‘The Three Tenors meant people were no longer afraid to go to the opera’

I meet Jose Carreras in his hometown of Barcelona – at a youthful 69, he looks pretty much as he did at the height of his fame in his 40s, the main difference being his collar-length hair is now white.

There are no platinum discs on the walls (he has sold a staggering 85 million records, making him one of the most commercially successful opera singers of all time). Nor are there images of him on stage in his greatest operatic roles (as one of the most celebrated tenors in the world in the 1970s and 80s, he was known for his clarity of tone and romantic expression, as well as his nuanced interpretations of Verdi and Puccini). But there are photographs of him visiting leukaemia patients, children mostly, and they are a reminder of where we are: The Josep Carreras Leukaemia Foundation.

This spelling of his first name is significant, and we shall come to it, for now it is appropriate to mention that the Foundation, which also has branches in America, Germany and Switzerland, raises millions of euros a year for research. It’s quite a legacy, one born of Carreras’s own struggle with leukaemia.

The Three Tenors (L-R): Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras, in 2003
The Three Tenors (L-R): Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras, in 2003 Credit: Barry Batchelor/PA

In 1987, aged 40, he was given a one in ten chance of surviving the disease. He now has a clean bill of health, and looks fit in neatly-pressed grey cords, a tie, tweed jacket and silk kerchief. His eyes are steady; the colour of chocolate. And his manner is friendly and open, if a little imperious. (His staff, I notice, refer to him as Mr Carreras.)

After his operation and chemotherapy, he was never quite able to return to his full, punishing operatic schedule. He found instead a new role for himself as a populariser of opera. Most famously, as a fanatical football fan, he came up with the idea of forming The Three Tenors to mark the opening of the 1990 World Cup in Italy. He and his friends Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti intended the concert as a one off, but such was its popularity they ended up performing together a further 30 times, racking up colossal record sales along the way (which still hold the record for classical music).

Though they all had different singing styles, The Three Tenors had in common a passion for football, which they talked about much more than opera. When I ask Carreras how there was room on the stage for those three egos, he laughs. “Well, we were all trying to be the best, it’s true. And of course there was rivalry, but it was healthy. We had different looks and voices, but we created a chemistry that worked. If tenors seem to have big egos it is because of the characters we play, it’s part of the show. You are the lover, or the hero with the sword and cape.”

Jose Carreras as the title role in Massenet’s Werther, 1978
Jose Carreras as the title role in Massenet’s Werther, 1978 Credit: Ron Scherl/Redferns

As for their lasting impact, there has yet to be an operatic event popular enough to have eclipsed the coming together of the trio. Carreras reflects: ‘I think The Three Tenors did a lot of good for opera as an art form, introducing it to people who weren’t familiar with this kind of music. If one of our concerts has been shown to a thousand million people on television it means a lot. For some humble people it meant they were no longer afraid to go to opera houses.’

And perhaps they started a shift, that meant, to Carreras’s mind, opera is not as elitist as it once was. ‘Compared to the 1970s and 80s, I think a broader range of people go to the opera today,” says Carreras. “People used to worry about what clothes to wear, now they don’t. And now in most opera houses in Europe they do special performances for kids, as well as open dress rehearsals for them, and that is good because that is where the love starts.’

Watch: Exclusive live streams from Glyndebourne

Carreras is performing in a new opera at the Vienna State Opera House in July, El Juez, by Christian Kolonovits, about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Before then he is coming to London to perform “A life in Music” at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic. He will be singing the songs that have influenced his life, from Catalan folk music to the American songbook, taking in some more heavy-duty arias along the way. He has eclectic taste. One of his happiest memories, he says, was performing My Way in front of Frank Sinatra.

In his time, Carreras has performed with most of the great sopranos, including Birgit Nilsson and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, but the one he felt closest to was Montserrat Caballé, “even though we are so different in terms of our personalities, on stage something happened between us. Along with Maria Callas I think she was the greatest, with all respect to the others I worked with!”

Carreras’s parents didn’t go to the opera when he was growing up, but as a child he did happen to see Mario Lanza in the film The Great Caruso, and it changed his life. “I was six and I wanted to be him, so I would spend hours singing ‘le donna e mobile’ in the bathroom.”

Does he wonder what might have become of his life if he hadn’t by chance seen that film? “I don’t know, I think I would still have been drawn to the arts. I don’t think I would have been a footballer, though I have always been passionate about it.”

What is it about him and football? “It is 90 minutes of forgetting about everything else. Escapism. But for Catalonians who support FC Barcelona, as I do, there is something else. For many years under Franco’s dictatorship it was a way of keeping your identity as a little country with your own language and traditions.”

This is why he uses the name Josep for his Foundation. It is Catalan. Under Franco he was obliged to use the Spanish version José. I take it he’s a separatist, then? “What I would like is the right to vote so that we can decide for ourselves, like you did in the UK with the Scottish referendum. Here 49% of the parliament are for the independence of Catalonia.”

Jose Carreras in Latvia, February 2016
Jose Carreras in Latvia, February 2016 Credit: Ints Kalnins/Reuters

I ask him what it was like growing up in Franco’s Spain. “There was severe repression. You had to compromise with yourself. But my parents felt more strongly about it than me, because they had actually fought against Franco. My father had been a French teacher and was forced to give that up.” He became a traffic policeman instead; his mother worked in a beauty salon. “I was 18 when she died, which means she never saw me become successful as an opera singer.”

He describes himself as compulsive and self-critical. “I would be disappointed most of the time by my performances. Like when I listen to my recordings, you become ultra-critical, especially straight afterwards. But when I listen again after twenty years I think, actually, that was pretty good.”

Did his illness change his personality, as well as his singing voice? “I think everyone who goes through an extreme period of suffering becomes more mature… Afterwards, when the doctors told me I was going to be OK, I thought ‘I’m going to make so much more of my life’. I told my wife I was going to be a better man from now on, but you feel so good you forget and slip into old habits, repeat the same mistakes as before.”

What sort of mistakes? “I can be selfish as well as generous. I don’t always make the right decisions.”

Jose Carreras, c.1970
‘An artist has to be selfish sometimes’: Jose Carreras, c.1970 Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

His first wife and his mistress took turns sitting by his hospital bed. After he recovered, he divorced his wife and married his mistress, but now they too have separated.

Was he difficult to live with? “I had a wonderful relationship with my last wife but, like with so many couples, we decided the best thing for both of us was to go our separate ways. An artist has to be selfish sometimes. If I have a performance at La Scala next day I’m not going to the restaurant that night to please my wife.”

Is he in a relationship at the moment? “No, I am single.”

The great loves of his life these days, he says, are his two children and five grandchildren. “Latin people are not afraid of showing how much we love our children. I am an indulgent grandfather.”

So far none of the grandchildren have shown signs of having inherited his sublime singing voice. “But they are still young,” he says with a shrug. “There is time yet.”

