In Bradford, Sir Tom Courtenay’s name is forever associated with John Schlesinger’s film version of Keith Waterhouses’s comic novel Billy Liar.

But evidently the 1963 film, notable for the exterior scenes shot in and around the city centre, Undercliffe Cemetery and Baildon, isn’t the one he would choose to watch.

Hence his choice of One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich for screening at the Bradford International Film Festival on Saturday, after he receives a Lifetime Achievement award on stage at Pictureville cinema. Billy Liar can be seen the following day.

Many years ago in an interview with the T&A, Courtenay said of Billy Liar: “I haven’t seen it for years and years and years.

“I thought my best Billy was in the rafters of the Cambridge Theatre. On film I didn’t quite feel I knew what I was doing.”

He had already shown what he could do on camera before Billy Liar. His first screen role was the borstal boy who rebels against the establishment in Tony Richardson’s 1962 film version of the Alan Sillitoe short story The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner.

Winning out over rules imposed by the system is essentially the theme of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1962 short story which was filmed in 1970 and stars Courtenay as the resourceful prisoner of a Soviet labour camp in Sibera in which a good day consists of an extra slice of black bread or finding a bit of sewing thread.

In these two films he plays characters who are subversive, either openly or covertly. In later films such as The Dresser and A Rather English Marriage, he plays a factotum whose willingness to fetch, carry and placate at the behest of an overbearing master, masks feelings of anguished love and pain.

Bill Lawrence, former head of cinema at the National Media Museum who has master-minded many a film festival in Bradford, said: “Billy Liar is memorable because of its entertainment value. But I think it does betray Tom Courtenay’s more gifted skills.

“In Shakespearean terms, he is the fool who is wiser than the king. He’s very good at playing vulnerable but complicated characters where there is always something more going on than appears.

“In Billy Liar, there’s nothing else going on.”

The screenplay for One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich was written by Ronald Harwood. His stage play The Dresser, which was filmed in Bradford, notably at the Alhambra, Halifax and York in 1983, brought together for the first time on film Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay.

In his book Made In Yorkshire, film critic and former Bradford International Film Festival director Tony Earnshaw, writes: “On release The Dresser was a critical smash. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing and Best Actor for both Finney and Courtenay, who cancelled each other out...

“The picture also signalled the re-emergence of Tom Courtenay after a self-imposed break from movies of more than a decade. While working on the film the choosy star quipped: ‘Why don’t you put on the bill ‘And reintroducing Tom Courtenay!’”

In 1998, he reminded us what he could do as retired milkman Roy Southgate, playing a dogsbody’s for a former RAF fighter pilot played by Albert Finney in the screen version of Angela Lambert’s 1992 novel A Rather English Marriage.

This film won four British Bafta awards including one for Best Actor – for Tom Courtenay.