It has been billed as the sexiest adaptation of Wuthering Heights, with bodices ripped to shreds and a flirtation with BDSM. And yet the standout star of Emerald Fennell’s new film isn’t one of its smouldering young lovers, played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, but British television’s most affable grump – Martin Clunes.

Clunes plays Mr Earnshaw, the patriarch of the Earnshaw household whose decision to bring home a destitute young Heathcliff from Liverpool to the Yorkshire Moors sets in motion the destructive love story at the centre of Wuthering Heights. In Fennell’s reworking, Cathy’s elder brother, Hindley, is abolished entirely, with his cruelty, boozing and gambling folded into the father instead.

“He’s rotten to the core,” Clunes told ITV’s This Morning recently. “He’s sort of drinking from the start. He’s a devout misogynist. He’s got a gambling addiction and is covered in vomit.”

It is a far cry from the roles that have defined Clunes’s career, and one he has described as both “exciting” and “scary” – not least for the prospect of stepping on to a blockbuster film set. Critics, however, suggest the risk has paid off. “As a child, young Cathy Earnshaw is a pert miss, indulged by her roistering old twinkly eyed squire of a dad, in which role Martin Clunes pretty much pinches the whole film,” wrote the Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw.

Born in Wimbledon in 1961, Clunes is the nephew of the actor Jeremy Brett, famed for playing Sherlock Holmes in the Granada TV series, and the son of the actor Alec Clunes, who died when Clunes was eight. Clunes has spoken about having to suppress his grief as a child in the face of British stiffness. “The expectation was, ‘Oh, come on, let’s not cry. Let’s be grown up’,” he said last year. “How grown up can you be at eight?”

Soon afterwards, Clunes was sent to Barfield boarding school in Surrey because his paternal grandparents feared growing up without a father figure would make him gay. “So then I had to not cry and not wet the bed at boarding school, which was just impossible,” he said.

He drifted into acting, studying drama at the ArtsEd theatre school before working in repertory theatre. During a performance at Hampstead theatre, he was spotted by Harry Enfield, who cast him in his sketch shows and later recommended him for the role of Gary Strang in Simon Nye’s sitcom Men Behaving Badly. The beer-guzzling, woman-chasing Gary, played opposite Neil Morrissey, made Clunes a household name and earned him a Bafta in 1996.

The show was unmistakably of its time – Clunes has since described it as a “silly” and “zeitgeisty” series that got swept up in “that whole Loaded movement”.

Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, Clunes worked steadily across film and television, appearing in Staggered, Lorna Doone, A is for Acid, Shakespeare in Love and Saving Grace, as well as leading roles in Goodbye, Mr Chips and the ITV comedy drama William and Mary.

But his most defining role arrived in 2004 with Doc Martin, in which he played the curmudgeonly GP Dr Martin Ellingham. Running for 10 series across 18 years, the show established Clunes as a fixture of British television, and still attracts pleas from fans for a revival. Clunes, meanwhile, has insisted he is far sunnier than his onscreen counterpart. “I’ll go around trying to make everyone like me, unless they don’t deserve to like me,” he once told the Guardian.

In recent years, he has appeared in Reggie Perrin, Arthur & George, Manhunt, Warren, and last year’s Out There, in which he played a widowed farmer who faces up to county lines drug dealers. Earlier in his career, he supplemented his acting income by modelling for Gilbert and George and voicing Safeway adverts, while also presenting travelogues, documentaries and writing books about his love of animals.

Clunes lives in Dorset with his wife, the Doc Martin producer Philippa Braithwaite, five dogs, two cats, and a menagerie of horses and hens. The couple have one daughter, who is studying to be an equine vet. He has been lined up to portray the disgraced BBC presenter Huw Edwards in an upcoming factual drama, Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards, charting the implosion of one of British television’s most recognisable figures.

For now, though, Clunes finds himself improbably at the centre of one of the most talked about films of the year. And in a glossy, sexually charged literary adaptation, no one would have expected his “rotten” patriarch to leave one of the deepest impressions.