A heavy mist is descending as I approach what I hope is the right house, a modernist eyrie surrounded by young pines on a hillside above Oslo. I’m about to ask a man tidying up the basement garage for directions when I recognise him as Henrik Carlsen, a trim, balding, middle-aged engineer in metal-framed glasses. We have met before, 11 years ago, when I came to Norway to interview his son Magnus, then aged 13.

The reason? Magnus had become the youngest grandmaster in the world, The Washington Post had duly dubbed him ‘the Mozart of chess’, and none other than Garry Kasparov had predicted that one day this Norwegian wunderkind would become a world champion. Most prescient the Russian grandmaster proved to be.

At 19 Magnus Carlsen became the youngest-ever world number one. At 21 he became the strongest chess player in history, beating Kasparov’s own ‘ratings’ record (ratings are the eye-wateringly complicated way in which relative chess strength is calculated). And at 22 he did indeed become world champion. That was in 2013. He successfully defended his title last year and will mount another defence of it next year. Before that he will be playing in the London Chess Classic, which begins on December 4.

‘On a clear day you can see down to the fjords,’ Henrik says as he emerges from the garage, wiping his hands on his jeans. ‘But you’ll have to take my word for that.’ He and his wife helped their son find this house a few months ago and are house-sitting until he moves in. ‘It was the first one Magnus looked at and he wanted it straight away, which rather ruined our negotiation tactics. He’s like that, impulsive.’ He checks his watch. ‘He’s also always late.’ I notice a sleek new Tesla sports car in the garage. ‘Not mine, sadly,’ Henrik says. ‘It’s Magnus’s company car. Now all he has to do is get round to taking a driving test.’

This throwaway comment is a reminder that Magnus Carlsen is not your typical chess player. In the past decade he has gone from being a prodigy to a superstar, one who has earned millions in sponsorship and prize money, won modelling contracts and was even named by Cosmopolitan magazine as one of the ‘sexiest men of 2013’.

As Henrik shows me into a sitting room with red sofas and matching abstract paintings, he recalls our earlier encounter in 2004. ‘My wife and I were nervous about agreeing to it,’ he says, ‘because Magnus had never done a press interview before and we didn’t want it to go to his head. We wanted to give him as normal a childhood as possible.’

They were the opposite of pushy parents. It was Magnus who did the pushing. From the age of five, he was able to perform impressive feats of memory, reciting complex geographical facts and figures for fun. His father, himself a keen amateur chess player, took note and taught him how to play. But Magnus showed no interest in this most cerebral of sports until he was eight, when, in a spirit of sibling rivalry, he beat his older sister. He beat his father soon after that, then started to devour books on chess.

His parents decided to take him and his sisters (one older, two younger) out of school for a year, becoming their teachers as they travelled the world playing  in chess tournaments. His sisters are students now, one studying medicine, another dance, the third computer engineering. Magnus decided not to go  to university, against his parents’ wishes. ‘He’s very wilful,’ his father says now.

A car pulls up. It is Magnus with his manager. When he enters wearing jeans and a hoody, he  overrules his father’s suggestion that we do the interview in the sitting room while he has his lunch in  the kitchen. ‘See what I mean?’ Henrik whispers as  I relocate to the kitchen and he collects his lunch to eat in the sitting room.

‘My parents are living here at the moment,’ Magnus says in a resonant voice, laced with a faint Norwegian accent. ‘When they least expect it, I will throw them out on the streets.’ He gives a slow-burn, lopsided smile, to show he is joking.

His chestnut hair is teased up into a Justin Bieber quiff, but his slightly simian jaw and brow, along with his full, sulky lips, make Matt Damon a better comparison. For a while he was the moody face of G-Star Raw, the designer clothing brand, along with Liv Tyler and Lily Cole. But he tells me he has given up modelling now. Was it proving a distraction? ‘Um, not really, I just figured out I enjoy playing chess more.’

I ask how he can bear not having a licence to drive that lovely new car downstairs. ‘I suppose I should take lessons,’ he says with a shrug. ‘But the main hurdle is the theory test. I’m put off by that.’ Another grin, one that brings us to a psychological paradox. For someone who exhibits phenomenal powers of concentration at the chessboard – he is capable of calculating ‘lines’ that are 30 to 40 moves ahead – Magnus Carlsen is easily bored, and though he is something of a fitness fanatic, as well as being a keen footballer and skier, he is actually quite lazy. He told me so himself last time I met him, which was shortly before the world championship in 2013. ‘Not too much has changed since then,’ he says now. ‘I lie in bed until slightly before lunchtime. But it depends on whose definition of lunchtime it is.’

His laid-back approach extends to his training. He has a full-time coach, the Danish grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen, but he is not keen on using computers, and in the past he has spent much less time than other elite players preparing his ‘openings’ (an opening is a recognised sequence of initial moves). He has tended to rely instead on instinct, making moves that feel right. It is known as ‘playing with the hand’ and is associated more with ‘speed chess’ (played over as little as a minute or two) than with the much slower ‘classical’ (played under time controls of between 60 and 180 minutes per player). ‘Actually I do much less of that,’ he says, correcting my assumption, ‘because when I play by hand nowadays I seem to make more blunders. I analyse positions much more than I did.’

Another thing he said last time we met was that once he had the world championships out of the way he would have more time for relationships. Has that proved to be the case? ‘No. It hasn’t. I have time to go out and have fun when I’m at home. But I haven’t come very far in terms of settling down and starting a family.’ Has he ever been in love? ‘I don’t think so. I’ve been infatuated, of course, but not in love. No.’

Part of the problem is that he spends half the year travelling, and when he is at home in Oslo and goes out on the town he tends to get mobbed by female fans. ‘It’s a curse and a blessing,’ he shrugs. He is  not trying to be cool about it, more matter-of-fact.

He may have put the modelling on hold but ‘Brand Carlsen’ does have other revenue streams, such as his app Play Magnus, which allows you to try your luck against Magnuses of different ages. And he keeps his various sponsors happy by agreeing to stunts, such as beating 10 strong players in simultaneous games, while blindfolded. He seems to enjoy doing them and says he wants to take on 20 players next time.

He has a photographic memory, presumably? ‘I can picture the board, but most top players can do that. I don’t think my memory is exceptional. It is much worse than when I was little. Now I can’t even remember the games I played two months ago.’ Really? The kinked smile again. ‘OK, that’s not true.’

His love life may not have improved, but in other ways he has changed. He makes good eye contact now. And he seems less arrogant. When I ask him whether he has to, as it were, play against himself, beat his own records to keep motivated, he sighs. ‘Maybe it was like that for a little while but recently  I have been playing so poorly that I have to start  comparing myself to the others again.’

All great champions, from Muhammad Ali to Roger Federer, need great opponents to reach their potential. Are the former chess world champions Vishy Anand and Vladimir Kramnik his Joe Frazier and Rafael Nadal? ‘Up to a point. But the last few years for me have been like Federer’s first few years at the top, when he didn’t really have an opponent. And I think we’ve yet to see someone make the jump from a steady 2,800 guy [only the top grandmasters have ratings this high; Carlsen’s peak was 2,882] to challenging me and being right there in every tournament. Although I haven’t been playing brilliantly lately, I’m still keeping a substantial lead in the ratings.’

That may sound boastful, but it’s not delivered in that way. He is merely stating facts again. And he does admit that he has his eye on Wei Yi, a 16-year-old Chinese player currently ranked number 25 in the world, who might one day take his crown.

He has always been interested in the history of chess and has had the chance to play both Karpov and Kasparov, two legends of the game. But if he could play anyone in history who would it be? ‘I think the top ones would be Fischer and Capablanca, maybe Mikhail Tal, but I think I would beat Tal pretty easily. Fischer would be more difficult, but I think I could beat him too.’

The American Bobby Fischer famously misplaced his marbles, driven mad by chess, to the point that he had his teeth fillings removed, apparently because he thought the CIA, or possibly the KGB, was sending him radio signals through them. But Carlsen seems to have none of Fischer’s mental instabilities, even if he did once say it was ‘obvious’ he was on the autistic spectrum, and then had to explain it was a joke.

As well as being known as an intuitive player, Carlsen also has a reputation for appearing to be relaxed at the board. He will sometimes get up during a game and wander around, lost in his thoughts. His opponents find it unnerving, which is perhaps no bad thing because, as Fischer once said, ‘the object of chess is to crush the other man’s mind’. On the subject of intimidation, Carlsen, along with Kasparov – who was his coach briefly in 2009 – is the most renowned living chess player in the world, and no doubt some of his opponents are envious of all the attention he gets. Does he think it is an advantage or a disadvantage? ‘I think it’s a huge advantage. My opponents are inevitably a little more timid when they play me. Now I just need to reassert myself and get back to a level of play that justifies their attitude.’

His secret weapon seems to be his three sisters, who often come along to tournaments to support him, and keep his feet on the ground by teasing him. As for a hinterland, he says he doesn’t really listen to classical music – ‘Not listen listen’ – and that, contrary to rumour, he was never that into rap music. ‘I’m not as cool as that.’ He says he doesn’t watch much television. ‘I used to binge-watch TV shows and play PlayStation, but not any more.’ He doesn’t read novels much either, because he finds his concentration goes. ‘For two minutes I will be reading, then I’ll realise  I have been thinking about chess and I have to go back and re-read what I just read.’

Football is his biggest passion away from the chessboard and he is a dedicated fan of Real Madrid (last year he took the honorary kick-off before the team’s match against Celta Vigo). For his own amateur side in Oslo he plays in defence, ‘where I can do least damage. I enjoy the camaraderie in the team but prefer kicking around with friends rather than playing organised matches,’ he says. His friends being? ‘Some I know from football, some school, some random. Most of them are chess players.’ Grin. ‘Inevitably.’

When I first met Carlsen, he told me he enjoyed reading Donald Duck comics, which seemed unusual for a 13-year-old. And I have heard that he still enjoys playing on children’s climbing frames. It makes me wonder whether he grew up too quickly. ‘It’s true that I had to behave like an adult whenever I was at chess tournaments,’ he says. ‘Then at home I would overcompensate by being extremely childish. Thus  I haven’t really come so far in my development and  I am still immature at home. So it’s all gone wrong!’

I ask him to give me an example of this arrested development. ‘I have a very childish sense of humour; I will do a prank and my friends will shake their heads.’ Has he been through a rebellious phase? ‘I’ve tried to grow a beard several times but haven’t managed at all. As for tattoos and piercings, I have a little too much self-respect to do those things.’

Are there days when he looks at a chessboard and feels sick at the very sight of it? ‘Yes, and on those days I find it helps to play rapid or blitz chess. Sometimes during tournaments I will think, “This is so boring,” and I will have a break and log on to the internet and play a couple of blitz games somewhere anonymously, to have a bit of fun. The cheap thrill for me is tricking some guy into a one-minute game. It helps me get back on track.’

Although there is a photograph of him laughing after jumping in a swimming pool in his dinner jacket, taken a few hours after he became world champion, he doesn’t seem an excitable person generally. Quite unemotional, in fact. Did becoming champion make him happy? ‘I think getting to number one meant more to me. I guess my thoughts about becoming world champion were that it would be a bigger deal if I hadn’t won it.’

At this point I feel as if the fog outside has crept inside. He’s an inscrutable young man is Magnus Carlsen, one defined by his contradictions. But I get the impression that, at 24, he is maturing and has started taking his chess more seriously, which must be worrying for his opponents. That said, despite his freakish memory and his cold brilliance at the chessboard, he still manages to seem normal. I say as much to his father when the interview ends and Magnus goes off to do the photographs. ‘Thank you,’ Henrik says in his earnest, softly spoken way. ‘In our family we appreciate results, but they are not the most important thing.’

Forty-five years after Simon & Garfunkel split up, the singer is still consumed with bitterness

I hear Art Garfunkel before I see him, singing to himself as he drifts across the hotel lobby in a blue T-shirt, heading for the lifts. At 73 his golden curls have become white dandelion seeds, and he is not as tall as you might imagine — an illusion that was probably created during all those years standing next to the diminutive Paul Simon.

As I’m early, I hang back and wait for him to reappear. When he does, he has changed into a white shirt and is carrying a large manila envelope. He tilts back his head to study me through black-framed glasses before proffering his left hand to shake, explaining that he trapped his right one in a door. We find a quiet corner in the bar area and instead of ordering a coffee – it is 10am – he asks for a bowl of pea soup.

Oh good, I think, this is going to be a memorable encounter.

“I’m allowing myself to be victimised here,” he says, jiggling his knee, not making eye contact.

By me? “By the press. I’m nervous.”

Really? Someone who can sing in front of half a million people (as he and Paul Simon did in 1981 for that historic, but temporary, reunion “the concert in Central Park”)? “Oh, I was nervous there, too. You feel vulnerable. Exposed. You might forget a lyric. It’s brave work, this work. I want you to respect it.”

But I do, I say, I do – which is why I’ve already bought my tickets to see him in concert when he returns to London in the autumn, to play at the Royal Albert Hall. ‘Gorgeous acoustics,’ he says, relaxing a little at this. It will be a tour of seven cities, and it nearly didn’t happen because in 2010 he suffered from a “paresis” of his vocal chords. “Since I lost my voice – and I have now almost fully recovered it – the loud, high notes haven’t quite come back, so I need a mic for volume.”

When the middle range of his voice went, he was devastated. “I teased it back by singing in empty theatres. I would sing, and crap out, and my knees would buckle and I would whimper in frustration. I didn’t know how I was going to carry on. Was I going to be some guy named Walter who doesn’t sing? Did I have to get a regular job instead? I’ve been singing since I was five. It’s my identity. I can get away with murder when I sing.”

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, prior to their split in 1970 (Picture: Rex)

He is often described in terms of that goosebump-inducing voice of his – “angelic”, “haunting” and so on. But when I ask him to describe himself he says: “I’m a misanthrope.” There is something in that, given what he will go on to say about his father, and Paul McCartney, and Paul Simon. But I would also add “eccentric”. Take his habit of listing on his website every book he has ever read. “You notice it’s heavy sh*t,’ he says. ‘It’s not fluff.”

Since Simon & Garfunkel split up in 1970, he has married twice and raised two sons, had a film career, walked across America and Europe – ”to get away from people” – and continued recording.

Although his solo hits (Bright Eyes, I Only Have Eyes for You) were written by other people, and though Paul Simon wrote all the Simon & Garfunkel songs, he does write. Prose poems, mostly. In long hand. “I never bought a computer or a cell phone.”

He also does a lot of mathematics, having read it as a student at Columbia. “I’m precise. I think in proportions. I play games with numbers and I proportionalise. I imagine we have now done 1/8th of our interview.” I check my watch.

He even took a job as a maths teacher at one point, in the Seventies, despite being a world famous pop star.

“I’d just got married and moved to Connecticut, and there was a nearby preparatory school and so I taught math there. It was a weird stage of my life, to leave Simon & Garfunkel at the height of our success and become a math teacher. I would talk them through a math problem and ask if anyone had any questions and they would say: “What were the Beatles like?”

At the risk of sounding like one of his pupils, I ask about the Beatles, specifically George, who felt his talents were overshadowed.

“George came up to me at a party once and said “my Paul is to me what your Paul is to you.” He meant that psychologically they had the same effect on us. The Pauls sidelined us. I think George felt suppressed by Paul and I think that’s what he saw with me and my Paul. Here’s the truth: McCartney was a helluva music man who gave the band its energy, but he also ran away with a lot of the glory.”

Shortly before they split up, Simon & Garfunkel released what was to become the (then) biggest selling album in history, Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Why did they walk away from that phenomenal success?

“It was very strange. Nothing I would have done. I want to open up about this. I don’t want to say any anti Paul Simon things, but it seems very perverse to not enjoy the glory and walk away from it instead. Crazy. What I would have done is take a rest from Paul, because he was getting on my nerves. The jokes had run dry.

But a rest of a year was all I needed. I said: ‘I’m not married yet. I want to jump on a BMW motorbike and tour round Europe chasing ladies.’”

Did he have a seduction technique? “I had it down to an art form. When you sign autographs after a show, you see the real pretty one and make sure you get to her last. Then you ask, ever so casually, ‘Have you had dinner?’”

Paul Simon once said that it upset him that audiences thought Garfunkel had written his masterpiece, the song Bridge Over Troubled Water – because Garfunkel sang it as a solo, with piano accompaniment.

“I saw that quote, too. But how many songs did I sing upfront and have a real tour de force of vocal? Does he resent that I had that one? I find that ungenerous.”

It’s an intriguing answer, one that makes me suspect that Paul Simon is not only a musical genius – that overused word seems appropriate – but also an insecure man who has to be the centre of attention. When I mention that I went to see Paul Simon and Sting at the O2 a few weeks ago, Garfunkel sits forward. “Oh tell me, I’m curious. Did he do Bridge Over Troubled Water?”

“It was a gamble that he did that. And when they did it, was Sting on the arrangement?”

Sting and Paul Simon on stage together as part of their 2015 world tour

When I say he was, Garfunkel jiggles his knee again, looks over his shoulder, reaches into his manila envelope and produces a clutch of his prose poems marked with pink Post-it labels and reads one to me. It is about a zebra.

He’s a hard man to get the measure of, Art Garfunkel.

On the one hand he still seems eaten up by bitterness about his divorce from Paul Simon, yet he also talks about his old friend (they were at school together) with deep affection.

Simon and Garfunkel during their reunion tour in 2003 (Picture: AP)

He can seem vainglorious, too, referring to his own “beautiful” voice and being a “helluva singer”, but egomania is not incompatible with self-doubt, or misanthropy. And perhaps if he was nervous about this interview it was to do not with what I would ask but what he would answer.

He grew up in Queens, New York, a few blocks away from Paul Simon (they attended the same high school and started impersonating the Everly Brothers when they were 13). But what about his home? Was there singing there?

“Dad played rudimentary piano and sang with my mum, in thirds, but it was all middlebrow stuff.”

His father was a travelling salesman of men’s coats.

“At the end of the war there were a lot of surplus bomber jackets that needed to be unloaded. He travelled in the north east, four-day trips with sample cases in the trunk. Lately I’ve been thinking why did he not want to stay home with us more? Did he have a girlfriend on the road? I think the man who goes through his adult life as if he was born to carry a burden on his back has an inferiority complex. He thinks his place is not to stand up with dignity but to carry the samples.”

He sips a spoonful of pea soup as his 24-year-old son, Art Junior, appears and says hello, before heading off to wait at the bar.

“We were estranged for a while,” he says. “Aged 16, my kid created a distance. He broke my heart a little. Now he’s moving back to love of family. For these shows I’m going to bring him on stage. We harmonise. He’s got the singing gift.”

When I ask what advice he has given his son he makes me laugh with his answer: “Watch out for traffic.” Anything else? “Be kind to people. I’m working on that second one myself, because I’m not always kind. I’m judgemental and picky. When I order room service and they get it wrong I try so hard to be kind and I fail. ‘But I only asked for three things! How could you get one wrong?’

“Or to the taxi driver: ‘How can this be hard? Listen to the address and take me there. Don’t you care about your job?'”

I say there is one more question I have to ask, and he will have guessed what it is.

“Will I do another tour with Paul? Well, that’s quite do-able. When we get together, with his guitar, it’s a delight to both of our ears. A little bubble comes over us and it seems effortless. We blend. So, as far as this half is concerned, I would say, ‘Why not, while we’re still alive?’

“But I’ve been in that same place for decades. This is where I was in 1971.”

He then seems to address not me but his old friend. “How can you walk away from this lucky place on top of the world, Paul? What’s going on with you, you idiot? How could you let that go, jerk?”

Actually, another question strikes me. I speculate about whether Paul Simon might have a Napoleon complex. Is there a height thing there, between them?

“I think you’re on to something. I would say so, yes.”

He adds that at school he felt sorry for Paul because of his height, and he offered him love and friendship as a compensation. “And that compensation gesture has created a monster. End of interview.”

When he drifts off back to the lifts, singing to himself again, I check my watch. Turns out his mental clock, when he guessed how far we were through the interview, was exactly right.

Impeccably dressed and naturally convivial, Bill Nighy is happiest in his own company. He talks to Nigel Farndale about football, staring at trees and riding a motorbike with Judi Dench

Bill Nighy has suggested we meet in Notting Hill, in a café run by an Italian family who really know their coffee. His ritual is to come here for an espresso on his way to his favourite Indian restaurant nearby, where he likes to sit and eat on his own while reading a book. But even if he wasn’t a regular here, I suspect he would still be recognised by the waiters, because he never tries to disguise himself in public. On the contrary, he always seems to look like someone doing an impersonation of Bill Nighy.

It’s to do with his black-framed glasses and the bespoke navy suits he wears over open-necked shirts. Today he arrives in an overcoat and midnight-blue silk scarf with white polka dots, which also seems very Bill Nighy. He wears these elegant clothes well, but doesn’t he ever feel like dressing more casually? Putting on a T-shirt and jumper? “Actually,” he says in that mellow and unhurried voice of his, “I never wore T-shirts even when I was supposed to wear them. Never felt I had the right shape. Couldn’t do a T-shirt justice. And I don’t do unshaven well either. It makes me look like someone about to have a breakdown.”
The film team review The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Guardian

He is keenly aware of his own absurdities, which not only include his sartorial “fetishism” (his word) but also a fairly manic obsession with football (in general and Crystal Palace in particular), and music (again in general, but especially Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones). He can’t help it; he has a compulsive nature – one that, like his professed “crippling self-consciousness”, seems to be at odds with the insouciance and languor of his public persona.

But does he ever catch himself stepping into a sort of Bill Nighy character when he leaves his house, playing up to people’s expectations? “Not really, no. I always assume when I meet people in the street that they are going to be basically disappointed. But there’s, what’s the word? There’s no… what is the word? No conflict. There’s no conflict between the private me and the public me.”

The public him, the actor, has had a career that can be divided into two halves. The first got off to a wobbly start. Struggling to find work in the early 70s, he gave up acting and took a job on a market stall in Croydon selling women’s clothes. “Then someone put me up for an audition at the Everyman in Liverpool and my life changed.” The Everyman – where the resident writers were Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale – was a hotbed of socialism and agitprop. That must have been a shock to his system, given that his father, who ran a small garage in Caterham, Surrey, was a Tory.

“Yes, I was a mess of anxiety and general unease,” he says. “I had somehow managed not to learn the difference between Left and Right, and when I got to the Everyman it was too late to ask. I took the Times in one day and the director took it off me and threw it across the room in disgust.”

From the Everyman he progressed to the National Theatre, where he worked with David Hare, Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter. But this wasn’t a happy period in his life. Wracked with insecurity about work and money, and suffering from chronic stage fright, he developed an “unhealthy relationship” with alcohol, a dependence he wasn’t to kick until 1992. To this day he still doesn’t like to talk about it.

Then in 2003, at the age of 53, he became highly bankable almost overnight when he won two Baftas, one for playing a newspaper editor in the TV drama State of Play, and another for his role as a washed-up but endearing rock star in the Richard Curtis romcom Love Actually. He appreciates what that film did for him (not least that it got him out of ever having to do an audition again), but he is a bit scratchy about people assuming that his acting career began that year. “I did go through a phase of politely pointing out that I had been around as an actor for a long time before that.”

One legacy of the first half of his career was that he found it hard to turn work down when the second half began. He has averaged three or four films a year since, but has become choosier lately. And his bankability as a film star has meant he can also afford to take up offers of theatre work when the mood takes him. His recent West End performance opposite Carey Mulligan in a revival of David Hare’s Skylight won him much acclaim, and he enjoyed doing it so much he is about to head off to Broadway to do it again, for a four-month run.
Nighy in 1985’s Pravda with Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Baines and Peter Blythe
Curtain raiser: Nighy (right) in 1985’s Pravda at the National Theatre with Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Baines and Peter Blythe. Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex

The play is set in the post-Thatcher early 90s, and as with all David Hare plays, there are some comic lines in it. There is also an anti-Thatcherite political message – one with which, you suspect, Nighy agrees. Although he doesn’t like to align himself with any one party, his politics are broadly on the Left, and if you want to get him on the subject of the Robin Hood Tax, which is a levy on financial transactions, you should settle down for a half-hour lecture. He lobbies about it on behalf of Oxfam at G8 summits.

But the reason members of the public always approach him as if they know him, as if he is an old friend, is not because they expect a lecture on politics. It’s because they think he will make them smile. And it is easy to see how they might confuse him with the parts he plays: all those amusing tics and mannerisms you see on film are his, as is that hesitant voice and delivery. It can all seem like self-parody when you meet him in person.

One of the first things you notice about Bill Nighy is his hands. He suffers from Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition that causes some of his fingers to bend in towards the palm, which can make shaking hands with fans difficult. Does it hurt? “Not at all. It started in my 20s. It was alarming and I should have had an operation on them at the time, but I didn’t because I was a mess and was frightened.” He holds up his left hand. “It means I have a spooky handshake.”

The hands have become part of what makes him distinctive as an actor, affecting as they do the way he moves and holds himself, so much so that some young actors assume it is an affectation. “They come up to me and say: ‘I like that thing you do with your hands.’”

The hands are, as it were, something he has to bring to every role, and they make him an easy target for mimicry. I came across a sketch online in which Harry Enfield plays Bill Nighy playing Hugh Grant in a Richard Curtis romcom. It’s all “Gosh!” and “What a clot!” and it is cruelly well observed, not least because Nighy always seems to play a version of himself in Richard Curtis films, notably The Boat That Rocked (2009) and About Time (2013).

He is aware of this, and does sometimes go out of his way to avoid it, as he did for last year’s Pride, a film about a group of gay activists who supported the miners during their strike. Not only did he look different in that, with his slicked-down hair, but he sounded very different, too: Welsh, in fact. (“To get the accent right,” he says, “I went down to Wales and hung about in pubs with a tape recorder asking people to speak my lines.”) But even in Pirates of the Caribbean, when he was speaking with a Scottish accent and had his face obscured by octopus legs, Bill Nighy was still unmistakably Bill Nighy.
Nighy in the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with Judi Dench and Celia Imrie
Nighy plays ‘an absent-minded and charming adaptation of himself’ in the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/BBC/Neal Street Productions

In his latest film, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, out this month, he is very much back to playing an absent-minded and charming adaptation of himself. It is a follow-up to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was a surprise box-office hit in 2011 (surprise because it was about old people setting up a retirement home in India). The sequel has all the warmth and gentle humour of the first and sees Nighy riding around Jaipur on a motorbike with Dame Judi Dench on the back for the second time. “I’m still hopeless on a motorbike,” he says. “Took 17 takes. I don’t know why they didn’t use a stunt rider in long shot.”

Does he imagine he will end up in a retirement home like that one day? “I’m hoping not to retire. What do we hope for? Go to bed and don’t wake up, I suppose.” Actually, he contemplates mortality much more than this glib answer would suggest. “I probably think about death 12 times a day,” he says. “I measure my life in Champions Leagues. How many do I have left?”

But he also has other ways to fill his days. “When I’m working I have to get up at five, so when I’m not I like to get up at 10,” he says. “I put on some John Lee Hooker, shave, then go round to the café for a leisurely breakfast with two football pages. Then I go to the bookshop for a browse. Then I drink coffee very slowly in a café near Berkeley Square.”
Bill Nighy photographed by Alex Lake Jan 2015 For Observer Magazine.
Bill Nighy. Photograph: Alex Lake

He has a thing for Berkeley Square. “I love studying the plane trees. They overwhelm me. As you get older you feel you need to pay more attention to what is around you and relish it. I’m greedy for beauty.” He concedes that his perfect day is really “wandering about London on my own. I built my life around not being in a hurry.”

And in the evening? “In the evening I like to eat in an Indian restaurant on my own and then go home and watch football matches. I have Sky Plus-ed. I record the whole season. The Spanish league, too.”

For 23 years he lived with the actor Diana Quick, the mother of his daughter Mary (who is also an actor, and director, and to whom Nighy is close). But the couple separated in 2008 and nowadays he seems to prefer his own company. Or at least I think he does. Is there someone he comes home to? “No, Nigel,” he says, his mouth a horizontal slab, twitching at the corners. “I don’t come home to anyone. I live alone, and if I was in a relationship and I were to tell you about it I would involve your readers in something approaching gossip, and I know they would never forgive me for that.”

What about friends? Sounds a bit lonely, this day he has described. “I do have friends, honestly I do have some, but I sort of enjoy my own company and I don’t do that thing of: ‘Let’s all get together.’ I would never throw a party. Wouldn’t know whom to invite.”

Richard Curtis? David Hare? Dame Judi? “I suppose. Maybe. Maybe it would be more of a dinner party. I did once give a dinner party. But it was a long time ago and it won’t happen again.”

A poignant note on which to end. It is time for the spooky parting handshake. He retrieves his scarf, exchanges a few friendly words with some members of the public who have recognised him, and heads outside to wander about on his own and stare at trees.

Jamie Dornan is a happily married, Guardian-reading feminist with a daughter. So how come he’s so persuasive as a serial killer in The Fall? And what about all this bondage sex in Fifty Shades of Grey? By Nigel Farndale

The photo shoot done, Jamie Dornan is ushered away to a quiet corner of the studio by his publicist, who needs to brief him for five minutes on his international press schedule. Requests, requests. They do not concern the new series of The Fall, his sophisticated and critically acclaimed crime drama that starts again on BBC2 this month. They relate to the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey, which is not being released until February yet is already bulging over the 32-year-old actor like a heavy nimbus cloud.

We shall come to that. For now I watch him as he finds himself standing next to a vaulting horse. As he listens to his publicist, he takes hold of its sides and raises himself up, his 6ft frame forming a gravity-defying diagonal behind him in the air. Seeing this impressive gymnastic feat, the photographer stops packing away his camera and starts clicking again.

When the photographs are done, we walk to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and Dornan tells me it was just as well the photographer didn’t ask him to do a second take, because “I would have been crying in the corner if he had.” He broke his shoulder a few years ago, and “stupidly I put off having surgery on it until last year”.

He doesn’t realise he is doing these exercises half the time, he adds. In fact, he thinks he is “probably quite irritating to live with” because he has a condition which means his adrenaline levels are abnormally high, so he is always dropping to the floor at home and doing press-ups. “I’m quite hyper, and my wife [he married the singer-songwriter Amelia Warner last year] would prefer it if I sat down and read a book.”

In contradiction to this professed hyperactivity, Dornan has a languid delivery, with a crackly County Down lilt. His manner is composed, too. And he is open and self-deprecating, punctuating his conversation with an easy laugh. He even seems to wear his good looks lightly, behind a five-day beard. It’s sickening.

And it gets worse. With his spatchcocked chicken he orders a regular Coke. Really? Not diet? “Yeah, really.” He claims he doesn’t need to watch what he drinks and eats. Seems to stay in shape naturally. In fact he usually drinks beer, and opens a bottle of wine every night after helping his wife put their 11-month-old daughter to bed. And he eats “any old crap. I could eat 10 packs of Hula Hoops a day and not think about it.”
Dark star: in the second season of The Fall.
Dark star: in the second season of The Fall. Photograph: Helen Sloan/BBC/The Fall 2 Limited

Dornan also claims that he doesn’t need to spend hours each day in the gym (do we believe him?), and that he feels insecure about his appearance.

And at this point we need a little context. For almost a decade, you see, Jamie Dornan was one of the highest-paid male models in the world. Dubbed the “Golden Torso” by the New York Times, he was photographed by Bruce Weber and contracted to Dior, Armani and Calvin Klein; for one memorable billboard campaign, he and Kate Moss posed together wearing nothing but their tight Calvin Klein jeans.

Did he feel objectified when he was a model? “At times, yeah; on the whole, no. I got lucky with that gig because quite early on I could be picky about what I did, where I did it. And because I was on contracts, I was working maybe 10 days a year and getting paid really well for it.”

He says “working”. Actually what he had to do most of the time was “lean against a wall while looking depressed”.

When I ask him how old he was when he first realised, to quote Derek Zoolander, he was “really, really ridiculously good looking”, he gives an off-centre smile and a shake of his head. “I don’t recall. I’m not sure it has even happened yet. I didn’t do particularly well with girls at school. I was always very young- looking. And my sister’s friends would always say: ‘You’re so cute.’ I fucking hated that. If you are a skinny, baby-faced teenager, the last thing you want to hear is that you’re cute.”

His mental picture of himself as baby-faced is the reason he usually sports a beard. “I feel uncomfortable without it. I find myself moving differently. I don’t like myself without a beard.”

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OK, there’s one insecurity about his appearance. Any others? “My nose bends to the right.” It has been broken twice definitely, three times possibly – when his tennis coach “fired a fucking tennis ball in my face”, when a maul collapsed in rugby and when someone headbutted him in a Clapham pub.

Well, the camera doesn’t seem to mind the asymmetry. Nor does it have a problem with his beard, which we are about to see on our screens again when he resumes his Bafta-nominated role in the second series of The Fall. In this critically acclaimed drama – which has brought BBC2 its highest ratings in more than a decade – Dornan plays an eerily calm serial killer who stalks the streets of Belfast by night but who by day is a bereavement counsellor and loving father. And judging by the first episode of the new series, which sees his character return to Belfast after his escape to Scotland at the end of the first, it has lost none of its tension or darkness.

Part of its appeal, I suggest to him, is that the character he plays is chilling yet strangely sympathetic, because you see both sides of his life: the rapist and the family man. In a way it is his co-star Gillian Anderson, who plays the detective hunting him, who is the colder figure. “Yeah, you end up sort of gunning for my character in some sick way. You’re almost wanting him to get away with it. That’s what is so genius about the writing.”

Clearly he is proud of this drama. “I’ve always got The Fall,” he says as if to reassure himself. “No matter what happens in my career, I’ve always got The Fall.” And it has served him well, leading him to be cast in three Hollywood films due for release over the next couple of years – one in which he plays opposite Bradley Cooper, another in which he co-stars with Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and a third, well, let’s talk about that third.

In the film adaptation of the bestselling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, Dornan plays the billionaire BDSM-enthusiast Christian Grey. The trailer was previewed online not long ago. It broke the record for the most hits: more than 100m in one week.

If it is this film he is alluding to when he says “whatever else happens in my career”, then that would be understandable, for it must be daunting having to live up to the expectations of 100 million readers. The only comparison in recent years is with Tom Hanks taking on the similarly popular Da Vinci Code – but he’s Tom Hanks; he can afford to take a gamble (and gamble it proved to be, because that film was a turkey). For Dornan, this is his first lead in a big-budget movie. And he was even told he had to shave his comfort beard off for the role.

“I am never going to please all 100 million people who read the book,” he says. “I’ll be lucky if half that number are happy with me playing Christian Grey. I know there are campaigns of hate against me already.”

It’s not paranoia – I checked online. And the critics are no doubt sharpening their knives as well. He rolls his grey snow-leopard eyes. “Yeah, there is a huge intellectual snobbery about the book. And it comes from all the papers that I like to read. The Guardian is my home page on my laptop, and the other day I logged on innocently and there they were having a massive go at the trailer for Fifty Shades and I was thinking: ‘Fuck, this is not good.’” He laughs. “But what can I do? I understand why those kinds of papers would have preconceived ideas about what it is.”
The ties that bind: with Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades of Grey.
The ties that bind: with Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades of Grey. Photograph: Allstar/Focus Features

That it is just “mummy porn”? That it lacks literary merit?

“Yeah, all of that – but you have to give Erika [EL James] some credit, because whatever you might think of the prose style, 100 million is a lot of people. Are the literary critics saying those 100 million people aren’t very bright?”

Yep, that’s about the strength of it.

He laughs again.

“OK. Fair enough.”

Had he read it before he landed the role?

He shakes his head.

Had his wife?

“Nope. Because we are the types of people who have the Guardian as our home page. Look, the film is not the book. It’s an adaptation, and Sam Taylor-Johnson is an artist as well as an award-winning film director. Look at her track record. And look at the film studios behind it. Universal. Focus. All I can say is, wait until you see it before passing judgment.”

We talk about the whole Fifty Shades phenomenon, why so many women seem to have sadomasochistic fantasies. As part of his research he went along to a BDSM dungeon in Vancouver, where he watched “a perfectly sweet and normal woman” enjoying being spanked. “There may well be a repressed side to some women who long for that kind of thrill in their everyday life,” he says with a shrug.

When asked how graphic the film is, he pauses, weighs his answer. “You want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible without grossing them out. You don’t want to make something gratuitous, and ugly, and graphic.”

So no sex then? “Sam is a very bright woman, so there might be some suggestive elements to it, but I haven’t seen it at this stage, so it is hard for me to say. I’m aware of what we shot, and it wasn’t as if we shot a film without any action.”

Was he completely in the nude? “There were contracts in place that said that viewers wouldn’t be seeing my, um…”

Todger? He laughs. “Yeah, my todger.”

Not like Ewan McGregor, then. He has it written into his contracts that his must be seen, at every possible opportunity. The laugh again. “Does he? Well, maybe Ewan has a more impressive girth.”

On a more serious point, Dornan describes himself as a feminist – is he worried that the film will glorify sexual violence against women? “I think it’s very hard to argue that when it is all consensual. Half the book is about making contracts. Permission and agreement that this be done. There’s no rape, no forced sexual situations.”

And no, he didn’t find it a turn-on when he had to spank co-star Dakota Johnson. “Anyone who thinks actors get turned on doing sex scenes in films is mistaken. There are dozens of hairy men standing around, moving cables and lighting equipment. That’s not sexy unless you’re into being watched, which I’m not.”
Family man: with his wife Amelia Warner.
Family guy: with his wife Amelia Warner. Photograph: Richard Kendal/Barcroft Media

Was his wife comfortable with him doing it? “She understands that it is work.” In fact she used to be an actor herself and the couple met through mutual friends in Hollywood. “I don’t think we will be watching it together too many times at home, though.”

Dakota Johnson has said she doesn’t want her parents to watch the film. “I don’t want Dakota’s parents watching it either!” he says.

He’s sure his father will be totally fine with it, but says: “I’m more concerned about my mates. More concerned about the ribbing I’ll get. We’re all quite harsh with each other, in a lovely, known-each-other-all-our-lives way.”

A lot of his friends from Northern Ireland now live in London, and none of them are actors. He insists that his glamorous life as a film star hasn’t had an impact on these friendships, that they still talk about ordinary things. That was one of the things he learned from his girlfriend of two years Keira Knightley: “There’s someone who still has great friends from her youth.”

Dornan is a hard man not to like. From a journalistic point of view, indeed, you almost wish he had some unpleasant personality flaw to balance things out. Rudeness to waiters, perhaps. But the going hasn’t been as smooth as it seems. Because casting agents thought of him as a model, he found it a struggle to break into acting, with hundreds of failed auditions. I ask what assumptions people made about him in his modelling days. “None, because I wouldn’t tell them I was a model. I’d always say I was an actor.” This said, he protests that he has “great respect” for the fashion industry. “But the fact that I lied about what I did proves that I mustn’t have been hugely comfortable with the label. I’m still haunted by the reaction my dad got when he told his friends what I did for a living.”

His father is a professor of medicine and one of Ireland’s leading obstetricians and gynaecologists. The life they led in Holywood, County Down, was decidedly “middle class”. Young Jamie attended school in Belfast, where he was more interested in rugby than academic work.

After his A levels were derailed by the death of his mother to cancer, he ended up going to Teesside University briefly, before dropping out to train as an actor and sing in a band, Sons of Jim. The band did quite well, appearing on television and supporting KT Tunstall on tour, but then his modelling career took off and everything else had to be put on hold.

I ask him about Belfast. It didn’t seem like a war zone to him when he was growing up. “There would be a bomb scare every Saturday, but that was about it.” Though he was raised a Protestant he never felt like one, and he says he has no time for the small minority who spoil it for the rest, with their “my Jesus is better than your Jesus stuff”.

When we discuss his mother’s death, he reveals a stoical side. “What can I say? It is an unimaginably horrible thing to happen to you when you are 16. I was at an impressionable age and was naive. I was angry at the start and I still get angry now sometimes. But my dad helped me get a perspective. My mum’s death made me more accepting of things, but the enormity of it still hits me in waves.”

With a lump in my throat, I say that it’s sad that his mother didn’t live long enough to see what became of her talented son.

“Well,” he says with a slow, knowing nod, “it’s probably just as well she didn’t have to see Fifty Shades.”

It’s difficult to imagine anyone more Tory than Charles Moore. He edited the Telegraph, opposes gay marriage and for the past 17 years has been writing Margaret Thatcher’s official biography. Nigel Farndale meets the man who’s been rifling through Maggie’s wardrobe

What can it be like being Charles Moore? Since 1997 he has been trying to get inside the head of Margaret Thatcher, understand her personality, fathom why she was so loved, so hated. That was the year she appointed him as her authorised biographer, and gave him unlimited access to everyone and everything in her life, on condition that he wouldn’t publish until after her death. So that’s a good 17 years of Thinking About Thatcher. Thatcher for breakfast. Thatcher for lunch. Thatcher over port in the evening.

Magnus Carlsen earns £1m a year and is mobbed by screaming fans wherever he goes. Why? Chess… and attitude. Nigel Farndale meets the 22-year-old Norwegian who next month aims to become world champion

Over the course of an hour, on a cloudless afternoon in Oslo, Magnus Carlsen sinks from an upright sitting position to an open-legged slouch, to an almost full stretch, as if on a psychiatrist’s couch. And that, I’m sure, is where his opponents would like to see him, preferably after he has unravelled mentally, in the manner of one-time chess world champion Bobby Fischer.

