It’s a story about a man best known for ducking and diving on a truly gargantuan scale. You remember him; Nick Leeson, a pushy, energetic young derivatives trader from working-class Watford, who in 1995 brought about the collapse of Barings the genteel, 200-year-old merchant bank which employed him with losses of $800 million. Fraudulently, he had manipulated balances on Simex, Singapore’s monetary exchange, to make his trading look profitable when it was actually losing massive sums. His book about his experience was aptly titled Rogue Trader From that memoir comes a film of the same title, starring Ewan McGregor as Leeson - a man who took his reputation as a chancer to unthinkable lengths - and Anna Friel as his fetching wife Lisa.

Leeson, who has been diagnosed with cancer of the colon, has suffered for his criminal folly. He has spent four years languishing in a primitive Singapore prison. Lisa who, at the time, knew nothing of his nefarious schemes, divorced him in 1997, then remarried. In short, his life lies in ruins. If his behaviour marked him as an opportunist of the first order, it’s fitting that the powers behind Rogue Trader have also kept an eye firmly on the main chance from the moment the film was hatched as an idea. In 1995 Sir David Frost interviewed Leeson for a BBC special in Frankfurt, where he was apprehended on fleeing from Singapore in the wake of his bank’s collapse. Frost easily sold his interview to America and a host of other territories: ‘It was plain as a pikestaff, this was a wonderful story,’ he has said. ‘So I resolved to get hold of the film rights.’

This was duly achieved, after Frost negotiated ‘a fair fee’ to Leeson. James Dearden, best known for his Oscar-nominated script of the Hollywood mega-hit Fatal Attraction, was hired to direct the film and write the screenplay from Leeson’s autobiography. To help this process he managed to secure a brief visit with Leeson in his jail cell.

Then came another stroke of luck. After McGregor — then merely Britain’s hottest young actor — was signed to play Leeson, it emerged he would be portraying Obi-Wan Kenobi in the new Star Wars film — a piece of casting that would make him universally recognisable. Frost and Dearden must have rubbed their hands with glee.

Rogue Trader was shot in late 1997 and early 1998 for six weeks in Pinewood Studios, then on location in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. Initially it was expected to open towards the end of last year. But then came a problem: ‘Nick was diagnosed as ill,’ says Dearden. ‘We knew he had cancer, but we weren’t quite sure how ill he was. It didn’t seem the most propitious time to let the film go out.’

Having missed its slot for a late 1998 opening, the film was scheduled to open in April. The new Star Wars film would not open until May in America and July in Britain; an April opening for Rogue Trader would be premature in terms of maximising McGregor’s presence.

Now another opportunity for hype presented itself. With time off for good behaviour, Leeson was due to be freed this summer. Why not tie the opening of Rogue Trader around that event? ‘When it occurred to us that Nick would be released it made sense to hold off for a couple of months,’ Dearden says. ‘But it wasn’t that premeditated to be honest.’

Still, the publicity machine has gone into action, with a press release from the film’s distributors, Pathe, courageously skirting the borders of good taste: ‘Ewan McGregor is the man who brought down Barings Bank in the new film Rogue Trader which opens in cinemas on June 25 across the UK — as Nick Leeson himself prepares to be released from a Singapore prison on July 3.’

Say what you will about such tactics but they do make Rogue Trader an intriguing prospect. One could also argue that Leeson, who is after all a convicted criminal, does not merit being treated with undue sensitivity. And this is hardly the first time a film company has resorted to naked opportunism to attract an audience.

Yet ironically, while everyone concerned with the film has been dashing around frantically, heightening awareness, switching opening dates and synchronising headlines, Rogue Trader has yet another potent weapon in its arsenal. This is Anna Friel. When cast, Friel was known only as an actress who walked out of the Channel 4 soap opera Brookside (not without some acrimony) having for several years played Beth Jordache, the achingly lovely teenage lesbian who murdered her abusive father and helped bury him under the patio. ‘It was entirely fortuitous about Anna,’ says Dearden. ‘When we cast her she was just beginning in movies.’

But look at her now; 18 months on, Friel is one of Britain’s hottest young film actresses. She starred in the British Second World War drama Land Girls. She has completed Mad Cows, the film adaptation of Kathy Lette’s comic novel. She is Hermia, one of the young lovers in a new film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which opened to good reviews last month in America; director Michael Hoffman cast her first out of all his starry line-up which includes Michele Pfeiffer, Kevin Kline, Rupert Everett and Calista Flockhart.

Friel, who is represented by hotshot Hollywood agency CAA, is all of 22. Currently she is on Broadway, starring with Natasha Richardson, Ciaran Hinds and Rupert Graves in the acclaimed Patrick Marber play Closer. It is her part in this particularly that has whetted Hollywood’s appetite. It says much for the velocity of her career that when I talked to her in New York recently, she had not even had time to see Rogue Trader. ‘But Ewan has seen it, and he phoned to say he thought it was great,’ she says. ‘Apparently they did quite a lot of re-editing. Ewan’s a wonderful actor. He and I got on brilliantly.’

