with when Stephens first appeared on the scene.

They enjoyed a long and happy marriage, his calm demeanour perfectly complementing her insecurities, but Dame Maggie remained scarred by the failure of her first marriage. She was devastated when Stephens published his autobiography, shortly before his death, blaming her reliance on a prescribed amphetamine to help her through the gruelling schedule of Brodie for the collapse of their marriage. He said "It was like living with knives, she was always ratty and nasty."

Toby has long been tormented by the fear that he might follow in his father's hard-drinking, womanising ways, and instead throws his energies into sport. At the moment he trains twice a week on a nearby gym's climbing walls, a simulated rock face which requires incredible strength and endurance to master. "I read a biography of Mallory and was fascinated by the way they found his body on Everest, perfectly preserved because of the altitude. I want to write a screenplay about him, so I decided to learn about climbing so I had some idea of what I was writing about. I am fascinated by the psychology of people wanting to get to the top, especially in Mallory's day, when it was so dangerous.

"And I must admit the training is quite addictive. It's just you and a rock face and that appeals to me. You have to keep yourself going and it's a real challenge. In a way it is similar to acting, you have only yourself and your confidence to rely on." Toby admits he has always been good in his own company, an inner srength put to the test in the past. So raw was the public disintegration of his parents' marriage that the subject was quite simply never discussed at the home Dame Maggie went on to make with Cross. As a child, Toby would often inquire if his father was dead. As a sensitive adolescent he was anxious not to upset either his mother or stepfather by seeking a closer relationship with his father, yet was also very keen to get to know the man whose genes he bore. Ironically, Robert Stephens's death came when the two men where reconciled and the absentee father was in a position to help guide his younger son professionally.

"It affected me very much when he died of alcohol-related problems. Having a blood relative die is very upsetting, you feel a sense of being cut off from something. You lose a bit of your history."

Three years later he lost another crucial man in his personal history, when Beverley Cross died after a long illness. Asked if Cross's death affected him more profoundly than that of his real father, he says without hesitation, "Absolutely, Beverley was my father. He took care of me from the age of four. It was devastating for all of us. It wasn't just the loss of a dear man, but a good man and somebody who was very close to me and my family. He was very supportive of me and great to have around. If I ever wanted advice on anything I would go to him. He was very level-headed and wise and I really miss that."

In the year following Cross's death, Toby, his brother and his elder brother Christopher, who also acts, clung to one another for support. "Christopher was fantastic and dealt with all the practical stuff. People told me the best thing I could do was just be there. That first year was very hard."

All three remaining family members endured their grief and Toby describes them now as a "very close nuclear family. We speak all the time." In time Dame Maggie threw herself back into work to fill the void in her life, and her sons resumed their own existences. Somewhere along the way he broke up with Alison Fogg, a langage graduate whom he had been engaged for four years, and moved to New York a year ago. Fiercely protective of those close to him, Toby refuses elaborate on the split, but it was almost certainly one of the contributing factors to his subsequent reassessment of life. "When you go through something like losing your father and stepfather you really have to look at your life. It is quite sobering, in the way that turning 30 is." Although he admits to first feeling relief that he had left his 20s, this was quickly followed by "a sense of panic. I had set myself all these goals and I thought by the time I was 30 I would be a very respected actor, working constantly, with my own place. It just hasn't happened – although I have been very lucky to have worked fairly solidly – and that was a very sobering experience.

"Professionally and in life I was wandering a bit and not really sure about what I was doing. I felt I had to sit down and figure out what I would be doing. A lot happened to me when I was really quite young. I was getting great roles at the RSC when I was 25 and everyone was telling me I'd be really big in films and I kind of believed them.

I just expected it to happen and when it didn't I got kind of lost and disillusioned. I bathed in self-pity for a while, but then I had to pull myself together, I had to regroup and be humble about things. It is probably a good thing in the long run because if everything goes your way you can crack and be unable to handle it. At least now if I get a big film I'll be ready."

The first major change he made was giving up alcohol. "I had done it once before for three years in 1994, and I assumed I would be able to cope if I started drinking again, but I couldn't and it soon got out of control. After another couple of years I gave up again. To a certain extent I had or could have a problem with alcohol. I hadn't been to a drying-out clinic and I wasn't in Alcoholics Anonymous, but I knew if I continued the way I had been, I would be in ten years' time.

