Oscar winner: Jeff opens his Crazy Heart

Jeff Bridges nearly turned down the role which won him the coveted Best Actor prize at the Academy Awards earlier this week.

In Crazy Heart, the 60-year-old plays Bad Blake, a washed up country singer reduced to touring bars and bowling alleys.

"It was a wonderful script, great story, but the bar was set pretty high for me after The Fabulous Baker Boys (a 1990 film on a musician's life, which co-starred his brother Beau as his on-screen brother and Michelle Pfeiffer as the love interest).

"I had a great time making The Fabulous Baker Boys — all that wonderful music — those pop and jazz classics. But in Crazy Heart, there was no music. I thought a movie with lousy music may not be a happy picture. So I took a pass on it," he recalls.

A year later, his musician friend T. Bone Burnett was asked to write the songs and Burnett encouraged Bridges to take the role. "He said: ‘I'll do if you do it' and I said: ‘Oh God, let's go! Come on!' A lot of the songs were written specially for me."

To help Bridges find his character, Burnett, whose credits include O Brother Where Art Thou? and Walk The Line, wrote a list of music Bad Blake would have listened to growing up in Texas. "Bad may have been listening to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen; he was a music lover. So Dylan was a role model. I watched his performances."

Bridges' own love of music came from his childhood. Born in Los Angeles to acting parents Dorothy and Lloyd (stars of films Hot Shots! and Airplane), he learnt to play the piano, but then rebelled against his mother by quitting.

"You shouldn't do that, listen to your mother," he muses. "I said: ‘Ma, I don't want to practise', she said: ‘OK, but you'll be sorry' and she was absolutely right, I am sorry. I still play, but not as well as I might."

Then he fell in love with the guitar and has been playing and writing music since he was 14.

Besides showcasing Bridges' musical talents, Crazy Heart is also a love story. Bad Blake agrees to be interviewed by a reporter called Jean, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the pair fall for each other.

Bridges chose Gyllenhaal because he'd always "admired her acting".

Extra time with Bridges

As a teenager, Jeff Bridges and his brother Beau used to appear in his father's series The Lloyd Bridges Show. He was first nominated for an Academy Award in 1971 for his first film The Last Picture Show.

His blazing start led to a succession of hits, including Tron, Starman and The Fisher King, before he finally fell off the film radar in the early 1990s. Bridges then regained his status in 1998 with The Big Lebowski, which was followed by an Academy Award nomination for The Contender (2000) and his turn in Seabiscuit (2003).

Bridges is now due to team up with the Coen Brothers again on True Grit, a remake of the 1969 Western that starred John Wayne.

And later this year, he'll revisit his role as Kevin Flynn in Tron Legacy, the eagerly awaited follow-up to the 1982 sci-fi adventure set in cyberspace.

Bridges is known to take pictures during the shooting of all his films. He's also a keen cartoonist. His pictures and cartoons can be seen at www.jeffbridges.com.