Those on set confirm as much. ‘The screen chemistry between Anna and Ewan was spot-on,’ says Paul Raphael, one of Rogue Trader’s producers. ‘She’s hard-working, committed, professional. She’s a woman with no doubts about where she’s going. And she has no fear. She had a bedroom scene on the second day of shooting, which is incredibly hard for an actress. But she just got on and did it, and gave us a very sweet moment. She’s an immense talent.’ McGregor himself told me respectfully. ‘Anna Friel’s quite something.’

Certainly playing Lisa represented a stretch for her. ‘I had my hair cut short, which was a first,’ she says. ‘And 1 was a blonde, which I’d never been before.’ She had to submerge her geographical roots, too. Friel is from Rochdale, whereas the Leesons are decidedly Home Counties; Lisa hails from Kent, but Friel and McGregor speak in generalised Estuary English accents.

‘She transformed herself into a South-east girl very convincingly,’ says Dearden. ‘She has great charm and vulnerability, but she’s also quite tough, the power behind the throne. That’s why Nick never let Lisa in on what was happening. She would have given him a bollocking.’

Friel broadly agrees: ‘My character was someone who didn’t know what was going on. I think she and Nick were very much in love, but he was able to lead this double life with a woman he really loved.

Though Dearden met Lisa, Friel never did, and has no regrets: ‘I wasn’t doing an impersonation of this person. I’m different from her. As for research, I watched a documentary about Nick. But I tried purposely not to know everything going on in his life. My participation in the film portrays the more human side of his life. Lisa provides a mechanism through which [the audience] learns the bigger picture.’

Shooting was tough, especially in Asia’s torrid heat. The film’s budget was relatively low (about £5 million) and the schedule was tight, which necessitated long working days. Cast and crew tried to gain access to the jail housing Leeson. ‘They wouldn’t let us in,’ says Friel. ‘But even from the outside it looks scary and horrible.’

She thinks Leeson has suffered more than enough: ‘It’s sad that his wife has remarried. What he did was wrong, but his sentence was too heavy. He comes across as the perpetrator of a crime, but the film says there were others who might take the blame as well.’

Her reference is to Barings’ public-school-educated executives who, Dearden’s class-conscious script implies, were negligent in not monitoring Leeson’s shady activities and so allowed the bank to founder. Leeson’s lowly origins made him an ideal scapegoat. As Frost has memorably said, ‘I have no doubt that if his name was Nick Fotheringay-Leeson, he wouldn’t be serving time now.’

Indeed, Dearden sees Leeson as a figure who represents the last gasp of the Thatcher era — a brash upstart enamoured of money who exceeded his grasp. ‘He’s the boy who flew too close to the sun,’ Dearden says. ‘The story’s like a tragic myth.’

He is convinced Leeson has no ill-gotten fortune salted away for his release, and believes he is essentially not a bad person. ‘The film’s sympathetic to Nick, but it doesn’t pull punches either. It shows how someone could get himself into that position. You cover up a small loss and it leads to a greater loss. Then the losses mount up. The audience ends up thinking, "There but for the grace of God go I." Nick lived with all that as a working reality for two years.

He even sees parallels with the Clinton-Lewinsky saga, in that if Leeson, like Clinton, had owned up to his initial misdemeanour, he might have been cleared with a reprimand. Instead both men tried to cover up and dug themselves into a deeper hole. ‘Nick’s story is a sweaty-palm ride,’ Dearden notes. ‘It’s an extraordinary drama. Derivatives trading may seem an arcane world. But basically it’s just gambling.’

As things stand, Leeson’s demeanour on leaving jail will be of as much interest as the film’s fortunes. He has had surgery for the cancer and his chances of survival are good. Dearden wrote him a note last year, commiserating about his illness, and received a brief reply ‘I told him I hoped he’d see the film and not be too disappointed in it,’ he says.

‘Nick’s nervous about his reception. He knows the story has been all over the press. Will he be a hate figure? Will people leave him alone? He’s worried about the film for the same reason. He may hope it will all go away. He could make money from the chat-show circuit, but he wants to see his father, who’s not well [he, too, has recently been diagnosed with cancer], and be left alone.’

As Dearden tells it, Leeson has been most upset by Lisa’s divorce and remarriage. For two years after he was jailed, she managed to visit frequently by becoming an air hostess with Virgin Atlantic, but was said to be upset by his book, and in 1997 they divorced. Last December she married Keith Horlock, a trader with a merchant bank, having delayed the wedding on learning of Leeson’s cancer. ‘Think about it,’ says Dearden. ‘You’re in an eight by 10 jail cell with two people who don’t speak English. You think about the woman you love. You’re diagnosed with cancer. Then you lose your wife. I think Lisa leaving has been the bitterest blow of all.’

One setback for Rogue Trader is that it will not be shown in American cinemas, but will be seen instead on HBO, the pay-cable channel. I understand at least one Hollywood studio balked at Dearden’s script because Leeson’s dodgy dealings could not be traced back to some traumatic incident in his childhood. The mere fact that there was no incident, and that his is a true story, was irrelevant to them. This tells you much about the narrow, predictable mindset of Hollywood executives.