"Towards the end I was drinking every day, during the day. Originally it was red wine I drank, but latterly I wasn't fussy what it was. I was waking up and feeling ill all the time. I was deeply unhealthy and I looked like a tomato. Professionally I had two choices, I could carry on the way I was going and maybe by the time I was 40 I would be considered for character parts or I could get myself together and play young parts."

Toby opted for the latter and gave up alcohol completely, but is careful not to say he will abstain for life. "I'm 30 now and I hope to live to 70. That's a helluva long time and it's even odds that I might start again, but I hope I don't."

The second – professional – component of his life-change turned out to benefit the first. A year ago Toby spent five months in Ring Round The Moon at New York's Lincoln Center and it gave him the impetus to try his luck in America and 3,000 miles from the goldfish bowl existence of one of Britain's premier acting dynasties, Toby can at last grow up. "I don't want to be always known as the son of…" he says.

It is anonymity he has striven to cultivate. Although he shares his father's stocky build and roguish charm and his mother's colouring, he is not instantly identifiable as a relative of either. At college, the London Academy of Music and Drama, when his cover was blown and staff learned that Dame Maggie's son was among them, he cheerfully let a fellow student by the name of Smith handle all the ensuing inquiries.

But although the anonimity America offers has been a welcome spin-off of the transatlantic move, it was not the main motivating factor. "I had been doing a lot of theatre in Britain and I'd reached a point where I'd carved out a niche of some kind for myself, yet I still didn't own a flat or earn enough money to look my bank manager in the eye. I really need to have some sort of base, to settle my life in some way; I am fed up being a gypsy."

Realising that the precarious nature of film-funding in Britain was unlikely to accord him the security he craved, he decided to try America for two years. "There are a lot of people who are offered film roles first in Britain – which I completely understand because they have proved to be financially viable – but it makes it artistically very limiting if you are not in that group, as I was not. People like Ewan McGregor and Jude Law, who are very good and have proved themselves bankable, would always be ahead of me."

So far the gamble has paid off. Toby followed his five-month stint at the Lincoln Center with a role as the young Clint Eastwood in the actor /director's soon-to-be released film Space Cowboys, followed by several months in Montreal, Canada, shooting The Great Gatsby for the BBC, in which he stars.

Toby is compelling in the role of the flawed Jay Gatsby and elicits a great deal of sympathy for his character. He is lavish in his praise of American actress Mira Sorvino of Mighty Aphrodite fame, who plays Daisy Buchanan. "Mira is absolutely lovely and incredibly professional. She's very hard-working and very very good.

"I think everybody has wanted a girl they can't have and everybody wants to be part of something they are not, just like Gatsby with his desperate wish to be part of the old money set. Whether you are an awkward teenager or in your 30s, you can identify with that."

For the part, Toby mastered a Midwestern accent, but insists he will not make America his permanent home. Aside from missing family and friends, he longs for British television – without the commercial reliance on advertising every five minutes. And for someone who has clearly become frustrated with the uncertainty of an actor's life it is impossible to imagine Toby embracing the unworldly environs of Hollywood. "At one point I was driving round LA to meetings all day, then spending my evening learning lines for parts that I wasn't even that interested in when I thought, This is not what I got into this for. There are a lot of things which stop you just practising your craft: the casting agents, producers and directors are in control of your life. People ask me what I am doing next and I can never say with certainty because it is not my decision. That is part of the reason I am writing a screenplay and would like to direct, so Ican get some sort of structure in my life that I can control." He says he has "great difficulty with extra-curricular" side of his profession. "I have no interest in going to parties to glad-hand people I don't know and who don't know me."

And despite his open demeanour and fears that he may have inherited some of his father's addictive traits, there is rather more of Dame Maggie in Toby than perhaps even he realises. She rarely gives interviews and Toby is careful to protect her privacy, and his own. He will say of her only, "She's very strong and very busy." He goes to similar lengths to avoid speaking about Alison, his ex-girlfriend. "To appear on stage you have to sacrifice something of yourself, so you don't want to sacrifice anything else in your life." He says by way of explanation. After all, there are worse things in life than being known as the son of Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens.