The middle-aged man who answers the glass door could be anyone, though the fact that Boy George has owned this house on a hill in Hampstead for the past 16 years does narrow the possibilities. And it definitely is his house because on the gate posts, as you wait to be buzzed in, you see fans have scrawled messages to him in felt-tip – some are fresh, some faded.

Japanese tourists especially used to track him down here. He thinks they bribed taxi drivers to show them where he lived, then they would wait with their cameras. ‘I’m thinking of putting up a plaque,’ he says. ‘Boy George lives here. Go away.’

He also has a house in Ibiza, and had an apartment in New York, until his unpleasant experience there a couple of years ago, which we shall come to. He moved back to London after that, but not before he had this house ‘exorcised and blessed’. The place has gothic turrets, around which you half expect bats to be circling. Come to think of it, what with his shaved head, there is something of the Uncle Fester about the man himself. There is a blue Star of David tattooed on it, with a pink lotus blossom on the base of his skull. He has luminous pale eyes, wears no make-up and is dressed in a black hoodie and sweatpants – a Buddha in a tracksuit.

Even as a svelte youth playing on his androgynous looks, he had the suggestion of a double chin, one which he used to disguise with shadowy make-up. Now, at 47, he seems comfortable with himself, but different… different from the man who was once one of the most recognisable people in the Western world, after Diana, Princess of Wales and the Pope. So different that it is possible not to recognise him at all, as Italian police discovered a couple of days before my visit.

‘I lost my passport when I was in Italy and because I didn’t have a driving licence I had to show my credit cards, and when they still wouldn’t accept who I was, I had to do the Boy George thing, which I rarely do. I had to say, “I’m Boy George”, then they let me go. They clocked I had nail varnish on and that caused great hilarity.

‘You’d think people would get over it, but they never do. Look,’ he holds out nails that are chipped and varnished black. ‘It isn’t even proper nail varnish. It’s scuppered and butch. It’s manly nail varnish. In a way, it is reassuring, like police sirens.’

The varnish helped convince the Italian police that he was Boy George? ‘I suppose so. Anyway, they let me go, which was a relief. Thought it was going to be pasta for a week.’

He still does nice lines like that. Indeed, they trip off his tongue relentlessly. He talks quickly and breathily – wheezily, actually, because he suffers from asthma. On the subject of which, he couldn’t have eaten pasta for a week, because he is on a special no-wheat diet. No sugar, either. The asthma doesn’t stop him smoking, though. ‘When you smoke as a singer you lose a few octaves, but you gain something as well. Pure jazz, my voice.’

In a curious way, his voice is more recognisable than he is these days. The cadence is still vaguely East End, still archly camp, or camply arch, and it is still punctuated with laughter – albeit the laughter of habit rather than mirth. He always laughed like that when interviewed on television, but I never realised until now that it was a nervy, defensive laugh. Perhaps it has become so over time.

Boy George was just 19 when he found fame as the singer of Culture Club. The reggae-influenced New Romantic band released their first record in 1982 and went on to sell more than 50 million, notching up seven British and nine American Top 10 hits, and going to No 1 in both countries with Karma Chameleon. Boy George played upon his androgyny not only in the way he dressed – the beaded hair, the geisha make-up, the big hats – but also in what he said. When talk-show host Russell Harty asked if he was keen on sex, he said he’d sooner have a cup of tea.

Actually, he was very much gay, as well Harty knew, and when he did officially come out in America, two years later, he had to wear a bulletproof vest because of the death threats – with admirable insouciance, he worried that it made him ‘look chunky’. Examples of his self-indulgence were legion, but perhaps the most rock-star-ish was his insistence on flying the opposite way around the world to the rest of his band for a show in Japan – because it was better ‘nine ki’ energy.

Despite this better energy, the band split up in 1986 and Boy George checked into rehab for his heroin addiction. Some solo success followed, both as a singer-songwriter and as a club DJ. But his biggest come-back was his autobiographical musical, Taboo, which did well in the West End, and not so well on Broadway. He also launched his own designer clothing label (B-Rude) and wrote a memoir, Take it Like a Man.

He has just started a new tour, his first in 10 years, but it may be cut short depending on what happens next month. George O’Dowd, to use his real name, is due to stand trial in November after being accused of falsely imprisoning a 28-year-old Norwegian male escort and chaining him to a radiator in his former flat in London. O’Dowd pleaded not guilty to the charge in February and was released on bail. He faces a possible 15 years in jail. ‘I would love to be able to talk about the trial but I can’t,’ he says now. ‘I’ll talk to you about it afterwards because there is a lot I would like to say.’

Is he apprehensive? ‘No. I’ll think about it when it happens. You wouldn’t want to think of me spending all these weeks panicking in anticipation. It would be so bad for me.’

He says his spirits are kept high by the fans who come to his concerts, as well as by the people he bumps into in the street. Some may consider his behaviour seedy, but there seems to be a deep-seated affection for him as well. ‘People are funny in England. They will cheerfully shout out, “Hey, George, I hear you got nicked again, you’re a one!” Sometimes it can be annoying, but usually it makes me laugh. In America, no one says anything. They are too embarrassed to bring it up.’

This latest charge follows his arrest and trial in New York. In 2005, O’Dowd falsely reported a break-in at his Manhattan flat – and police officers who responded found 13 grams of cocaine there, allegedly, but their over-eagerness to search without a warrant ruled out the possibility of drugs charges. He was found guilty of wasting police time and a judge made him sweep the New York streets on a five-day community-service order. O’Dowd called it ‘media service’ because of the paparazzi frenzy that followed. With his state-issue orange vest, he wore Capri pants and shoes without socks. It was meant to be a humiliation, but O’Dowd reckoned his working-class background meant it wasn’t. ‘My mum was a cleaner, my dad was a builder,’ he shouted across to the scrum of reporters, as he got to work with his brush. ‘Know what I mean?’

Does he take drugs now? ‘Never, ever, ever do drugs again and I don’t drink either. My job of giving the police something to do is over.’

How long since he took them? ‘It’s been a long time. Telling you exact days and months is only helpful to me, not you. I can say that now and mean it, because I’m in a good place. But there was a time when I could have said it knowing I didn’t mean it.’

A curious distinction. Drugs brought him pleasure to begin with, presumably, but if he had his time again would he take that first line, that first needle? ‘If I had known what a dreary old road it would be? Never. And if I can stop anyone else starting on that road, I will. Time is precious and drugs waste time. I think Amy Winehouse is going to realise that soon. Hers is the most played-out drug addiction in rock’n’roll history. Like a living soap opera. But pain makes a wonderful sound. Her terrible vulnerability is touching. So raw and effortless, not even pushing the notes. From a singer’s point of view that’s scary. You notice she is hitting these rich notes without trying, tossing them away like a handbag.’ Pause. ‘And I love her hair-do.’

He’s sort of talking about himself, of course. And on the subject of soap operas, why did he agree to be filmed for The Madness of Boy George, an unflattering Channel 4 documentary a couple of years ago? ‘They pursued me until I surrendered. It was dreadful. A piece of trash. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever, ever done.’ He laughs at his own exaggeration. ‘No, it’s not. Of course there have been much worse things I have done, and will no doubt do, but as a piece of television it was lazy; trying to turn me into a headline.’

They didn’t have to try too hard. ‘You mean because I was doing the community service when they were making it? Yes, but why did they have to go on about that?’

Well, it was a bizarre episode, even by his own standards. ‘As much as other people might like to cling on to it, it’s over. Done. It means nothing to me, Oh Vienna.’

So he didn’t learn anything about himself from that experience? ‘I learnt that I don’t like getting up at 6.30 in the morning and that Chinese people chop vegetables really small, which makes them hard to pick up off the pavement.’

Does that make him shallow? ‘Oh God, you’re really trying hard, aren’t you? No, there is nothing remotely shallow about me: I could probably talk for hours about my community service, but it means nothing. Nothing. It was only five days. I don’t know whether that makes me shallow, or enlightened and Buddha-like.’

Well, he’s Buddha like in one respect. He even seems to have a shrine to himself in the house: two shelves of curiosities including two wooden name plates: one that reads George O’Dowd, the other, Boy George. We are sitting in his high-ceilinged kitchen, which has stairs leading up to a balcony.

On one wall there is a giant mirror, on another a stencil painting saying, ‘F— you. Hate you.’ There is also a photograph of David Bowie, a crucifix, an assortment of candles and a gothic-looking throne-like chair, whose arm rests are fashioned in the shape of two large phalluses. ‘They were made for me,’ he says when I do a double-take. On another shelf are books about Andy Warhol, Marc Bolan and Oscar Wilde.

It may sound unlikely, but there is something Wildeian about Boy George. He is known for his bons mots, after all – at one point he says to me,’Honesty is a curse. It will get you charged every time,’ which is pure Wilde – but also, like Wilde, and every hero of a Greek tragedy, he seems to have been the author of his own downfall.

He shakes his head when I put this to him. ‘If I sweep the streets that does not mean my life is totally tragic. It’s not who I am and it doesn’t take away from the fact that I sold millions of records. I know the media don’t get that and it frustrates the hell out of me. I think I’m generous because I don’t have a blanket attitude to the media, despite what it has done to me and what it continues to do to me.’

Blimey. Get arrested. Blame the media. ‘I’m not blaming the media for that. What I mean is… I’m letting you into my home. I’m not saying there are any questions you can’t ask me. Try asking Madonna or Sting some of the questions you have asked me, and someone will step in and tell you you can’t. Interviewing me is a luxury and you should appreciate it. I’m an intelligent man. I’m exciting company. You can analyse me all you like, but please do a good job. Don’t be boring.’

Blimey again. And OK, I’ll try. He comes across in print as being pricklier than he is in person. Actually, he is likeable and funny, once you get past the nervous tension and the drama queeniness. But he seems to have little equilibrium, no shame, and no self-control. What he does have is self-pity, self-destructive impulses and delusions of grandeur. He can seem wounded and spoilt, but also, at times, worldly wise. And he is an odd mix of vanity and self-loathing.

Does he feel like a victim? ‘For other people it may look like I was built up to be knocked down, but actually I don’t have that kind of perspective. I was sweeping, now I’m not sweeping. I suppose on the last day I did try to keep my orange jerkin as a souvenir. It was a weird experience and…’ He laughs. ‘Now you are making me think about it!’

But it sounds as if he’s not the sort of person who has regrets. ‘Know what? I have loads. But lately, I’ve been thinking I don’t have to be that person and behave in that way. I’ve never noticed this before in 47 years.’

How has he not? ‘Because there has been too much hairspray in the way. You don’t notice because even when your life is dysfunctional you think that’s normality.’

I begin a sentence about the fame he enjoyed, or endured, in the 1980s, a time when he was one of the most recognisable people on the planet… But he cuts me off… ‘What do you mean “was”? I still am and always will be. Your talking about me as if I’m not here gets on my nerves. I’m here, in your presence!’

Then he redeems himself. ‘I sound like Gloria Swanson, don’t I? Look, no one can take any of that stuff away from me because it’s mine. I’ve learnt to appreciate what I have. My life is amazing. Being Boy George, putting on a hat and make-up, is amazing. And easy. Being George O’Dowd is the f—ing battle. I still moan as much as I always did, but I stop myself now. When things are kicking off, I can tell myself, “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to be nasty, you don’t have to be an a—h—.”‘

I mention that he seems to have a lot of anger just below his surface. ‘I come from a family that explodes. Mine is the great exploding family.’

Does he enjoy exploding? ‘Actually, I don’t. I don’t find it therapeutic. I’ve come to realise that when I snap at people they get hurt. When you care about someone… which is the difference. I care if it is someone in my family. When it’s someone from the record company it doesn’t mater if I shout, Yahhhbllagghh!!! at them.’

Record company executives don’t have feelings? Or is it more that he doesn’t care if they do? Isn’t that a little selfish? ‘You’re trying to narrow me down to a headline aren’t you? Yes Boy George was selfish, but he’s not now. I was a b——, but I recovered.

‘I need to go out and perform to the people who always forgive me for everything I do and that is the Great British public, God bless them. I go out there and feel so lucky. They still sing along with my songs.

‘To be honest, when I started this tour, I thought: “Who is going to want to come and see me after all this time?” But when you get to Norwich and Newcastle, I mean, all these weird people come along to see you, all these old ladies who dance and sing along to Karma Chameleon and shout [he adopts a Geordie accent], “I f—ing love you George.” In Northampton, there were all these stage-door hangers-on and they were my mum’s age; it was really sweet and really funny. I’ve become Barry Manilow!’

He can laugh at himself, and that is his redeeming feature. As well as being a builder, his father, Jerry, was a boxer, one who used to beat up his wife. By wearing make-up as a teenager, George was rejecting his father’s masculinity, clearly. But he may also have begun wearing black lipstick to get his father’s attention (he was one of six children, after all).

He still craves attention, which may partly explain his almost Tourette’s-like tendency to insult people. ‘It sounds like a name-drop, but Elton John rang me up the other day and it was really exciting,’ he says. ‘Elton John has my number! I had a barney with him a couple of years ago and I loved the fact that I had pissed him off [he had called him a ‘humourless grand old dame’]. I can’t believe I’ve registered with him. He was fuming, “I’m going to kill that Boy George!”‘ A result.

Does he fall in love easily? ‘I fall in lust easily, but I don’t think I’ve ever been in love. I look back and think was that love? But I’ve never been in that stage where I think I don’t want anyone else.’

According to his memoirs, his longest relationship was with Jon Moss, the drummer of Culture Club, who is now married with children. He wrote the band’s first hit Do You Really Want to Hurt Me about Moss. (Actually, it was the other way round. Boy George would throw bottles at Moss and once broke his fingers.) I ask if Moss was the love of his life. ‘I thought so but, with hindsight, I’m not sure he was. He was certainly the great drama of my life, but I’m not sure I love him more than I love my mother. No, I definitely love my mother more. Was it love? I cried. He punched me. There was music.’

Was he ever beaten up because he was gay? ‘By my own brothers. By kids at school, every day from the age of six they would shout “poof” at me. School was a hellhole.’

Did he ever fight back? ‘I can fight but I don’t like fighting. You scratch your nails.’

What about ‘muscle Marys’ such as Rupert Everett: gay men who work out? ‘I’m much tougher than Rupert Everett. I could knock him out in five seconds. Muscled men are the most scared because they are building a wall. We are the only culture who identifies with our persecutors, gay men trying to act straight. The toughest ones are the drag queens. They are the suffragettes. They are the warriors. You ain’t a man till you’ve walked in heels.’

John, his business partner, arrives for a meeting and George asks him if he will do him a favour and go out and get a packet of cigarettes.

‘You’re vile,’ George says.

A few minutes later the buzzer sounds again. It is someone called Lady Pat, a man, who is also expected at the meeting. ‘Do you smoke?’ George asks before buzzing him in.

‘No’

‘I hate you’

For the record, I didn’t make Courtney Love cry. She made herself cry, every time she mentioned Frances, her 15-year-old daughter from her marriage to Kurt Cobain, the frontman of the grunge band Nirvana. As she raised the subject four times over the course of two hours, this meant she cried four times: real, eye-dabbing, make-up running, sniffy-nosed tears. But this is to come. For now, if anything, it is she who is bringing me close to tears with her Buddhist chanting. I have to endure 15 minutes of it before the interview can get under way. We are in her hotel suite, one of London’s most exclusive. She is in the adjoining bedroom, chanting loudly. I am sitting waiting for her on a sofa surrounded by unruly piles of magazines, a guitar in a case, two full ashtrays, burning joss sticks, property details for a £4 million house she is looking at in Notting Hill, and racks of her clothes — Givenchy, mostly, as Love is the new muse for that label.

A gong sounds, the chanting stops and she appears smiling in a skimpy black nightie and no make up. There is a  longhaired man with her.  ‘This is my friend David,’ she says. ‘We’re chanting. Obviously. But he is so much better at explaining it that me.’ She disappears to get changed, leaving me with her guru. As he is explaining what the chanting means I reflect on the living (despite the odds) legend that is Courtney Love. This is a woman who seems to have  teetered on the edge of mayhem all her life — the heroin addiction, the air rage incidents, the tabloid headlines, the custody battles, the jail sentences, the star fucking, the millions made, the millions lost, the rehab — but she has never been boring. Or predicable. And although she was often described as the Yoko Ono to Cobain’s John Lennon, she was always a rock star in her own right. Indeed, immediately after her husband killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head in 1994, she embarked on a tour with her band Hole which, according to John Peel, verged on the heroic. ‘Swaying wildly and with lipstick smeared on her face, hands and, I think, her back, the singer would have drawn whistles of astonishment in Bedlam,’ he wrote.

Back in the hotel room, ten minutes have passed and the guru is coming to the end of his explanation. ‘I tend to chant with Courtney for two or three hours a day,’ he says. ‘A lot of celebrity Buddhists don’t like to put in the time. But she loves to chant.’

No kidding. It may make for inner harmony for her but for me the chanting adds to the sense of chaos in the hotel suite. But then there is always a sense of chaos when Courtney is in town, which is why she has been banned from staying at two of London’s finest hotels (on both occasions it was to do with fire alarms being set off). When she reappears she is doing pretend karate chops, I think because she is wearing a Vivienne Westwood outfit that looks as if it came from the props department of Kill Bill. It is a black corset affair with leggings, shoulder pads and buckles — I am staring at a particularly strange looking buckle when I realise it is the  shop security tag still attached. As she talks she keeps adjusting her bra to try and get comfortable. She also tries to work out what to do with a rogue cord that dangles between her legs, gives up and instead gathers her long, bottle blonde hair over one shoulder — and teases two strands of her fringe down so that they hang dangerously over her eyes.

Courtney Love is 43 and in fine shape. Thanks to Madonna’s macrobiotic nutritionist, she is back to a size 10. But her weight yo-yos — ‘You have to be thin all the time to make it as an actress,’ she says, ‘but my rock weight is 20 or 30 more lbs than my film weight.’ She juggles the two careers. ‘Performing on stage is like great sex,’ she tells me. ‘Of course you want to be known for giving the best blow job in town but you also want to get yours, too.’ She has a new album out in the spring and various film projects in the pipeline, trying to regain some of the form she last lost since her Golden Globe nominated role in The People vs. Larry Flynt and her equally good performance in Man on the Moon opposite Jim Carrey. Actually, it’s three careers if you include the fashion thing: ‘Givenchy is like me,’ she says. ‘A legendary brand which has had its ups and downs.’

She lights up a cigarette and holds it between two straight, long fingers with nails varnished vampy black. Although her eyes are large, green and — because slightly divergent — slightly mesmerising, it is her pouty mouth that arrests the attention. She begins applying lipstick with a paintbrush as she is talking. And boy can she talk. She has a big mouth in every sense. A ‘big dirty rock mouth,’ as it was once memorably described

I have to say, I like her instantly. I like her goofy grin. I like the crack in her husky voice. I like the fact that she is funny, chatty, animated, boastful, open, vulnerable, namedropping and unselfconscious. She is also flirty, jiggling her eyebrows up and down when she wants me to look at something on her laptop — some art she is buying.     Our opening exchanges goes something like this. ‘Did you like David?’ He seemed very nice. ‘I share him with Orlando Bloom.’ And how does feel after a chanting session? ‘Sometimes really aggressive. Sometimes really energised and ready for a fight.’ I see. Does her chanting fill a vacuum left by heroin? ‘I didn’t have an addiction when I was 24, which was when I started chanting. I try to focus on gratitude when I chant, because it kills anxiety and depression dead. I play tapes of gratitude in my head. Occasionally though, a negative thoughts sneaks through. Lately I’ve been getting weird visions of Vince Vaughn running around naked in an executioner’s mask.’

While one must not make light of mental health issues — especially in relation to someone who has been in and out of therapy all her life — the journalistic devil on my shoulder does whisper into my ear at this point, thank goodness she’s still bonkers. Does she ever fear for her sanity, I ask?  ‘I am naturally pretty paranoid,’ she says. ‘And I have a right to be.’

Because? ‘Mostly it is about money. What has caused problems for me is not understanding money. I had it and I had it stolen. I’ve had to rebuild it. It is a powerful thing. It has killed people in my life, the force of greed and covetousness. It has hurt me. I was embezzled.’

An estimated $20 million of her money was siphoned off in a case that is still being investigated by the FBI. Does she mean the royalties from Nirvana? ‘Not just the royalties from Nirvana, it is all the money I have made, too. I’m not a slice of baloney myself. I’ve sold nine million records.’ It’s true, it’s true. She was known for her grungy guitar playing, as well as for the way she would stage-dive into the crowd wearing charity-shop dresses and no knickers. Her biggest hit ‘Celebrity Skin’ still stands up, in my opinion. ‘The last money thing is from 98 to 04 when my assets were frozen,’ she continues. ‘I had everything stolen and so did my daughter, and that is upsetting.’

And so the sobbing starts. When she has composed herself I note that she is clearly very protective about her daughter. ‘She is 15 now. That’s a difficult age. She slept with me for the first time in a long time last night.’ She starts to well up again. ‘Sorry, I hate getting emotional. We get on well most of the time but teenagers are hard. Being a single mother is hard.’

Love’s own childhood had no stability whatsoever. A Juvenile System report detailed the eight different institutions where she was held in care between 1978 and 1980. Her case folder bore the phrase: ‘Parents’ whereabouts unknown’. Aged 16, she became a stripper.

Does she consciously avoid repeating the mistakes her own parents made? ‘Oh my God, so much. We went to Trudie and Sting’s the other night because Trudie has a daughter who is Franny’s age, but it was hard. For one thing they were going to see Control and I wanted to show Francis that she could go out in London without a nanny or a bodyguard, so they went by themselves. I wanted to get her a cake because it is the first time she has gone anywhere on her own. She came back so disturbed because — Daaa! — I forgot what the movie was about [the death of the lead singer of Joy Division]. Anyway Sting was there and he was reading his book and there were all their other kids there who had a mom and a dad, and Franny felt the odd one out.’ She wipes her tears. ‘I’m sorry. I just want things to be good for her but she’s a lot like me and a lot like her dad. I think she got the best of both of us, so there’s that.’

Good cheekbones, I imagine. ‘Yeah she is a very good-looking girl. I don’t want to put her in a burqa. But I want to protect her from your tabloid press. I can take it but she…’ Love trails off for a moment. ‘It happens to me when I get papped in the UK, in the car. It’s like Diana! Diana! Diana! You can’t see anything because of the flashbulbs. At least I know how it works now. According to the tabs I’m dating Pete Docherty and we went to a Wetherspoons. Yeah, I get the joke. Fuck off. I hardly know Pete Docherty. I’ve talked to him once on the phone about rehab, because I’m a good rehab guide. Rehab worked for me because the judge ordered me to do 90 days, not 28. It was in a house doing one-to-one cognitive therapy, all 12 steps. It’s a really good invention, the 12 steps. They gave me this sheet with all these negative attributes — paranoid, self-centred and so on — and told me to circle the ones that applied to me. Man there were a lot of circles on mine. It was like an inventory. Then I had to write these damn letters to people I had fucked over. Trouble was, my memory was so fucked from the heroin I couldn’t remember who I had fucked over.’

No one at all? ‘Well some things came back to me. I had to apologise to some guy I’d called a cunt. And when I was telling this to my friend Chris Rock he said, “You should apologise to me, too.” I said why? He said: “I remember getting 56 texts from you one morning.” I was like: what? He said: “I read some of them out on stage and, believe me, you kept a lot of brothers and sisters sober.”

Does she still have memory lapses? ‘The other night I was at the V&A and got talking to Vivienne Westwood, Dame Vivienne, and I said “great to meet you, I’m a huge fan” and she said “we’ve met before. And we talked on the phone for three hours one time.” I had zero recollection of it. I said: “was I horrible? Was I boring?” She said, “No, I would have hung up on you if you had been. You were terribly amusing.” Can you smell that?’ I test the air. ‘Smells like weed.’ Not mine. ‘Not mine either. Must be coming from the airducts. Someone is having a smoke. What were we talking about?’

Her memory. ‘Yeah, I’m just going through my three and half years sober and I’m afraid I burned some of my memory cells out. A lot of Courtney stories end in a fire. Usually on a set. But hey. I’m not a bad person. There were massive gaps in my education: like you are not supposed to sleep with people who are married. I didn’t know what to be scared of. I’ve stepped over the line here and there in my romantic behaviour but I have always been pretty moral.’

And pretty consistent. She likes to stick to front men: the front men of The Smashing Pumpkins, The Lemonheads and Nine Inch Nails to name three. She has also been consistently, um, high spirited in her behaviour. Does she feel when she is in a public place that she has to live up to a public version of herself as a hell raiser? ‘No, no no. There is a disconnect  between who I am, and how I live, and how I am perceived. I used to play up to it a bit when I was on drugs because who cares: sex, drugs, rock and roll WAAAAH! I always seem to come number 2 to Keith Richards in lists of greatest hell raisers of all time. But if I was a guy I wouldn’t even be on the list! I didn’t know it was such a guy’s job. It’s like playing football in high heels and lipstick, no wonder it smears.’

Her appearance on Letterman is the stuff of You Tube legend. She talked hyperactively, wouldn’t leave and kept flashing her breasts. “That’s not art, that’s just me not being the greatest celebrity of all time. I’m not 19 any more so me standing on a Letterman’s desk is not as acceptable.’

An embarrassment threshold; does she have one? ‘God yes, I get embarrassed all the time. Are you crazy? I don’t like things that embarrass my kid… You’ve got me crying again.’

In 1992 Love admitted to Vanity Fair that she had used heroin while (unknowingly) pregnant. Afterwards she claimed that she had been misquoted. The LA County Department of Children’s Services nevertheless took the Cobains to court, claiming that the couple’s drug usage made them unfit parents. After months of legal wrangling, they were granted custody of their daughter. There have been other custody battles since. ‘I am a good mother and the proof is in the pudding,’ she says. ‘I would never, ever put Franny on television. I would never let her do press. She has been offered the lead in four features, and was offered a campaign for Hilfiger, and I tell her about these offers but she wants to be a political journalist anyway so… I don’t think any kid has been more wanted by both her parents and I don’t think any parents have ever wanted to fuck up less than we did.’

Some of the gaps in her memory must be good for her self-preservation, I suggest. ‘I don’t have a gap about Kurt.’

Does she go through guilt about his death, wandering if there was anything more she could have done to prevent him from killing himself? ‘It’s a horrible thing, but it is harder on a woman because widowers don’t get the blame for suicide and widows do. Imagine having to grieve in public. It almost prevents you from having your own grief. I went kooky bananas ten years later because I didn’t have a real association to my own grief. I didn’t do a bereavement group. I didn’t see a psychiatrist. I went on tour. Those shows were cathartic, but I was very defensive about what I would let out then. I was swaggering around all fucked up on pills but I wasn’t really telling the truth.’ She lights another cigarette. ‘Where were we? Yeah, my album. You’re going to love it.’

And that’s her. She is shameless. She is droll. She is a survivor, just, lurching from chronic insecurity to raging ego, self-belief and ambition. ‘I want to get to the grown up table once more and leave it with some grace,’ she says.        The smoke alarm goes off. She crosses the room to open the window. ‘It is going to do this for a moment then it will stop,’ she says, shouting above the noise. ‘I hate this hotel.’ On her way back she gets tangled up in the Vivienne Westwood cord dangling between her legs. ‘I wonder what this string is for? I’m not sure what it signifies. The Dame sent me a few nice pieces, but this one is just crazy.’ She looks in her packet for another cigarette. ‘Shit. Do you smoke?’ When I shake my head she picks up the phone. ‘Could you get two packs of Marlborough Lights as fast as possible please.’

And so the encounter ends as chaotically as it began.

 

It’s not the sight of the groupies that haunts me, but the sound, or rather the absence of sound, as they ghost past us on their way up the stairs to the dressing-room. It takes me a moment to figure out that the reason they aren’t talking to each other is that they don’t know each other. One of the band members, the keyboard player, I think, has picked them from the audience on the basis of their looks. Half-a-dozen of them, all in their late teens and early twenties, and all, surprisingly, in pretty frocks, as if they were going to a Sunday school meeting. They have been separated from their friends like lambs weaned from their mothers. The silence of the lambs.

The ‘us’ they are filing past is James Blunt and me. He has a bottle of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and not a hair in place – tousled just so, like a Renaissance painting of John the Baptist – but they don’t realise it’s him because he has changed out of the suit he was wearing on stage and is now in jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket, as well as a pink feather boa and star-shaped novelty sunglasses. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is the end of the day; we need to go back to the start, well, to the middle, when the seats are empty and the Texan sun is at its most unforgiving.

A barefoot and unshaven Blunt is wearing normal sunglasses and shorts as he plays his piano, strums his guitar and sings his plaintive songs into the microphone for the sound check, all the while looking out with his soulful eyes over an empty, open-air arena in Houston. At 5ft 7in, he’s not a tall man, but he has presence and an unaffected manner – a certain maturity, too, one that you wouldn’t normally associate with a pop star in the ascendant.

But then he is 34 and this is his second career, his first being as an officer in the Household Cavalry. He joined after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in sociology. He became a champion skier for the Army and not only saw active service in Kosovo, but also guarded the Queen Mother’s coffin when she was lying in state.

Tonight he will be supporting Sheryl Crow, though, since his second album ‘All the Lost Souls’ and the single from it, ‘1973’, went straight to number one in America, he is arguably the bigger act these days. Indeed, not since Elton John has there been a more successful British singer-songwriter in the States.

His first album, ‘Back to Bedlam’, also went to number one over here, as it did in 18 other countries, making it the biggest-selling album of the millennium. It even entered the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-selling album in one year. But it was his first single that really put him on the map. You’re Beautiful became the sound of that summer. It was everywhere, and still is – having become a favourite at weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. I even heard a brass band playing it at an agricultural show in the Yorkshire Dales this summer.

As well as millions of sales, James Blunt has won Brit awards, Ivor Novello awards, MTV awards and various Grammy nominations. In terms of credibility, he’s headlined at Glastonbury and won the respect of the world-weary music press. Yet not everyone loves him, as he points out when we get something to eat in the canteen area back stage.

‘After Back to Bedlam really started selling,’ he says, ‘there was this sudden aggression towards me in the UK, for whatever reason, and that focused my mind, made it clear to me what I was doing and why I wanted to do it. I write songs for myself. I don’t write them for you, or for anyone else, I write them because I have experiences that I need to process. I don’t have the answers all the time, but I do have lots of questions, and I express them in the songs I write.’

He is, I think, alluding to a poll last year of ‘the most annoying things in life’, which put him at number four, just behind cold-callers and queue-jumpers. ‘I haven’t met anyone who voted in the poll, have you?’ he says when I mention this. ‘That poll probably came from a website that was after some publicity. You and I could do the same poll very quickly right now and it would count as a poll. We could do one about annoying newspapers, for example. I promise the Sunday Telegraph wouldn’t be in my list. My parents take it.’

His father, a retired colonel in the Army Air Corps, manages his son’s finances. His mother arranged the purchase of his six-bedroom villa in Ibiza (he also has a chalet in Verbier and recently bought a place in Chelsea). ‘I’m not married,’ he says, ‘and so the support structure in my life is my parents. I’m closer to them now than I have ever been.’

He certainly isn’t married, as the photographs of him emerging from nightclubs with various high-profile women on his arm attest. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was probably the best known socialite, Jessica Sutta, of the Pussycat Dolls, the most glamorous. He also seems to be photographed regularly cavorting on beaches with bikini-clad models such as Petra Nemcova, whom he dated and then dumped – unceremonious dumping being his way of ending relationships, according to the tabloids. He once said he found himself in a swimming pool in LA with nine naked women. ‘I was the only bloke. It was the only time I wished my mates were there, purely to spectate. I had arrived. It was a moment.’

Now he says of the tabloid interest in his peripatetic love life: ‘Last week I went to my home in Ibiza and was photographed by the paparazzi in my swimming trunks with girls. What is the point of that? I’m not that bothered, but maybe the media should be concentrating more on global warming or the Russian invasion of Georgia.

‘Looking at me in my swimming trunks is not a great sight. It’s a waste of time. There generally is a long lens pointing at me wherever I go, these days. I’m comfortable with it. I appreciate how things work. But my record label said something about my always being photographed coming out of nightclubs and I thought, “But this is what I do. I was doing it before the second album came out, so what is different now? You didn’t tell me to stop then.” I’m not going to change my life because of these people. I don’t see why I should.’

His label also gets him to dye his grey hairs and be enigmatic about his love life, which is an old tactic dating back to the Beatles – they had to pretend they didn’t have wives and girlfriends so that fans could fantasise they were in with a chance.

Actually, at the time of going to press, Blunt seems to be going out again with one of his old flames, Verity Evetts, an Oxford-educated barrister. He has also stayed friendly with some of his other exes, the socialites at least. He told one – an ex who got married not long ago – that he doesn’t feel ‘centred’ at the moment and would like to get married as well. Then again, he also said that he never tires of singing You’re Beautiful night after night because it gets him laid night after night.

Either way, he tells me he has grown used to the idea that his mother will probably find out from the papers what he has been up to, and with whom, before he has had a chance to tell her. ‘And my [two] sisters are quick to email me about things in the papers, laughing their heads off. I get healthy, ritual abuse from them, and give it back myself.’

As we are talking, I can’t decide whether the way Blunt smiles all the time is disarming or disturbing. He’s like a victim of a religious cult, smiling at the beginning of the sentence and at the end. I guess he has a lot to smile about, but also I sense a great deal of insecurity to disguise.

Then, I’m distracted by the sight of Sheryl Crow playing table tennis across the room. She has been holding her adopted son in one arm as she bats with the other, and now, even more distractingly, she is heading straight for us. ‘Are we going to have one of our little conversations on stage again tonight, James?’ she says. ‘That flirting thing. I think it worked well last night.’

They discuss the duet they will sing – a cover of Cat Stevens’s The First Cut is the Deepest – then we both watch her shimmy away, her blonde curls bobbing. ‘She’s very down to earth,’ he says. ‘I’d met her a couple of times, which was why she asked me on this tour. We do end up playing a lot of table tennis on the road. We’ve done 117 shows so far this year, in 117 cities, and there are a lot of hours to fill in the day.’

As he sleeps on his tour bus with his band, one city tends to blur into another. When I joke that he is in Cincinnati now, he looks genuinely confused. ‘No, this is?… Oh, right. Actually, I always get the tour manager to say where we are just as I’m going on stage. I still managed to get it wrong the other night, saying “Hello Dallas” when I meant Austin. I’m surprised I got out alive.’

He is funny on the subjects of things that go wrong. ‘People are normally surprised by my show, which is more energetic than you might think. Jumping on the piano. Jumping out into the audience and running up and down the aisle high-fiving them. But going off the stage can be quite dangerous. I broke my finger once. My legs carried on when I jumped off, and I smacked down on the ground. The spotlight was on me, and when I got back to the piano I hit the wrong note and thought, “Why did I do that?” And I looked down and saw it was because my finger was broken, sticking out an angle. Look,’ he says holding it up. ‘It’s still crooked.’

On another occasion, in Chicago, he jumped 8ft off the stage. ‘When I began running to the audience, a security guard stuck his arm out and I thought, “Does he want a hug?” Then next thing I know he’s rugby-tackled me. He wouldn’t release me and I was screaming in his ear, “I’m the f—ing singer.” I had to wait for the other guards to pull him off.’

I would have thought Blunt’s training in unarmed combat would have helped. I presume he still works out. ‘No, never. Couldn’t handle it. Too boring. I am a hyperactive person though.’ He likes an adrenaline rush, as well, having recently bought an 1100cc Moto Guzzi V11 Sport motorbike. There’s also the skiing, which he still does, and the riding. Actually, he tells me, he never really liked horses before joining the Life Guards. So why did he join that particular regiment?

‘Well, it is a reconnaissance regiment.’ But they are all so tall in the Life Guards, did that not make him self-conscious? ‘Some are. The Foot Guards tend to be taller regiments, though. The Life Guards take a few shrimps, as well. Besides, they are on horses, so height isn’t so important. Also being in that regiment had the benefit of being in Knightsbridge. I got a chance to be in London and meet people in the music scene.’ And groupies, as it happens.

As he paraded up and down the Mall in plumed helmet and shiny breastplate, girls would stick their phone numbers down his knee-length boots. But it was his time in Kosovo that really made girls swoon. He used to strap his guitar to the outside of his tank, because there wasn’t room for it inside. He had learnt to play the violin at five, the piano at seven and the guitar at 14, while a pupil at Harrow.

He writes his songs on piano and guitar. ‘But mainly guitar because it is easier to carry around. It’s like a child messing around with a toy. If a tune comes to me I don’t record it instantly. I think if I remember it, then it must be worth remembering, and if I forget it, then it was forgettable.’

Does he have any anxiety dreams about forgetting lines or chords? ‘Not yet. Perhaps I will tonight. Perhaps you’ve jinxed me. But audiences aren’t judgmental, and if things go wrong and you can look them in the eye, that is fine. The only people who are judgmental are the journalists. I will be conscious of you being there in the audience judging me.’

Blimey. Sorry about that. Is it true he signs breasts? ‘Not that I remember. Not that I’m fussy what I sign. A lot of men started coming to the shows after I appeared on Top Gear last year. That was such fun. I spun the car five times. I thought I might as well make the most of it. I am competitive.’

He recorded one of the fastest laps, but I’m surprised blokes didn’t think him manly before that, given his tour of duty in Kosovo. ‘It’s because I sing songs that are heart-on-your-sleeve and therefore I must be overly emotional. Nothing I can do about it. I could pose more, but I am comfortable with my masculinity.’

He has said that his lyrics are autobiographical, in which case, are we to assume that the lyric on his new album, ‘I killed a man in a far away land’, means he killed a man in a far away land? I only ask because in the past he has said that he would never try to exploit what he went through, what he saw. ‘You should ask any soldier how many lives he has saved. How they do it is no one else’s business. What I took from my experience in Kosovo is that you are told from one day to the next who your enemy is and it keeps changing. That’s what is happening in Iraq, too. I believe in looking people in the eye, looking for the common humanity.’

He is a great believer in looking people in the eye. He will use the phrase again later and it seems to reveal a Christ complex, or a John the Baptist one. That direct and challenging stare of his. It would also explain the hair.

It is time for him do some photographs before he goes on stage and, endearingly, he says he is ‘not fussed’ about the grooming he is offered before they are taken.

On stage his features contort with passion when he sings. The big video screen goes in tight on his face. His voice is by turns soft and tremulous and forceful, but always high. Having seen him in concert once before, a couple of years ago, I notice the tone of his banter has changed.

‘Wow it’s hot tonight,’ he says now. ‘I’m surprised any of you are wearing any clothes. We could all take them off and get friendly.’ It is suggestive, designed to get the teenage girls in the audience screaming. Before he used to joke about his ‘girlie voice’ and taking helium to get it that way, and being ‘a bit wet’ and the ‘housewives’ favourite’. I think now he has realised that, actually, he is a proper musician, a popular one, too, and that he doesn’t need to apologise for it.

Afterwards, back in the dressing-room, he strips to the waist as he talks because he wants to take a shower before going back on to do his duet with Sheryl Crow. ‘Things got a bit hairy out there when I jumped into the crowd,’ he says. ‘Did you see that? Some thought it was some kind of sport to grab me.’

I watch his duet from the side of the stage and notice he whispers something in Sheryl Crow’s ear and then she starts running her hands over his trousers suggestively, patting them. Afterwards, I ask what he said. ‘”Is now a good time to ask for your phone number?” She was checking my pockets, pretending to look for a pen.’

He shows me round the gold-coloured tour bus where he will be sleeping tonight as they drive to their next gig in Dallas. It is full of hi-tech equipment and is nicely air-conditioned but there isn’t much space in the bunks. ‘We do live in close proximity,’ he says. ‘Some of us stay up late. This is the crew end, they have to get up early.’

Where do the groupies go? ‘Never have groupies on here. Never. They’d only get in if we invited them in. But we’d only ever invite friends in.’

Does he sleep OK? I heard he has to take sleeping pills. ‘It is a bit of a rough sleep, but better than a hotel and taking planes all the time because you have to get to the airport two hours early, which is miserable. Then your flight gets delayed.’

He is drinking champagne from a plastic cup. ‘This is for your benefit,’ he says. ‘The tour management went out and bought a bottle of champagne because he thought I should be seen drinking it. Better for my image. Isn’t that sweet? Normally, we drink vodka and beer. In fact, I think I’d rather have a beer, now. Want one?’ He opens a well-stocked fridge then takes me to the back of the bus where there is some seating space. He has one small case which he pulls out from a cupboard. It continues a few pairs of socks, T-shirts and a spare pair of jeans. No photographs or mementos. ‘This is all I have for 14 months on the road,’ he says. ‘I’m not known for style.’

Does he know how much he is worth? ‘No I don’t, not very interested in it to be honest. I travel with hand luggage only. That is why I always seem to be wearing the same clothes in photographs. If a tabloid says my clothes aren’t fashionable or my hair looks stupid, I really don’t worry about it. Don’t have any hair gel.’

In London, he takes the Tube or the bus. He prefers pubs to restaurants. When he goes to Ibiza, he flies easyJet. Still, that’s at home. Presumably on the road he can afford to be more self-indulgent.

Another lyric that we can only assume is autobiographical is ‘I’ve taken a s—load of drugs’. It is. Though his only comment on the subject is that he has ‘a comfortable relationship with drugs’. His relationship with fame is less comfortable. Oscar Wilde said there were two forms of tragedy: not getting what you want, and getting it. Is that how it felt for him when he went to number one? ‘Actually, I don’t think I had been dreaming about it. Certainly, I hadn’t anticipated being so recognisable so quickly.

‘I do remember getting a phone call from the record company, who said both the single and the album have gone to number one, and thinking, “S—, this is not what I expected.” I hadn’t prepared myself for it. Number two is great. Number two is nice. I sensed then it would mean having to change from being a musician to being a celebrity and that that would be a change for the worse. Fame doesn’t affect me, but it does affect everyone else around me. As for celebrity, it is the worst invention of the modern world. Gossip columns treat your life as if it were a cartoon. Relationships reduced to cartoons.’

Although there are other public-school bands around at the moment – Radiohead, Coldplay – Blunt seems to have suffered more than most from a perception that he is too posh to be credible. His family name is Blount (and his middle name Hillier), but he changed it to Blunt to sound, well, blunter and more proletarian.

When he tells me he would nevertheless still send a son of his to Harrow – ‘I think I would. I think I would. Public schools make individuals rather than sheep’ – I ask what he makes of the mood change now that the old Etonian David Cameron has made it OK to be posh. ‘Is it? I must come back to Britain immediately. Is it really safe to come back?

‘It’s not a dirty word to be posh, people come up to me and no one gives a damn if I’m posh. It’s about having a normal conversation and looking people in the eye.’

We head back to the dressing-room where he puts on his feather boa and novelty sunglasses then we wander back downstairs to have a word with Sheryl Crow, who is signing autographs. This is the moment at which the keyboard player says: ‘This way to the good-time room girls’ and the silent groupies dutifully appear.

I hear Kathleen Turner before I see her. She has a guttural, slurring voice that is several fathoms below the surface of normal female speech. As I sit waiting for her with my head in a book, this voice rolls up and out across the restaurant like a breaker. We are on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, around the corner from her apartment overlooking the Hudson River, and she has stopped to say hello to some friends on her way to my table. She has her back to me and I am filled with a sudden trepidation as I wait for her to turn. Her voice, as she herself has put it, is more recognisable than she is these days.

It seems a cruel fate to be frozen in the public memory as a lithe, icy-yet-smouldering, husky-voiced sex symbol in your mid-twenties, but that is what the 54-year-old Kathleen Turner has to contend with every day. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which she was considered cinematic Viagra in her day. She was even offered that draughty Sharon Stone role in Basic Instinct and turned it down on the grounds of it being too tacky. Certainly, it is no exaggeration to describe her as an icon of 1980s cinema, not least because Body Heat, her first film and first box-office hit, was made in 1981 and her last big hit, The War of the Roses, was made in 1989.

In Body Heat she played a cold-hearted femme fatal opposite William Hurt and delivered the unforgettable line, ‘You’re not too smart. I like that in a man.’ She was pretty chilling in her second film as well, The Man With Two Brains, and that was a comedy. A trilogy of rom-coms with Michael Douglas followed – Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile and The War of the Roses – and these made her one of the most bankable female stars in Hollywood.

There was an Oscar nomination for Peggy Sue Got Married and then her turn came as Jessica Rabbit, the cartoon figure she voiced in Who Framed Roger Rabbit – ‘I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.’ But then, in the 1990s, she seemed to disappear off the radar. There were sightings of her looking bloated and raddled; reports of her having become an alcoholic. She didn’t deny them. She thought them preferable to the truth.

She had succumbed to rheumatoid arthritis, a crippling auto-immune disease that affects the tissue in the joints, and the steroids she was taking for it were the cause of her changing appearance and making her look puffy – though the vodka she started drinking to kill the pain didn’t help. As things transpired, she did become an alcoholic and went into rehab in 2002.

But instead of becoming a recluse when she came out, she reinvented herself as a stage actress, an acclaimed one, both on Broadway and in the West End: first as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, then in an award-winning performance as Martha, the acerbic, hard-drinking faculty wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? After that, in 2006, she got a divorce and sat down to write an autobiography. There’s a lot to talk about, then. The woman has lived.

And here I am, sitting at a corner table in the restaurant, waiting for her to turn round. When she finally does, the air tightens. She gives a toss of the head and a smile exposing expensive American teeth – she had them fixed after the studios complained that, because she had spent part of her teenage years in London, she had ‘English teeth’.

When she sits down, I see she is wearing a silky Chinese jacket and no make-up. Her skin is not smooth and she has a low brow, with thick, dusty blonde hair that spills over her shoulders. For a moment, this adds to an impression that her features are somehow too small for her face, then they seem to come into focus and I realise that there always was something snubby about her look. Hers was an enigmatic beauty, neither obvious nor bland – chiselled from wood rather than sculpted from marble. And something about the way light catches her eyes, one hazel, one blue, as she tilts back her head makes her suddenly unmistakable.

‘Friends of mine,’ she growls with a backward look over her shoulder. ‘Like just about everyone around here, they work in the theatre.’ She has lived in the theatre district of New York for most of her adult life, eschewing Hollywood because she didn’t want to raise her daughter there. ‘Your engagement with the world is completely out of whack in LA. I mean, all their body-image problems. Once I had a daughter, there was no way in hell I was going to bring her up out there.’

She is quite unstarry in her habits, she tells me. Takes buses. Potters around the grocery store and the pharmacist. Chats to the garbage men she sees every morning on her way to the gym. They know about her numerous feet and knee operations and are used to seeing her with a cane or on crutches. ‘Yeah, this is my neighbourhood. Lived here for 16 years. Let’s eat. I’m hungry. I’m going to have steak tartare. Haven’t had much meat lately.’

I nearly choke on my drink. Though she didn’t mean it that way, it just sounds so, well?… What about alcohol? I ask. Has she had much of that lately? ‘Just back from a two-week vacation to the wine region of northern California. Rented a convertible. It was so nice not to have a schedule. I have friends in the vineyards there. So, yeah, sometimes I drink wine.

‘I know it is not approved behaviour but, the truth is, I haven’t had an incident for many years now. Hope I never do again. I know it is a serious danger, but I don’t have the pain that I had and don’t have the personal pressures that I had. What can I say? Alcohol is a powerful anaesthetic. It works! It works!’ She gives a raucous laugh then looks serious again. ‘It is so hard to explain to people that kind of chronic, endless pain that you can’t do anything to relieve – can’t sit, stand, lie, anything. It hurts from the inside out. It’s hard to explain what it does to your mind. You will take any escape. I went too far with the drinking but I don’t feel I have the need or the inclination to do that any more.

‘You know, RA is a very bad disease. Very difficult. You have a permanent low-level fluey feeling, a constant temperature and nausea.’ She raises her arms in the air, clenches her fists and shakes them. ‘You think, “Get the f— outta my body!”‘

She still feels angry about her disease, clearly. ‘My first feeling was relief that it had a name, because I thought I was dying from something nameless. Having a name for it gave me a point of attack. Honestly?…’ She sighs. ‘I was 37 years old when I was diagnosed and I thought, why should I expect to be incapacitated? It wasn’t as if I had done a stupid stunt that broke my neck – though, boy, I came close to that.

‘I suppose I felt a sense of helplessness. The day I was told, I went from the hospital to kindergarten for a meeting with my daughter’s teacher and looked at these little chairs and started crying because I knew there was no way I would be able to get into that chair. Anger certainly came along after that. Anger is never far from my sense of self. A core of anger has sustained me through many things. I become more articulate in an argument. I’m scary. When I go quiet, run!’

In her autobiography, Send Yourself Roses, she writes that she wants to apologise to anyone she was unpleasant to when she was drinking. In what ways unpleasant? ‘I’ve seen it in other families but not mine at all. We were never discourteous. Never have a tone of voice that was harsh. Then to hear it coming from my own mouth. It was like I was possessed. It was terrible. I was ashamed and shocked. Didn’t know I had it in me. Wrong!’

Her decision not to reveal the truth about her illness was one she took with her agent as well as her husband. The logic was that, in Hollywood at least, it is more acceptable for you to drink or do drugs than to be ill. Contracts are more likely to waive insurance for drink and drug addiction, than for serious illness. There was a precedent for this, after all. Michael J. Fox hid his Parkinson’s disease for years so that he could keep working.

Her illness, she says, sapped not only her strength but also her confidence. ‘And then there was the personal side, too,’ she says as her steak tartare arrives. ‘The sexual relationship is not pleasurable because it hurts to be touched. My husband was wonderfully patient and supportive, but I missed the sex. I missed it as being a part of me, part of my identity. I enjoy sex. I enjoy the hell out of it!’

How are things in that respect at the moment? ‘Boring. Not easy. It’s not so easy. I think many men are put off by, well, by me.’I suppose the name comes with some baggage. ‘Maybe. Maybe they don’t want to be part of this, have this responsibility, being photographed and appearing in public and having your life scrutinised. Maybe they are right to choose not to.’

There are scratches on the backs of her hands. ‘My cats have been at me,’ she says when she notices me noticing them. She lives alone these days, after being married for 22 years to Jay Weiss, a wealthy New York property developer. Their marriage had survived years of scrutiny, so what, I ask, was the reason for their split in the end? ‘I don’t think there is a simple explanation. I don’t think there ever is. I think we became too difficult for each other because our lives were going different ways. He wanted to be part of the public world less and less. He was tired of the publicity, and the travel, and being, as he would call it, “Mr Turner”.’

She reckons she and her husband are still great friends – just happier apart. At first she felt relieved to be on her own. ‘The peace of my own place, you know. I started painting rooms all these colours that he would have minded, one green, one terracotta… Then I started to grieve because I realised, “Nobody knows where I am right now.” Always, for 20-some years, Jay knew where I was.’

On the other hand, she felt she was ‘coming to a place where I was opening up more and I didn’t want my life to get smaller. My daily, child-rearing duties were over. Well, one hopes. At the moment I have my doubts.’ She laughs again, a room-filling laugh. Her daughter, Rachel, is a 20-year-old university student. ‘She’s a terrific kid but I am kind of hoping she will leave home soon.’

Her lowest moment came, she says, when she found herself crying in the bathroom, unable to squeeze moisturiser out of a bottle because she could no longer grip anything with her hands. Rachel was four at the time and said, ‘I can do that for you, Mommy.’

At one point, her daughter even had to feed her because she couldn’t hold a spoon. ‘You never want to look helpless in front of your child. It was hard not being able to play with her. She would say, “Come on, Mom, run!”, and years later, after many operations and much medication, Rachel and I were going somewhere and I ran with her across a road and she said, “Mom, you ran!” I suppose I never expected to again, having been told I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, you know. Instinctively, I would count the steps to the bus stop, just to brace myself for having to walk a distance.’

Turner is pretty good on the self-analysis, describing herself as ‘funny, smart, irreverent, silly, stubborn and demanding’. Her self-awareness even extends to admitting that her self-awareness is probably down to her having had the same therapist, a woman, for the past quarter of a century. ‘It’s preventive really. She’s a sounding board. My shrink has told me I have unresolved issues.’

Such as? ‘My father dying when he did. I was 17. A great time of transition in my life.’ Her father, a US diplomat, died suddenly of coronary thrombosis while on a posting to London. He was mowing the lawn at the time and she reckons he died angry with her, because they had had an argument. Her father hadn’t been keen on her becoming an actress, considering it one up from street-walking. ‘His death left me with an inherent insecurity that I would fight to hide. I would see others as being as flawed as I see myself. It’s one reason I wouldn’t be 20 again. Who needs to be hag-ridden like that? I wasn’t a happy 20-year-old.’

Really? She wouldn’t want to be 20 again? Everyone wants to be 20 again. ‘Not me. I’m so much better now, at my job, at caring and relating to be people, so much less self-involved. I’m a better person now. I was inexperienced, then. I wouldn’t deliberately damage someone, but I couldn’t see what could be done to protect someone either.’

The actress lost her virginity at 19 and found the experience ‘disappointing’ – but sex got better, and by the time she had returned to America and graduated with a degree in drama from the University of Maryland she was very comfortable about her sexuality, particularly her power over men. Famously, she once said: ‘You know how it is when you know you are really sexy? On nights when I feel great about myself, if I walk into a room and a man doesn’t look at me, he’s either dead or gay.’

Our waitress arrives, an actress in between jobs. That was what Turner was doing when she was cast in Body Heat, and she went back to waitressing while waiting for the film to be released. ‘For all I knew, it was going to be a flop and I needed to carry on paying the rent. But then, suddenly, Bill [Hurt] and I were hot.

‘Men were pursuing me all over the place. I went to a dinner party and Jack Nicholson was there and afterwards, when I got home, Jack was ringing saying: “How could you do that to me? You were my date.” I said, “I was your date? No one told me.” It was very odd but there was all this?… I didn’t know the rules, having not grown up in LA, thank God?… I felt hounded and hunted by men there. I thought after Body Heat I would never marry. Because who would want to take that on? When Jay said I was the woman for him, I said, “Are you crazy?”‘

Sitting in the Manhattan restaurant enjoying her meat she seems animated to the point of hyperactivity. She widens her eyes, tosses back her head, cackles manically. She even slips into Dick van Dyke English from time to time, for my benefit, and uses oddly old-fashioned phrases such as ‘Oh my stars and garters’ and ‘Heavens to Betsy’.

At one point I excuse myself and forget to turn my tape-recorder off only to find, when I later listen to it, that she hums to herself when alone. Actually, she does seem self-possessed and she is quite a one for bigging herself up, talking about her ‘range’ and how her films were ‘ground-breaking’ and how her ‘agent tells me offers to direct are pouring in’. Her relentless self-affirmation seems to mask vulnerability, though, as well as a certain sadness.

This autumn, she plans to return to the London stage in the new Edward Albee play, Me, Myself and I. She plays the mother. ‘I said to Edward, “It’s mother roles for me from now on.”‘ The playwright is a big fan of hers, having told her she looked like his idea of Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: ‘Strong and somewhat plain, and unpretentious, as though she had really lived.’

It’s not a bad description of Kathleen Turner either. She does, after all, do a nice line in self-parody, having played on her reputation as a gay icon by taking the part of Chandler’s transsexual father in Friends – ‘A woman playing a man playing a woman,’ she recalls with her deep and wheezy laugh that sounds like the last drop being squeezed from a tube of suntan lotion. Her memoirs reveal her to be unprecious about Hollywood, too.

Burt Reynolds was ‘just nasty’, Steve Martin was ‘quite stiff and unfunny, when he wasn’t being funny on film.’ And Nicolas Cage she dismissed as a ‘self-involved egotist’, though she was obliged to apologise to him after he successfully sued her earlier this year for falsely characterising him as a drink-driver who once stole a chihuahua. So there is exaggeration there, as well as blunt honesty.

She reckons she is getting blunter with each passing year. As to her appearance, she says that it makes no sense for people to compare her to how she looked 25 years ago. ‘These people who do that didn’t stop growing or changing, so why would I look the same?’ She is quite right of course, but there does seem something almost wilful about the way she now checks her watch, takes out her lipstick and applies it unselfconsciously before popping it back in her handbag – I get the feeling she hadn’t worn make-up deliberately.

Anyway, she has another appointment downtown and, before she leaves, she slips her sunglasses on indoors, a little touch of Hollywood in New York.

First he took Manhattan… now Donald Trump wants to turn part of Scotland into a golf course. He’s already worth ‘about $10 billion’ but – in between barking orders to his secretary (and our interviewer) – he says he’s not motivated by money. Nigel Farndale almost believes him

The first surprise is that Donald Trump, a man who prides himself on his focus and discipline, does not have clear surfaces in his office high above Manhattan.

On the contrary, the place is cluttered with baseball bats, American football helmets, assorted trophies, silver spades propped against walls, and dozens of framed magazine covers stacked rather than hung. Evidence of a busy mind perhaps; or a short attention span.

‘This is Shaq O’Neal’s shoe,’ he says picking up what appears to be a shipping container from among the sports vests and baseballs laid out on a sofa. ‘Here, have a hold of it. It’s a monster, right? Size 22.

He took it off immediately after winning the NBA. And this is Tyson’s world heavyweight belt.’ He places a heavy, medallioned belt in my other hand.

‘The trouble is, I have nowhere to put these things. And all these.’ He gestures at the picture frames and then at the extravagant views from his windows, Central Park to the north, the Empire State Building to the south. ‘Don’t have enough wall space because of all these windows. When I have time I’ll get them hung up.’

It sounds improbable, this lack of space, given that we are standing on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the most valuable piece of property in Manhattan, and one of the many skyscrapers around the world which this 62-year-old real-estate tycoon owns. But the lack of time rings true. His day starts at 5.30am, and he takes between five and 10 minutes for lunch, at his desk.

Though he is friendly enough, when he comes to the end of a sentence he has a habit of saying, ‘Go ahead’, as in, next question. Boy, is it unnerving.

The second surprise, by the way, is that he has shaken hands. I thought he hated that, to the point of obsessive compulsiveness. ‘Well, you look like a nice clean guy,’ he says. ‘What am I going to catch from you? It is a terrible custom that we all have.

But I guess it’s better than the hug. I had this guy came in a couple of weeks ago, and he says, “Hi Donald,” and shakes my hand, then gives me a hug, then sits down and starts coughing, and I say, “What’s wrong?”

And he says, “I have the worst cold.” So I say, “Excuse me,” and go off and wash my hands.’ Pause. ‘Go ahead.’

What about social kissing? ‘The triple is the worst. In France. One, two, three. The triple is crazy.’

Is that what he has to do with his one-time girlfriend, Carla Bruni? Or is it the kiss on the hand, now that she is the wife of the President of France?

‘Carla? It’s not awkward with her. She’s a terrific woman who is going to do France proud. She is already a great first lady. Is that what they call it over there? Has she taken you guys in England by storm? So different.’ Pause. ‘Go ahead.’

Scotland, I say as we sit down – him behind a vast polished desk cluttered with phones, cuttings and magazines, most of them featuring him on the cover; me opposite on a chair that is slightly lower than his.

A few weeks ago he landed his plane, a private Boeing 727 with the name Trump written in giant gold letters on the side, on the tiny Isle of Lewis, dwarfing anything else flying into or out of that airport.

He then spent precisely 97 seconds looking (for the first time) at the house where his mother was born and raised, all the while being photographed by the world’s media.

Then, with all the subtlety of a bulldozer, proceeded to give evidence to a public inquiry into a controversial £1 billion development he is planning to build at Balmedie, 13 miles north of Aberdeen, arguing that he was going to build ‘the greatest golf course in the world’ there, and there was no point in doing it ‘in a half-assed way’.

Environmental groups have balked at the proposal to build two golf courses, a five-star hotel, 1,000 holiday homes and 500 private houses on a three-mile stretch of coastline. They have argued that it could cause irreversible damage to a protected area of sand dunes.You certainly like to make an entrance, I say.

‘Well, you know all that publicity surrounding my visit is good for Scotland. I got calls from all over the world after that, from people wanting to invest there. It was on all the front pages. So many people have written about it. I have cuttings sent. Kelly!’

This is another thing he does. Mid-thought he will bark out his secretary’s name.

‘Can you bring in that pile of cuttings?’ Kelly appears and hands them over. He flicks through them. The headline on one is ‘Donald Grump’. I ask what it is about.

‘To be honest I don’t have time to read them. I wouldn’t get anything else done if I did. These are just the ones about Scotland. There are 33 other locations we’re working on. We’re doing great jobs around the world. Dubai.

China. India. Russia. Look here. Your FT. Right on the front page. I think that’s good for Scotland. I think it’s a positive. I think we made our case well. We have right on our side. Assuming we get the necessary approvals, I think it will be a great thing for Scotland.

There are very few opponents. I think they were very ineffective in the commission. I think we made our case well. Great thing for Scotland.’

This is another thing. He repeats his message several times in the same block of thought, treating discourse as an exercise in attrition. (Take these repetitions as read from now on.) He also bigs himself up all the time.

In fact, I don’t think I have met anyone less self-conscious or, with the possible exception of Don King, the boxing promoter, more puffed-up with self-belief. The funny thing is though, it suits him. He does it with a strange, almost cartoonish charm.

Trump has said that one of the things that attracted him to the site was that he had ‘never seen such an unspoilt and dramatic seaside landscape’. Which is precisely what makes it ‘the perfect setting’ for a six-storey hotel with customised boulevard. Does he appreciate the irony of that comment?

‘You will hardly even see the course,’ he says. ‘There are hundreds of courses built on SSSIs [Sites of Special Scientific Interest] in the UK. Tremendous number. It’s going to be beautiful, otherwise it wouldn’t be suitable.’

When we spoke, the inquiry was due to publish its conclusion any day. Whatever the outcome, this has been an unusual experience for Trump. Has his celebrity been a hindrance in this case, does he suppose? ‘I think it’s been both positive and negative. Positive in the sense that people know the work I do.’

His name is on everything: his buildings, his planes, even, according to legend, his bed. Did the use of his name as part of the brand start out as egotism?

‘It probably started right here in this building. Every company in the country wanted this site. It was and remains the best site in New York.

In my twenties I wasn’t naming buildings after myself, and then I bought the building rights for this site over Tiffany and had a choice of naming this building Trump Tower or Tiffany Tower, and a friend of mine who was streetwise said, ”When you change your name to Tiffany, then call it Tiffany Tower.” So I called it Trump Tower and it was a tremendous success.’

I have been trying not to stare at his famous brush-forward, comb-over hairstyle, the one that was once compared to a sunken apricot soufflé and which has been described by the New York Times as ‘an elaborate structure best left to an architecture critic’. As we are talking about branding and image, the question seems to be begged. For the love of God, man, why?

‘People always comment on it, but it’s not that bad and it is mine. Look,’ he lifts it up. ‘I mean, I get killed on it. I had an article where someone said it was a hairpiece, but you can see it isn’t.’ Does he use gel?

‘No, I use spray actually. I’ll comb it wet then spray it so it doesn’t get blown away by the wind. I’ve taken a lot of heat on the hair but, hey, it seems to work. Some people say, “Why don’t you comb it back?” but I don’t think NBC would be happy. They don’t want to take any chances.

‘Hey, Kelly! Can you bring in the figures from Nielsen?’

He is referring to the ratings for his US television show, The Apprentice, which he launched, along with the catchphrase ‘You’re Fired’.

‘There,’ he says, handing over the figures. ‘Didn’t even write them myself! When my show became a success I had all these people trying to copy it. Martha Stewart. Richard Branson.

They all failed. I really like Richard even though he tried to copy my show and failed. His show bombed whereas mine was the number one rated. The Apprentice has just been renewed for two more years.’

What about Sir Alan Sugar? Hasn’t his British version of The Apprentice done as well as Trump’s?

‘He does a good job over there. I chose him with [the producer] Mark Burnett. We have tried this format in lots of countries with different entrepreneurs and Alan has done it best.’

I heard there was tension between them, especially after Sir Alan described Trump as being ‘full of himself’ and ‘loud and garish’.

‘You mean early on? Well, if there was tension it was because he said he was going to top the rating in the United States, relatively speaking, and I said that was hard because I had the number one show. You want a Coke? Two Diet Cokes please, Kelly!’

The Washington Post once said that, ‘everything in Trump world is fabulous, or in first place, or better looking, or richer, or taller, or it has bigger breasts.’ Other papers have not been so kind, one arguing that with his taste for gilt and marble and overstatement, Trump has all the style and subtlety of a latterday Liberace.

There has been much speculation about how much he is worth. Manhattan seems to be his own personal Monopoly board, it’s true, but some of the properties associated with him around the world are not necessarily owned by him.

He sued Timothy O’Brien, a New York Times reporter, over TrumpNation, a book that claimed he was worth considerably less that he said he was.

Does he, I ask, know how much he is worth?

‘I may be worth approximately $10 billion.’

Presumably, the goalposts keep moving, I say, and he finds himself competing with other billionaires.

‘You keep going forward. I think if you love what you’re doing, that’s what you do. I have a choice. I could stay home and relax but I chose not to do that. If you like what you’re doing, you keep going forward.

By the way, I know plenty of very rich people who are not happy people. Money can be a negative. I know people who became unhappy after making their money. Equally I know people without much money who are very content. So it’s a mindset.’

Is he happy? ‘I think so. Content.’

Kelly’s voice comes over the intercom. ‘It’s Ivanka.’

Trump looks at me knowingly, and says, ‘The famous Ivanka.’ He presses the speaker button on his phone.

‘Hi, honey, I have a powerful man in my office, from The Sunday Telegraph.’

‘Is he treating you nicely? Am I gonna have to come up there?’

‘He’s gonna treat me nicely until I read the story, then I’m going to say, “That sonofabitch, I should have never wasted my time.” How you doing, honey?’

Father and daughter discuss diaries. Can she do London? He’s going to be in LA that day, etc. The famous Ivanka is his daughter by the equally famous Ivana; she of the blonde beehive who once said: ‘Don’t get mad, get everything.’

Their messy divorce in 1992 came after Ivana discovered Donald’s affair with American beauty queen Marla Maples, whom he went on to marry, and later divorce. He is now married to Melania Knauss, a former model from Slovenia 24 years his junior.

Ivanka works for the Trump Organisation, as do her two grown-up brothers. He puts the phone down.

‘That was about Dubai. Go ahead.’

We talk about how inheriting wealth can undermine children. ‘I think it can be tough, but it’s hard to not give them these things because they grew up in Mar-a-Lago [Palm Beach] or Trump Tower, so it’s easier said than done.

But you want to keep your children grounded, so mine work. Three out of five of them have come into the business – the others are too young – and they are doing a great job, Ivanka, Don and Eric. The fact they are working keeps them grounded.’

Does he assume most people are motivated by money?

‘I don’t think I’m motivated by money. I’m motivated by enjoyment. I do what I do well. If I was motivated only by money I would have stopped working.’

Trump himself was born into wealth, the son of property tycoon Fred Trump. After gaining an economics degree in 1968, he joined his father’s company and worked with him for five years. Would he have made it without his father’s fortune? ‘My father built in Brooklyn and Queens, and I learnt a lot from him in terms of how to negotiate. The biggest thing I learnt was that my father worked hard and was happy. I figured that is the way to be happy.’

A rare moment of reflection is upon us. When his father died 10 years ago, he says, it made him wonder what it was all for. ‘When you lose your parents you are an orphan all of a sudden, however old you are. It tells you that time is not something you can discount.

‘I had loving parents. My father always showed great confidence in me. Even before I was 20 he would send me out to do jobs. He praised me all the time. I’ve always had great success and it had a lot to do with that. If you sink your first 3ft putt, you know it’s going to go well for you for the rest of the round. So go ahead.’

I say the picture I have of him is of an optimist, a bullish one with a can-do spirit, but is there a melancholy or reflective side the public doesn’t see?

‘I think I have a lot of thoughtful moments, but I don’t think I’m always optimistic. I was the first to call the recession two years ago on CNN and NBC and everyone said I was kidding. That’s not an optimist. It’s a realist. I prepared very nicely and went to places that are booming.

Other people are in places that are dying. Either I was intelligent or lucky. I used to tell people not to take exploding mortgages because that’s what they do, explode in your face. You know, sub-prime. Two years ago I was saying don’t buy real estate because the price is too high. Now I am saying buy real estate because this is going to be a great time.’

During the property slump of the early Nineties, his business was a staggering $9.2 billion in debt. How did he deal with it? He called a meeting with his creditors and, after warmly welcoming them, pitched for more time to repay them. Within hours they were on side – but only on condition that Trump stopped spending like a man with unlimited resources.

Trump disagreed. Unless he behaved like a billionaire, how could he expect the business world to treat him like one? Within a year of this meeting, he had proved himself right. Not only was he able to repay the debt, but he was back in healthy profit.

In one of the 14 how-to-get-rich books he has published, he writes that a low point came when he passed a beggar on the street and realised ‘the beggar was worth $9.2 billion more than I was.’ How did he keep his nerve when he owed that amount?

‘Many people I knew were going bankrupt and I didn’t go bankrupt. I learnt a lot about myself. I learnt that I could handle pressure. I know a lot of people who are smart, but who can’t handle pressure, and they might as well not be smart.’

A man in a suit pops his head around the door and says: ‘Money’s in. Came in 2.30.’

‘Congratulations.’ ?Then to me: ‘Just did a big deal. Lot of money, and there were questions as to whether those involved would be able to come up with the money because it was agreed in better times, hundreds of millions. Go ahead.’

He talks about the successes in his public life a great deal, but what about the failures in his private life, namely that two of his marriages ended in divorce?

‘I find business a lot easier to understand than relationships,’ he says candidly. ‘I know some people who have a great relationship but can’t add two and two. Business for me is a natural thing. Relationships are not natural to me. I don’t blame myself.

I was married to two very good women before my third marriage but it was hard for them and unfair for them to compete against my business. It takes a lot of time. But look, there are lots of advantages too.’

Is he a difficult person to live with?

‘I think I am a very easy person to live with for the right woman. A person who gives you space. Takes the heat off. For the wrong kind of woman I am impossible. But the time-competition is tough for a woman. I don’t think it is easy being married to me, frankly.’

Does he have a strong sex drive? ‘Marla [his second wife] spoke about my sex drive but I didn’t. That’s all a personal thing. Generally speaking, I think a strong and successful person will have a stronger sex drive than someone who isn’t successful. History has proved that to be a fact, right?’

I presume this means he has no need of Viagra? He has big curling lips like Elvis and these now pucker as he mouths the word ‘No.’

His youngest child is two, he is 62. What’s it like being a father at that age?

‘I cope. I really like him, he’s a great kid with a great personality. I have a wife, Melania, who really takes care of the baby. She doesn’t put any pressure on me to do the things a lot of fathers have to do. She is totally content to really take care of that baby.’

We have been talking for an hour by this stage, and I can sense the time has come to wrap things up. He shakes my hand again. Afterwards, downstairs in the cool of the lobby, I feel slightly dazed.

He is exhausting company. Even here you can’t get away from his neurotic energy. The rose marble floors are teeming with tourists come to worship at this shrine to capitalism.

As souvenirs, they take away Donald Trump Signature Collection shirts, cufflinks and ties. For the budget-conscious there are baseball caps, key rings and mugs emblazoned with his name. In the gold-plated world of Donald Trump, it seems, everything is for sale and everything has a price… especially his name.

 

Where do we stand on Pierce Brosnan? Opinion, well, the little of it I canvassed before meeting him, seems divided. Men are unexpectedly harsh. He’s too smug, they say. Too knowing of his good looks. Clearly spends a couple of hours a day working on his hair. Women are kinder, their theme being not just that Brosnan is good-looking but that he has been a good father to his five children (two adopted) as well as a good husband to both his wives (his first having died of cancer). That’s three goods.

My impression of him, when we meet in Soho, is that he does not seem particularly comfortable in his skin. Though he has a crusher handshake, there is a primness to him, a preciousness. He is immaculately groomed in black suit, black shirt and black scarf flicked over his shoulder, just so. His hair is (suspiciously) black too, as well as neatly cut and blow-dried, and all this blackness makes the vivid blueness of his eyes the more startling.

He’s had his teeth fixed, which may be a sign of vanity. Then again, if you look out for him in his full screen debut – he plays ‘first Irishman’ in The Long Good Friday – you’ll see he had teeth like Victorian gravestones, so this seems fair enough. Unless he has had his face fixed as well, which he claims he hasn’t: he has indecently smooth and young-looking skin. Perhaps it’s the L’Oréal moisturiser. There is an ad campaign running at the moment showing his face next to a pot of the stuff.

He may not look his age, but does he feel it? ‘No, it’s good Irish genes,’ he says. ‘I don’t feel 54, but I do see the age creeping in. You do change little by little.’ He saw his Spotlight photograph the other day, the one that appeared in the official casting directory when he first started acting in 1975, after training at the London Drama Centre.

‘This young kid in the production office said, “F— me, is that you?” So he thought I’d changed. Perhaps it’s a matter of perception. I don’t think my mother looks her age. She has a sharp disposition in her 76th year. And the old man that I never knew had a spry, chiselled look to him. Snow-white hair. Flinty, squinty eyes. I look a bit like him.’

Thomas Brosnan was an alcoholic who earned a living as a carpenter in County Meath and who abandoned his family when Pierce was two. The young Brosnan’s mother left Ireland for London to train as a nurse, leaving her son to be brought up by her parents. He followed her over when he was 11, only to be picked on at school for being Irish. He fought back and soon learnt to conceal his Irishness. He has described his childhood as full of ‘loneliness’.

As an adult he has been compared to an expensively elegant yet tightly furled umbrella, and that’s about right. But the unease you notice is also partly to do with the way he talks himself up, partly with his convoluted, overly wrought speech patterns – they are almost stream-of-consciousness at times, with him asking and answering his own questions. It is also to do with his mid-Atlantic voice. It seems self-consciously smooth, whispery and polished, tortured almost, as if he is still a teenage boy trying on various voices to see which one seems the most impressive, rather as schoolchildren try out different signatures before settling on one. There’s an obvious explanation for this: an identity crisis. He’s an Irishman who has taken American citizenship, but has made his name playing a well-spoken Englishman. ‘It’s only confusing if I let it be,’ he says. ‘Intrinsically, I’m the same person I was as a young lad and I think I still have the optimism of life, still the same wants and desires to be good and great about what I do. I have asked myself that question. When I went to America I spoke so much about who I was and gave so much away in a confessional, Irish, story-telling way that I suddenly realised I had given up a lot of myself. I had to shut up.’

Did his 11-year-old self have a strong Irish accent? ‘Yes, and a strong sense of his Irish identity. Very Irish. Nineteen sixty-four; Putney Comprehensive School. Made to feel different, and no child wants that, so the performance began. The seeds of acting. Before that, I was in Ireland and the first theatrical performance was being an altar boy at church. The whole celebration of the Catholic Mass. I was enjoying being up there and looked at. I still go to church. Went last night.’

The impression he gives of being uncomfortable with himself may also be to do with his having had his identity stolen by James Bond. These days he seems to want to play it down. The biography on his website even begins: ‘Perhaps best known worldwide as James Bond…’ Perhaps?

There is no perhaps about it. The four Bond films Brosnan made were huge box office hits, the first three generating a billion dollars in revenue, the last one, Die Another Day in 2002, making half a billion on its own. Before him it had been generally assumed that the Bond franchise had run out of steam, with Roger Moore turning Bond into a cartoon figure and Timothy Dalton putting the final nails in the coffin with his politically correct version. For the purists, Brosnan represented a return to the hairy, misogynistic and cruel Sean Connery glory days. He also made it possible for Daniel Craig to introduce his darker, grittier version of Bond… and this is a sore point. Brosnan had wanted to take Bond down that route himself, with two more films.

‘Connery did six,’ he said after making Die Another Day. ‘Six would be a number, then never come back.’ But in July 2004 he announced that ‘Bond is another lifetime, behind me’, which may have been a negotiating ploy with the studio. If it was, it didn’t work because in October 2004, when his agent rang to say negotiations had stopped, Brosnan said, ‘I was shocked. It was a bit of a body blow. They had invited me back and then uninvited me.’

Let’s face it, this bitterness about Bond, if bitterness it is, gives an interesting texture to Brosnan’s moisturised façade. I want to explore it further but he only wants to talk about his new film, Mamma Mia! And he keeps dragging the conversation back to it. He keeps telling me, indeed, how good it is and how pleased he is with his performance in it.

The story revolves around a young girl who is about to get married and decides to track down the father she never knew. Brosnan plays – and sings – one of her possible fathers, and Meryl Streep plays her mother.

Given the sempiternal popularity of ABBA, and of the stage version which 30 million people have seen worldwide, Mamma Mia! the movie looks certain to be one of the biggest block-busters of the summer. We shall come to it, I assure him. For now I want to know more about his confused identity, especially what it is like having his identity swallowed up by James Bond – having, for example, people in the street shout out, ‘Look, it’s James Bond!’ rather than, ‘Look, it’s Pierce Brosnan.’ He purses his lips. Breathes through his nose. ‘I have very little to say on the matter,’ he says. ‘I promised myself before I started on Mamma Mia! not to discuss Bond because all has been said from me. All is done. That is it.’

But isn’t that a little perverse? Bond is, after all, a huge part of his life, his identity, his career. He even has a Bond museum of sorts at his home (the watches, tuxedos and cars he was allowed to keep). And when, one day, the Brosnan obituaries are written, James Bond will surely be in the opening paragraph. ‘It will be there, front row and centre, just as it will be for Sean and Roger or any man thereafter. I think Daniel is in the first blush of what it all means. You become an ambassador to a small country. Bond is an industry. You make your pact with the devil. You know that it will follow you. But you just hope you get yourself off the ropes. I have no bitterness but I just feel exhausted by it.’

The no-bitterness line doesn’t quite ring true. But perhaps it is more disappointment at the way his tenure as Bond ended. Either way, he now says more firmly: ‘Let’s talk about Mamma Mia!’ Hmm. I suppose GoldenEye, his first Bond movie in 1995, was the opposite of the almost guaranteed hit that is Mamma Mia! He takes the bait. ‘It was daunting. Having left the press conference for GoldenEye I did go back to my small hotel room and say, “What have I done? What have I done? What have I said yes to?” Dear God, give me strength. And it’s such an institution. You can’t get it right. You’re just not going to get it right.’

Yet he took on the role at the right time. Had he been able to take it when he was first offered it in 1986 – his contract on the television series Remington Steele prevented him – he could have ended up the Timothy Dalton of the Bond story. He was devastated at the time – ‘I felt a kind of ugly numbness when it all fell apart,’ he has said. ‘It was a very painful experience.’ But as things turned out, Dalton was given the part as a second choice after Brosnan and Timothy Dalton became the Timothy Dalton of the Bond story. But the subject of Bond is making him hot. ‘Oh God, I’ve got to take my scarf off now,’ he says unwrapping the garment. ‘Look. Bond was there. It was great. It has allowed me to make movies like The Matador [a dark comedy in which Brosnan played a deranged hitman]. To have a working career. It also allowed me to make Mamma Mia! Let’s get back to that.’

OK, OK. Was he nervous about the singing? ‘All trained actors have to learn to sing just as they have to learn to do tap and fencing. I had actually made a film before, called Evelyn, in which I sang, but singing pub songs in Dublin is different from the musical acrobatics and precision of a pop song. I was mildly terrified about singing the songs in Mamma Mia! but the musical director, Martin, left me with an iPod full of tunes and I spent the next few weeks in my house in Hawaii singing into the ocean. Driving my sons crazy as I drove them to school in the morning.’

He wasn’t an ABBA fan before this film. ‘No, I wasn’t. Did I dance to them? Hear them? Live with them? Yes, we all did, but it wasn’t my kind of music. I would never have gone to see this musical if I hadn’t been offered the job.’

Does he dislike the musical genre? ‘It’s not high on my list. I thought Moulin Rouge was inspirational, and Jesus Christ Superstar I loved.’ So the romance of musicals is lost on him? ‘I have a romantic side, of course, and a sentimental side. If it’s good and meaningful and coherent, I will have tears. It’s the most wonderful thing to be moved by a performance. Edith Piaf. The life of an actor lends itself to emotion and yet you have to be tough as old boots to stay at the table.’

We are on the subject of emotions. When Cassandra Harris, his first wife, died in 1991, four years after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, he said he was in ‘a helpless state of confusion and anger’. The grief would strike unexpectedly. He would be driving along the Harbor Freeway in California and find himself screaming at the top of his lungs: ‘Why? Why?’ I ask if he has ever drawn upon his memory of those extreme emotions in his acting and, if he has, whether that made him feel compromised, whether he felt it had devalued the real emotion. He gives a long sigh.

‘Well, I’ve never had to reproduce that particular emotion. I’ve never been in a piece where I have to lose a wife. I’m in a piece now where I have to lose a son. A movie with Susan Sarandon. I hold myself in abeyance about it somewhat. I will have to find that emotion… but you do use it. You do. It’s not as pure as the original emotion and there is that sense of fraudulence and of scavenging in your heart for that emotion, but if it is well written, you get an echo anyway and a subtext of what happened in your own life. What happened in my life back there has its own private place. With other emotions, well, you know the experience of pain, laughter and deep frustration because we all act everyday, to our wives, our children.’

He sometimes catches himself using his skills as an actor to manipulate other people’s emotions in his everyday life. ‘Of course. I could be doing it now, but so could you be. I have been subjected to many a lovely interview only to read in print that they have cut me to ribbons. I was being sincere but because they didn’t like what I did as an actor, or the way I spoke, they had made their mind up before I walked in the door.’

Oh dear. Perhaps I’m a little guilty here. Certainly I am finding him more sympathetic now that he is opening up a bit. And I can see why he might find it frustrating to live in the shadow of James Bond. For a proud man he doesn’t seem especially proud of himself for doing those films.

Tellingly, he once said of Christopher Fettes, an actor and one of his oldest friends, ‘I don’t know what he thinks of my doing Bond – I’ve always been scared to ask. Maybe he’ll say, “Could do better”, or “Try harder” – or “What are you doing?”‘ (Actually what Fettes said was, ‘To be honest, I think James Bond is a bit below his talents.’) Besides, there is more to Brosnan’s career than acting. He is a canny businessman who has his own production company, one that has made six films, his biggest being the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) in which he starred. ‘Thomas Crown was very good at playing on an iconic theme,’ he says. ‘There was room for manoeuvre with it, in terms of “suit acting”, which Steve [McQueen] never did very well. He was never comfortable with. I thought there was a chink in the armour there. We’re going to be doing another Thomas Crown. How do we find him again? How do we make a surprise? Good sex scenes. It’s great when you get it right, but very fleeting.’

He’s been a Hollywood star, and indeed a Hollywood mogul, for quite a few years now; what motivates him to keep at it? Is it the money? Surely he’s made enough to retire. ‘I’ve got a house in Hawaii and another one in California and a few overheads still. I’m building two homes in Malibu. I have a mortgage to pay. I’ve invested. I have my properties and want to keep them. I could cruise along but I like working. I’m getting older. I’m 54. What’s next? Do I want to direct? I love the visuals of it all. I paint. How do I mix that with acting? I like producing. I enjoy having my company. So a musical, why not? Having Meryl singing The Winner Takes it All on a bluff overlooking Greece is wonderful. I’ve worked with some beautiful ladies, Halle Berry and so on, but Meryl is the tops.’

Speaking of Berry, her Bond bikini is on display at the Imperial War Museum at the moment, as part of a Bond exhibition. Is he going to see it – the exhibition, I mean? ‘I have no desire to go to see it. I’ve been asked but I don’t have the heart. As for the bikini, I saw the real thing. I saw it on the day and so did half of Spain. She came out of the water, which was very cold and not clean. You looked to the right and looked to the left and there were huge crowds of people. Everyone had turned up to see that scene.’

I tell him that I had canvassed opinion about him before meeting him and that female colleagues had all seemed to know that he was a good husband and good father. ‘Interesting,’ he says. ‘I found it quite cathartic to talk about my wife after she died. The disease of ovarian cancer is so insidious and frightening, I thought it would be good to explore my own feelings in an interview with People magazine, which I later regretted.

‘That had a huge effect. I was fairly numb and deeply in pain when I gave that interview. I was grieving. It put an enormous focus on me as a father and husband. You don’t want to lose the common touch and get adrift from your life, because fame is glorious but it’s also hollow and meaningless without love and family and mates and bricks and mortar.’

Hollow in what way? ‘If you’re having an off-day it can be a very uncomfortable experience to be recognised in public. You have this other persona following you. Being observed and judged all the time can make you feel neurotic. The way to deal with it is to be nice to everyone, really. I hope I’d be nice without the mantle of fame. I’ve been working down in Soho these past five days and I am now the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine. From Thomas Crown to Thomas the Tank. I go to the pubs around here. Meet mates for lunch. My son [Sean]. He lives here. He’s 24, went to the Central School of Drama here, he’s in the first throes of being an actor, played Romeo with the RSC. I think he’s got the talent and the guts and the humility to be a good actor. He looks like me, actually.’

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? ‘It’s a great thing, for goodness’ sake! Looks like me – and his darling mother, God bless her.’

After his first wife died, was it Sean that forced him to re-engage with the world? ‘The children forced me to carry on, and my life carried on because of the children, no question. We had been together for 17 years, my wife and I, so that was a long partnership and it was very hard for me to find myself again. The main thing was to find a positive place for her in my life. We still talk about her. She’s not forgotten and I am blessed with a wife now [Keely Shaye Smith] who always keeps in her heart a place for my first wife. Keeps it open because she has a stepson and I have stepchildren. It takes a mighty heart to do that. A special kind of woman.’

Oddly enough, when I see his words written down, without hearing him deliver them, I find them more moving. For the record, he believes that he is comfortable in his skin. ‘I’d say so. I can be pretty hard on myself and have a good, healthy dose of insecurity and doubt, though. All the foibles of being human and being an actor and being a husband and being a father, wondering where to go next, wondering how talented I am. Where is that talent? How big is it? How small?’

Having heard that he prefers to be photographed from the left, I ask whether he is a narcissist. ‘There is always someone to cut you down. I have enough people to take the piss out of me and tell me to shut up and go away and don’t be boring, but actually I’m my own worst critic. I’ve tried to use my looks as well as I can but they have also cost me jobs. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.’

I like him for saying that. The interview is winding up, but before I go I ask if he will sign autographs for my James Bond-obsessed sons, aged 10 and eight. Rather endearingly, he signs with a flourish, signatures so big and flowery they take up two whole pages of A4. And when I inspect them later I see he has put in brackets at the bottom of each page (007!!).

To understand the man, Freud believed, you must look to the child – and as a child Rupert Everett was asked to leave his prep school for ‘being difficult’. The reason given for his expulsion from drama school several years later was ‘insubordination’. It would not surprise Freud, then, to learn that interviews with the adult Everett tend to end in tears – the interviewer’s.

And yet I’ve been told by an old friend of the actor that he is ‘funny, sharp and easy-going’. So, I ask Everett as we square up on a sofa in the Grosvenor House Hotel, London, am I going to get Nice Rupert or Nasty Rupert? ‘That,’ he says with an ominous arch of his eyebrow, ‘depends.’

At 42 he still has the brooding features of a teenage delinquent: sulky mouth (lip-glossed), imperious nose and hooded brown eyes (lined with mascara). Even though his T-shirt strains against the muscled contours of his upper body, hardened by hours spent in the gym every day, he still looks gangly. It’s partly to do with his height – he’s a rangy 6ft 4in – partly to do with his legs, which look weedy in tight jeans (he used to wear several pairs of tracksuit bottoms at once to make them look bulkier), partly to do with his large, angular head, as out of proportion as a toddler’s. It’s partly to do, too, with the way he sprawls, his trainers resting on the coffee-table in front of him.

Despite the posture he seems edgy and suspicious, which is only to be expected, given that he finds journalists’ questions ‘unpleasant – like having someone shine a torch in your face’. He didn’t always, though. There was a time when he could be relied upon to say or do something outrageous in his encounters with the press. He would gamely talk about his time as a rent boy (which was how he said he earned his living for a couple of years after his early departure from the Central School of Speech and Drama), or his enthusiastic consumption of heroin, or about the time he had a wobbly and sent a cutting of his pubic hair to a woman who criticised one of his stage performances.

Then, in 1997, he co-starred with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding, playing her gay friend and confidant. The film made £200 million. It also made Everett a hot property in Hollywood – and he refused to talk any more about his youthful follies. So could it be that the studios decided it was time he toned down the junkie rent boy stuff? Nothing to do with the studios, he says, everything to do with his family who were mortified by the stories and are ‘excruciatingly embarrassed’ by him. A belated attack of conscience, it seems.

Even so, Everett is contractually obliged to promote his films and next month he has a new one out, a romantic comedy called Unconditional Love. In it he plays the secret lover of a popular crooner (Jonathan Pryce) who is a heart-throb to women (especially a Chicago housewife played by Kathy Bates) but who is very much still in the closet. So, let’s start gently. Talk about the latest project. He’s a bit like the character played by Jonathan Pryce in the film, isn’t he? After all, when he first found fame in the mid-1980s, with Another Country and Dance with a Stranger, he became a pin-up to schoolgirls everywhere, as well as to schoolboys who wanted to emulate his dark, scowling, foppish look. ‘What do you mean?’ he says in a lazy, patrician voice.

Well, he is, is he not, in the unusual position of being a sex symbol to both women and men? ‘I see what you’re saying. But I don’t think I’m a sex symbol to men, to be honest. Sex symbols to men are people like David Beckham.’ Perhaps ‘role model’ would be a better term then, in the sense that many heterosexual men wish to emulate his easy way with women, that ability to become the confidant, as he has with his friend Madonna? ‘Be the GBF, you mean? The Gay Best Friend? Well, yes. Lucky me. But I think it’s an old-fashioned view that only gay men are capable of fulfilling that role. I’m sure David Beckham could talk about eye cream and shopping for clothes.’

Everett is the second son of an Army major who later became a stockbroker. While his parents were stationed abroad, he and his brother, Simon (who now runs a fleet of helicopters in Nairobi), lived with their maternal grandmother in Norfolk. He was sent away to board at the age of seven, which he says ‘calcified my heart’. At the same age he watched a film that was to change his life, Mary Poppins. He found, he says, that he identified with Julie Andrews so much that he knew from that moment on that he wanted to be a star.

Was it a parochial childhood? Military? Bourgeois? ‘Um, we weren’t the sort of family who went to St Moritz. We went to Scotland in the summer, stalking. And I had a pekinese, one of my first acts of rebellion. My idea of a holiday was following my family up the hill with my pekinese, who would skip over the heather in front of me. All the other dogs were big and butch.’ He smiles broadly at the memory – it’s a disarming, boyish smile; toothy and mischievous.

Presumably he was a rebel at Ampleforth, the Roman Catholic public school in North Yorkshire he attended? ‘I never wanted to take part in any group activities. I felt really proud of the fact that I never once played rugby in five years. No, that’s not quite true. I was forced to play it twice. I felt good about hiding out in the music school.’ Indeed he did – he’s an accomplished pianist – and in the school’s music and theatre wing, under the stairs, he had a ‘dressing room’ covered in pictures of himself. He would invite friends round to it for imaginary cocktails. Not very Mary Poppins, but certainly starstruck.

He thinks for a moment. ‘I’ve never been any good with authority. I just thought I had all the answers.’ He stands up, walks over to the window, lifts one side of the swagged curtain and peers out across Hyde Park. ‘Authority figures are so irritating,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘Because they always tell you to do things for reasons that aren’t very good. That sums up what authority is about for me.’

Did he have a nickname at school? ‘No.’

Come on, he can tell me. ‘Everett Two. My brother was Everett One.’ Everett Two has written two novels: Hello Darling, Are You Working? (1992) and The Hairdressers of St-Tropez (1995). The reviews weren’t at all kind (‘Deplorable’ – the TLS; ‘Abysmal’ – the Guardian) but the first one, about a boy who wants to wear a wedding dress, and later becomes a hard-up bisexual actor, forced to work in soap operas, had a cracking opening line: ‘By the time he was eight he knew he would never be a Great Actress.’ Was it autobiographical? ‘I don’t want the interview to be about that.’

Oh go on. ‘All right, yes, there was an autobiographical element. As a kid I would be put to bed when my parents had guests and because I was such a show-off I would go to my mum’s room, put on her nightdress and Jackie Onassis shawl, run downstairs, go outside, ring the doorbell and pretend to be one of the guests. I’d say, “Hello, I’m Mrs So and So.” And my parents would say, “Come in.” I would join the other guests for ten minutes, then be sent to bed again, only to reappear ten minutes later at the door in another outfit. This was repeated a couple more times before I became over-tired, refused to go to bed and clung on to the banister sobbing. Those were my dressing-up days.’

So his parents can’t have been that surprised when he told them he was gay? The temperature drops. ‘No,’ he says icily. ‘I think they were very surprised.’ He sighs. He frowns. He unscrews the top of a bottle of fizzy water, making it hiss angrily. ‘Look,’ he snaps. ‘Does everything have to be about me being gay?’ He takes a swig from the bottle. ‘Why can’t we talk about my new film?’

But he, er, plays a gay character in his new film, as he did in his last one and the one before that. And Another Country, his first film, was about homosexuality and betrayal in public schools. ‘Yes, but we’re not talking about them, are we? We’re talking about me being gay, as usual. Why are you so interested? Are you a closet fag? Would you ask a straight person about what they did with their parents’ clothes aged six?’

Of course I would, I say, if I thought it would offer some insights into the person.

There is a cold fury in his eyes now. His nostrils dimple in and out as his breathing quickens. Nasty Rupert has taken possession. ‘Yes. But with me it is the only thing that people are interested in. People aren’t just about their sexuality – and it’s very, very frustrating.’

What to do? Make a run for it? Faint? I slowly cover my head with my hands and draw my knees up to my chest. It seems to lighten the mood. He sighs once more, this time more calmly, and says: ‘OK. OK.’

He stands up and walks over to the window again, his back to me. ‘I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with talking about a person’s sex life. I’m just saying it can’t be the only identification point.’ He turns to face me. Pauses for dramatic effect. ‘It is provincial and old-fashioned to make it so.’ Fair enough, I say, let’s look for a different identification point then. Everett changed his identity radically in the mid-1980s when he left London to live in Paris – stayed there for a decade before coming back to make The Madness of King George. Was it a self-imposed exile? ‘I wanted to get out of England,’ he says flopping back down on the sofa, no longer in a strop. Nice Rupert.

Why? ‘Because everything had gone wrong. I wasn’t getting the jobs. I was feeling paranoid. I wanted to escape the attention that I was getting. It was pretty negative [two pop songs he had recorded were panned]. I went for one weekend to Paris and thought, “I’m so crazy, I could get out of all this negativity and move here,” and I did, the next week. And I didn’t understand French much at first and lived in this blissful fantasy world. I reinvented myself – and had a new character because I couldn’t express myself. All my new friends thought I was rather mournful.’

Were they right? ‘Yes, I do get depressed. Not so much recently though.’

What’s changed? ‘My spirits were low in my twenties because everything unravelled. I thought I was doing one thing, but when I looked at it objectively I was doing another. Some people would say your work is really, really fantastic, that you’re like a matinée idol from the 1950s, and others would say it’s really, really crap. Both were partly true, but neither was the whole truth. When this was happening to me it was at the time I was exploring my sexuality [he didn’t decide he was totally gay until he was 26], and it is a very trippy thing, like being in a kaleidoscope. So you spend a lot of the time bewildered and confused and having dysfunctional relationships.’

So were those his wilderness years? ‘They weren’t wilderness years for me, no. I’ve always been forced to move on and probably always will be. But wilderness years, no. Moved to France, learnt two languages [French and Italian], and working there set me up for my next successful moment.’

Is there anything he would change about himself now? ‘Everything and nothing. I like being Rupert Everett but I’d also like to be a muscly black billionaire hip-hop singer.’

And so you shall, Rupert, I say, waving an imaginary wand: Ping! ‘The Sunday Telegraph,’ he says dryly, ‘the paper that just keeps giving.’ He yawns without opening his mouth.

Does he contemplate his own mortality? ‘And immortality. A lot.’ Through film? ‘Hopefully. Yes, you see a whole life ageing on screen. Life as a selection of repeats.’

He has also been ‘immortalised’ as a model, the face of Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium for Men. What was it like seeing himself on billboards everywhere? Did he become a narcissist? ‘Mm. Yeah, narcissism. I think most people who are vain have a lack of belief in their looks, they want to look better and they want people to tell them they are good-looking.’ He takes another sip of water from the neck, then swirls the bottle round and round absent-mindedly. Bored now. But did he ever look at himself in magazine ads and think, ‘Phwoar’? ‘All the time! I would go to bed with a magazine and just stare at a picture of myself. Sweet dreams!’

Does he sleep well? ‘Not the last three nights, but normally, yes.’ No guilt or angst keeping him awake? ‘Guilt for what?’ He pulls a mock nervous face. ‘What have I done now?’ Everyone feels guilty. ‘No, I don’t feel guilty at night. Only during the day.’ So he’s a man with a clear conscience? ‘Mm, lazy but well-disposed. And unpunctual. And easily bored. And quite selfish.’

Is he a good friend to his friends? ‘For the most part, but I have lapses.’

So he does. His friends speak of the bust-ups and mood swings – inevitably, he had a brief falling-out with Madonna – but he is usually quick to make up. What everyone says is that he has never been able to settle down. It’s the ‘always forced to move on’ factor he mentions. His longest relationship lasted a year – or rather his longest human relationship. A man’s best friend is said to be his dog, and that was certainly true in Everett’s case. He divides his time between London, Miami and Paris, and at one stage bought a home in Los Angeles just so that his arthritic black labrador Moise – Mo – could get the veterinary treatment it needed. And he once turned down a role on the London stage because it would have meant Mo being quarantined for six months. Mo died in November; was he heartbroken? ‘Yep.’

Will he get another dog?

‘Nope. It would be too depressing seeing another grow old and ill. You have them from puppies and they age so quickly. Always trying to keep up. So obliging.’

And would he characterise what he felt for his labrador as love?

‘Mm. The closest I have ever come to it.’ Does that surprise him? ‘Not really.’ Why? Is it because, as an actor, he has to be able to say, ‘I love you,’ to a relative stranger, in front of a film crew. ‘Yes, you can say it with as much conviction as possible, even if you hate the bitch. That’s what it’s about. When you say, “I love you,” on screen it destroys the next time you say it because it has just become a sense memory.’ He taps his long fingers together. ‘I sometimes find myself standing back from emotional situations in real life and thinking [he adopts a German accent], “Ziz is werry interestink. Later I shall go to my room and write a sonnet about it. Over a glass of dessert vine.”‘ He laughs crisply. ‘You’re looking at me as if I’m mad!’

Not mad, but sensitive, amusing, erratic – and a little bit lonely. An encounter with Everett can be a bit hair-raising – his one-man good cop, bad cop routine – but he probably feels it’s what is expected of him. So Rupert, I say as we wind the interview up, that wasn’t so bad now, was it? ‘No, not so bad.’ And, I add, we didn’t even touch on the dreaded rent-boy stuff. He looks at my tape-recorder and says quietly and with unexpected dignity: ‘That’s still running. Please. My parents read The Sunday Telegraph.’

 

It has become a journalistic convention, when interviewing Ray Winstone, to say that he is nothing like the hard man he plays on screen; that, actually – who’d have thought it? – he is a rather calm, reflective and polite man. It has become a convention, in other words, for the journalist to dress up a bitter disappointment as an interesting human paradox.

Imagine my joy then when I arrive at a Soho hotel to find the actor in a state of agitation. His blood is up. He has, he tells me, just been sitting in traffic on Shaftesbury Avenue for 40 minutes. ‘I was going about a mile an hour. Facking terrible. Everyone was getting the ‘ump. You find yourself screaming at people out the window. Major rows going on. Facking Livingstone. I would beat that man with a baseball bat.’

I would beat that man with a baseball bat. This from a former boxer who, at 51, still looks as if he could go a few rounds. He has a barrel chest and a jawline like the prow of a ship. His stomach looks fairly flat, certainly not as paunched as it has been. ‘Yeah I’ve been keeping fit. Just had six weeks off. Swimming every day. Steam room. Walking on the treadmill. At the moment I’m drinking once a week and eating sensibly. Cutting out pasta. Have a roast at the weekend. Mind if I smoke?’ This is said without ironic timing. He runs his thoughts together, as he does his words, in a fast-paced East End patter. The cigarette seems to calm him down. Makes him more reflective and polite. Damn.

Ray Winstone is not a leading man exactly, but he is one of the most sought-after character actors in Hollywood – a favourite of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, no less – and the story of how this West Ham-supporting son of a Plaistow fruit and veg stallholder got there, via bankruptcy (he neglected to pay his taxes) and bouts of unemployment and hard drinking, is worth a movie in itself. His big break was to be cast, almost by accident, in Alan Clarke’s hard-hitting borstal drama Scum in 1979. He went along to the auditions to keep a mate company and the director spotted him in the corridor, or rather he spotted his arrogant, shoulder-rolling boxer’s walk. That was the film in which Winstone delivered the immortal line ‘I’m the daddy now’ after working someone over with an iron rod (as opposed to a baseball bat). It was clear this actor did anger and violence like no one else, not even Robert De Niro. Like a dark forest or a stormy sea, his anger and violence was a force of nature, what the Romantic poets would call ‘the sublime’.

The assumption that he is not acting is partly to do with his voice. He speaks rapidly in a cockney accent so thick you could stand a spade up in it, on screen and off. He does occasionally do accents, as he did playing Jack Nicholson’s major domo in Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed, but he always seems more comfortable in his own voice, as in Sexy Beast, the film in which he played an excruciatingly convincing run-to-seed villain on the Costa del Crime. Winstone speaks without Ts and Hs. He doesn’t bother much with middle Ds either (as in ‘di’n’t’), or Ms, come to that. Written phonetically, ‘something’ becomes ‘sa’i’. It seems to emphasise the anger and violence.

Yet, as he demonstrated in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth in 1997 and Tim Roth’s The War Zone two years later, there is more to Ray Winstone than anger and violence. Don’t get me wrong, he was angry and violent in those films – very – but he also proved he could bring subtlety to his performances and, most importantly, the camera seemed mesmerised by his moments of unblinking stillness. His natural gift as an actor is that you don’t think, can’t believe, he is acting, which is why journalists are always disappointed to discover that it is an act, sort of, and that he is calm, reflective etc.

On that point, though, perhaps we ought to clear this up once and for all. He doesn’t actually get the red mist, does he? ‘It’s more a matter of being intensely into what I’m doing,’ he says. ‘I do get exhausted. It’s the mental energy. The concentration levels. I could spend two weeks in bed after a film like Nil by Mouth or War Zone. There is one scene [in Nil by Mouth] in which I’m talking about how my father dies and we done that on the first day. The picture and the sound went to the lab and they lost the sound. So we did it again almost on the last day of shooting. It was the best take. I think it needed the energy levels to drop a bit. You think you switch off when you go home but you don’t. It was mentally and physically demanding, that film.’

What about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, his latest movie? ‘That’s just physically demanding,’ he says with a laugh. Go on, Ray, I say. Tell me the plot. I won’t tell anyone else. ‘I can’t. It’s for your own good. I’m contractually obliged to kill anyone I reveal anything about the movie to. It’s a brilliant way of selling a film. Swear everyone to silence. Great salesmanship.’

The last Indiana Jones was 19 years ago. Winstone never imagined he would appear in one. Apart from anything else, it seems so mainstream compared to the dark, art house films he is known for. ‘The script starts off at a gallop and gets quicker, the camera never stops. I’m in it all the way through. The first shot is where I get dragged out of the car and they throw Indy’s hat on the floor and all you see is his shadow putting the hat back on and Harrison’s voice saying ”Russians.” From that moment you know you are in an Indiana Jones movie. Harrison is so fit. Forget the age thing. He’s in his 60s but he moves like he’s 30. He’s like a stunt man. Drives the jeep. And he can hit that spot on the door with his whip.’ Winstone jabs a finger. ‘Ping! He can pull a gun out of your hand with his whip, too. Harrison is a geezer. Pretty straight. Bit introverted. Loves to tell a joke. Doesn’t tell ’em well.’

So how did Winstone unwind after a day’s filming? ‘Radox bath. Vodka and Coke. Indy was fun to make. Didn’t need much unwinding. You’re laughing all day.’

I can imagine Nil by Mouth was a laugh a minute, too. ‘You don’t realise when it’s crowding in on you. War Zone as well. Both about abuse. You have to ask yourself how you feel about what you’re doing. Nil by Mouth I played a wife-beater. OK, that was bad but War Zone I played a man who raped his own daughter. I thought, why am I doing this film? It made me question my own moral parameters. Like going to see a shrink in a way. If you’ve got problems, don’t go and see a shrink, become an actor and act these things out.’

Has he ever seen a shrink? ‘Na. I think a shrink would need to see a shrink after seeing me. I’ve never needed to, I think because I always boxed and got rid of aggression that way.’

I ask him to try a little self-analysis now, ask how well he knows himself. ‘I know I rabbit on. Give it large. Think I’m more important than I am. I also know when I’m starting to feel down, feeling lousy and when I’ve got a brew coming up. I know it. I can do something about that. It follows a pattern. I know how to get out of that. Feeling physically low pre-empts feeling mentally low. So I take more exercise. I don’t need no geezer on a couch telling me that. That’s what my wife’s for. She tells me all that stuff. She’s cheaper too.’

He married Elaine, a northerner, 28 years ago. They have three daughters. The eldest two, Lois and Jaime, are actors. ‘I can be completely candid with my wife but she’s never really asked me about work, and that’s kind of cool. I never tell her about the job I’m doing. I wait for her to see it on the screen because she’s very honest and will tell me what she thinks.’

What! He didn’t tell her about War Zone? He grins. ‘Na, actually I did warn her about that. That was the one exception.’

How did that conversation go? ‘It was fine. The hard conversation was with Laura, the actress playing my daughter. I wanted her to meet my three children, three gals, so she could see I was all right. She’s a great kid, Laura, she looked after me in the end because I weren’t coping. Even when I slept it was still going on in my head. When we got to the final scene I thought f— this, what am I doing here? But it’s a film I’m very proud of now it’s done.’

For all his flippancy about analysing himself, I get the impression that he gives a lot of thought to how he plays a role. He sounds like a method actor, in fact, one who immerses himself. We discuss the Laurence Olivier approach versus the Dustin Hoffman one in The Marathon Man. When Hoffman was doing press-ups before a scene in order to look exhausted, Olivier asked him why he didn’t just act exhausted. ‘I think Sir Laurence should have tried acting as well,’ Winstone says. ‘Because I’ve seen films he’s been diabolical in and Dustin Hoffman has never given a bad performance. Maybe he should have tried doing some press-ups and running round the block himself. Who the f— was he to give a comment like that? It annoys me.’

Excellent. He’s annoyed again. His eyes are bulging behind his black-rimmed glasses. So does he analyse his role in the way Hoffman does? ‘Nine times out of 10 I don’t have a clue how I’m going to play it and I think it ain’t gonna happen. I think, what am I going to do?’ A sort of actor’s block? ‘Yeah, but the fear keeps you on your toes. Keeps you buzzin’. I like to paraphrase. They call me Ray Paraphrase Winstone because I paraphrase everything. Sexy Beast was one of the few I didn’t change a word on because it was so tightly written.’ When I ask if he has ever considered directing, he laughs. ‘One day maybe, when my legs ain’t working properly anymore. Trouble is, I’m impatient. If actors started f—ing around I’d probably lose it, you know.’

I know, I know. But presumably, with his hard-man reputation, actors wouldn’t dream of ‘f—ing around’. ‘Yeah I reckon I could…’ He trails off. ‘Boxing stood me in good stead. Control and discipline and the way you look at someone. In boxing you can give someone a look and they know they can’t beat you. You look right into their soul. It’s not the verbals, it’s the look. Usually the one giving it large, mouthing off, is the one who is scared.’

Winstone grew up watching boxers fight. ‘I used to go to a place called the Cage in Spitalfields market that went on for 15 minutes. Bare-knuckle. Half-way through, they went for a tea break, then came back and finished it. No referee.’

He started sparring with his father. ‘Yeah, one day when we were sparring I saw him getting too close to the armchair and he tripped so I clumped him. He chased me up the stairs and I closed the door and the door knob cut him below the eyes, so then I thought I’m going to die. I put the bed up against the door and then I heard him laughing on the stairs. My dad only hit me once in my life and that was because I was caught cheating at school. He told me I was being hit because I got caught.’

His father is still working, driving a black cab. ‘He’s got a picture of me up in his cab, so I think he’s proud. But dads are the head of the family so maybe it is a bit strange for him having me getting all this attention.’

The house he grew up in, he says, was ‘very loud’. The day would start at high volume and get louder. ‘My dad would get up early and listen to Judy Garland on the Pye record player. It would be loud. There would be rows. Shouting. Everyone had their piece to say. Controlled mayhem. We never bottled anything up. But it was fun. I was told I was a little f—er as a kid. That was not how I remembered it. I thought I was a charming little boy.’

He recalls one day when he and his sister Laura began an argument over Sunday lunch. She threw a knife on the table, it bounced and stuck him in the sternum. With blood trickling down his shirt he dived across the table. ‘I’m strangling her, my dad was strangling me and my mum was strangling my dad. Then me foot went through the French window. It was like a nuthouse. No one sulks in my house. Twenty minutes later we were all sitting down in front of the telly watching The Champ and crying.’

The Champ, of course, is a rather sentimental, father-and-son film about boxing. Encouraged by his father, a keen boxer himself, Ray had joined the Repton Amateur Boxing Club at the age of 12 and, over the next 10 years, had won 80 out of 88 bouts. At welterweight, he was London Schoolboy Champion on three occasions, fighting twice for England. He spent so many hours in the gym as a child, he says, that it put him off gyms for life. ‘I get a nosebleed just thinking about training.’

The Winstones, like so many East End families at that time, lived in the shadow of The Krays, who were also keen boxing fans. ‘Yeah, I was aware of them. My dad knew them very well. I peed all over Ronnie Kray as a baby. He picked me up and I peed on him. He told me the story himself years later.’

The Krays, he now realises, were about the closest he came to glamour in those days because they were always mixing with sportsmen, actors and singers. ‘But no one where I came from actually became an actor because actors were in the category of poofs and poets.’

His career options were limited. Some of his fellow pupils at Edmonton comprehensive school went on to become professional criminals – ‘Well, we didn’t live in Surrey.’ It was his father’s idea that he should try acting, in part because the only CSE Ray had left school with was in drama. When Ray enrolled at the Corona Stage Academy in Hammersmith in 1974, it was his father who dug deep to find the £900-a-term fees. He only lasted a year before being expelled for bursting the headmistress’s tyres (because she didn’t invite him to the Christmas party). ‘I was lucky to go there, though,’ Winstone now says, ‘someone other than my dad might have said, bollocks. I did use to question myself whether acting was a proper job. But I also realised it was the only thing I really liked doing.’

He has been similarly encouraging to his daughters, but he has also tried to instil in them some of the working-class values of which he is still proud. ‘My gels went to state school. We looked at private schools but when we saw the workload and the Ferraris and all that, I thought no, that is not what we want. I’ve nothing against private education. I just think it would be better if everyone got the same education.’ He takes a thoughtful drag. ‘The trouble with the working classes nowadays is that they don’t work. Whereas my family were grafters. We never went without. The house was always spotless. You knew everyone in the street. Front door never locked. There were still bombed houses around us, from the war. We used to play in them.’ He stubs out his cigarette. ‘I remember the first West Indian coming into our street. He had a zoot suit on and the kids used to follow him and touch him for luck. Unbelievable, but true.’

How does he feel about immigration now? ‘It don’t affect me as long as everyone respects everyone else. London has always been cosmopolitan. But I do think the English way is always to say sorry. We get trodden on. I think we apologise too much for what we are. I’m proud to be an Englishman. Now in London you see mosques but if you went to their country you wouldn’t be allowed to build a church, there would be f—ing murders.’

When I ask him to elaborate on what he means by ‘working-class values’ he talks about his belief in the death penalty. ‘Do ’em. Put an injection in them. Child murderers, I mean. People who murder in cold blood, like this guy who murdered five women [Stephen Wright]. I would have no qualms about hurting him. Maybe I could even do it myself. I would like to think I could. But maybe it would f— up the rest of your life.’

Belief in the death penalty is usually associated with being Right wing, I note. Is he? ‘My dad was a royalist who voted Tory. I don’t vote for no cant.’

I can just see that on a Saatchi and Saatchi poster, I say: Don’t vote for no cant. ‘My right to vote is not to f—ing vote,’ he clarifies. ‘I mean, who do I trust?’ He’s getting worked up again, which makes me wonder, again, how much he does act and how much he merely reflects the anger he feels. For an actor, he seems admirably unaffected and unpretentious. That is not to say, though, that he isn’t affected by his performances. On the contrary, they seem to take a lot out of him, leaving him raw and emotional. He doesn’t seem to build up layers, as others actors do, between himself and the roles he plays. I have read somewhere that he has high blood pressure.

Is this still the case? ‘Yeah, but I take tablets for it.’ That’s something associated with a short fuse isn’t it? ‘Is it? Is it? What are you saying?’ He’s laughing again; big, shoulder shaking laughs. ‘I don’t think I have a short fuse any more. I used to have when I was younger.’ His assistant comes into the room and he turns to her and says, ‘Blinding job this, baby. I’m sorted out now. Had my therapy. Not mad any more.’ With this, he swings out of the room, rolling his shoulders. Walking on the balls of his feet. His boxer’s walk.