Now the veteran has gone one better by playing the world’s second most-famous miser – the oil magnate JP Getty – in Ridley Scott’s All The Money In The World.

Six weeks before this true-story film about the 1973 kidnapping of the billionaire’s imaginatively named grandson John Paul Getty III was due out, a string of lurid stories surfaced about the alleged sexual misdeeds of Kevin Spacey, the actor playing him.

Unflustered, Scott, 80, approached the studio with an astonishing plan.

For an estimated $10million he could reshoot Spacey’s scenes in nine days with 88-yearold Christopher Plummer in the role.

We’ll never know how good the film would have been with Spacey, although the old man make-up he sported in the early trailer brought to mind the early 2000s sketch show Bo Selecta!

But as comedy probably wasn’t the effect Scott had in mind, perhaps it isn’t too surprising he was so keen to start again.

It was an expensive gamble but it has paid off handsomely. Plummer is the best thing in the film.

In this tense, tightly-plotted thriller, Getty – not just the richest man in the world but “the richest man in the history of the world” – is a borderline psychopath with an almost certifi able need to pinch pennies. 

Visitors to his Surrey mansion are confronted with a functioning payphone in the lobby, he washes his own smalls to save on hotel room service and when his favourite grandson “Paul” is kidnapped in Italy he tells visiting reporters precisely how much ransom he is willing to pay.

“Nothing,” he says with the faintest hint of a smirk. Unsurprisingly, the boy’s mother has a different view.

Abigail Getty (Michelle Williams) knows everything about his hard-bargaining from her divorce from his drug-addled son.

She may have left the marriage without a penny but as she still had custody of her children she considers it a victory. Getty is still reeling from the settlement. 

After neglecting his family for decades, the old man is obsessed with the idea of a “legacy”.

Convinced he was the emperor Hadrian in a previous life, he wants to establish a “noble bloodline” and a global empire to rival ancient Rome.

To him, the kidnapping of Paul (Charlie Plummer, no relation) is more of an opportunity than a crisis.

As Abigail can’t afford to pay the ransom, she will have to renegotiate the terms of her divorce.

Williams, also in cinemas in the musical The Greatest Showman, is the perfect foil to Plummer’s ice-cold billionaire.

Her clothes and clipped accent may suggest a young Jackie Kennedy but there’s a torrent of emotions swirling beneath that immaculately-set bouffant.

Mark Wahlberg feels less well cast as Getty’s troubleshooter Fletcher Chase, an ex-CIA agent tasked with closing his boss’s trickiest deals.

His laid-back Boston charm and inherent likeability de-fang the sharply dressed shark a little too early in the plot. 

But Scott manages to keep the suspense ticking over, expertly switching between the tense negotiations in England and southern Italy, where Paul is being held by an increasingly bemused collection of petty thieves and hard-bitten mafia.

As the plot threatens to become predictable, especially to those who know the outcome, the Alien director stirs things up by tossing in a red herring and one of his trademark grisly shocks.

The octogenarians have cracked it.

All The Money In The World is worth every penny.