Carlsen jokes that he’s only 22, so there is “still plenty of time for the crazy”. But for now the crazy seems a long way away. And before then the young Norwegian is likely to become chess world champion himself, when he has his first shot at the title in November. In one of the most anticipated clashes since Fischer-Spassky in the 1970s and Karpov-Kasparov in the 80s and 90s, Carlsen will be taking on the 43-year-old five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand in India. Vishy, as he is known, has been in intense training for the match for three months. Carlsen has a much more relaxed approach. It is part of his genius.

You might think that an overused and ill-defined word, but no other will suffice. This genius is the reason Carlsen is known as “the Mozart of chess”. It’s not so much to do with his mercurial gifts – such as his ability to memorise thousands of games, or to beat 10 strong players simultaneously, blindfolded – but his style of play. He makes his moves more by intuition than analysis, feeling for them rather than thinking them through. And there is harmony in his moves – music, you might say.

Not surprisingly then, chess fans, too, might like to see Carlsen on the couch, or rather hear what he has to say and get inside that beautiful mind of his. For he is still an enigma, despite his very public rise from child prodigy to youngest world number one at 19 and finally, last year, becoming the highest-rated player in history.

I first met Carlsen when he was 13, at his grandparents’ house overlooking an inlet of sea, on the outskirts of Oslo. He had just become the world’s youngest grandmaster and had never done a newspaper interview before. He wasn’t shy and introverted quite, more… bored. His father, Henrik, an oil executive who was a keen though average chess player, filled in the gaps in our conversation and revealed that from an early age Magnus had been able to perform impressive feats of memory, reciting countries, populations and so on, but that it wasn’t until he was eight, when sibling rivalry drove him to beat his older sister at chess, that he really began to focus on the game. Back in 2004, young Magnus humoured me when I asked if I could play a game with him. It may not have been pretty, but at least it was over quickly, and he looked bored throughout. I have no intention of reminding him of that painful drubbing today.

The look of boredom is to do with his brooding features, a sulky mouth and a heavy, almost Neanderthal brow, which furrows when he concentrates. These looks, I should add, led to him being named one of “the sexiest men of 2013” by Cosmopolitan, and have earned him lucrative modelling contracts, appearing alongside the Hollywood actor Liv Tyler in advertising campaigns for the fashion brand G-Star. And they are combined with a slow-burn, lopsided smile that starts on one side of his mouth and creeps across his face like a shadow. He does that during matches, when he realises he has a checkmate in his sights. It must put the fear of God into his opponents.

I ask him if he ever feels sorry for them. “Not really,” he says in a low, measured voice, traceried with Norwegian. “But I find it more difficult to play opponents who I feel, for whatever reason, aren’t approaching the games with a sufficient level of seriousness. For instance, once at a big tournament I saw a player I was due to play the next day have a couple of drinks. Knowing that just ruined my concentration, because I thought how can I play seriously against someone who has drinks the day before?”

We describe him as a genius; does he think he is one? Carlsen sinks lower on the sofa. “No, I am not. I’m just really, really good at what I do. I’m fortunate to do something I love, but I’m not a genius.” How would he describe himself then? “I guess I’m pretty laid back.” As he says this he sinks lower still into the sofa, as if to illustrate what he means. Is it a pose? I don’t think so. The posture suits his personality, his languor. “But I am also determined when it comes to chess. I don’t like conflicts, apart from on the board. In general I am very different to how I am on the board.”

From the age of 13 he was a household name in Norway. Did he get picked on at school for that? “Not really. Some people I didn’t like, and they didn’t like me and would occasionally call me names, but it didn’t really bother me. I used to like provoking people and occasionally they would retaliate.” I ask him if his three sisters kept his feet on the ground, teased him. “Yes, they didn’t give me any special treatment.” His father told me that he could be stubborn. “Yes definitely, especially with my sisters, because they are also stubborn.”

An example of this stubbornness was his decision to forgo a university education. ‘My parents wanted me to go, but at some point I lost interest in formal education and they were OK with it. I wasn’t paying much attention so I wasn’t great at school.” That low boredom threshold again. Does he get bored easily? “Yes, in my later years at school I was bored, not necessarily because it was too easy, but because it didn’t interest me.”

Today Carlsen is wearing a grey blazer adorned with his sponsors’ logos, and the steel and glass building I meet him in is home to another of his sponsors, an investment bank. Unusually for a chess player he makes more than £1m a year in sponsorship, and he doesn’t seem to mind performing stunts as part of his contractual obligations, such as the blindfold simultaneous games. In fact, he seems to enjoy doing them and says he wants to take on 20 players next time. “When you think about chess all the time you are playing blindfolded anyway, sort of. But I can understand why other people find it freaky. One of the beauties of chess is that you don’t need a board either to play or analyse.”

Boards are rarely set up around his home, he adds, because he doesn’t need them to train. Nor does he rely on computers as much as other leading players. “I use them to analyse my openings, but in tournaments my assumption is that I am the best player there. That is why I seek positions where computer analysis can’t play that much of a role, or where I can analyse it better than a computer.” Not short of self-belief then.

Back in 1997 when Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer, beat Kasparov, it caused a sensation and there was much debate about man v machines. There is no longer a debate. The best machines can beat the best humans. Carlsen tells me he doesn’t play against them any more. “I never had any fun playing computers. It doesn’t bring me satisfaction to beat them and losing to them is always painful.”

Losing to Deep Blue disturbed Kasparov’s equilibrium, I note. Big time. “Yeah, but I think every loss damages Kasparov. He’s one of those people,” says Carlsen. “He didn’t think he was going to lose to Deep Blue, but towards the end of the match he was nervous and second guessing himself all the time, and I think basically he beat himself.”

Computers don’t suffer mental fatigue, of course. What about when Carlsen has been playing for seven hours at a stretch? Does he get headaches? “No, not really, but I do get tired. I can’t sit there for seven hours straight. I need to freshen my mind by going for a walk.”

Ah yes, the pacing, for which he is known. Is it gamesmanship? Chess, after all, lends itself to psychological warfare – Mikhail Tal’s infamous hypnotic stare, for example, or the kicks that Petrosian administered under the table to his rival Korchnoi. “No, the pacing is to let my mind wander before getting back to the game with a fresh perspective.”

There are more possible games in chess than there are atoms in the solar system — and even to try to think about that statistic makes you dizzy. Yet grandmasters welcome such intellectual vertigo and refer to being in “the tank”, a place where they can enjoy losing themselves, their sense of time, as they swim around with ideas. Even so, when he considers a move for a long time, for an hour, say, running variations round and round in his head, does he ever feel like he’s being driven mad?

“A little, maybe. But if I study a position for an hour then I am usually going in loops and I’m probably not going to come up with something useful. I usually know what I am going to do after 10 seconds; the rest is double checking.” He calls this process verifying his intuition. “Often I cannot explain a certain move, only know that it feels right, and it seems that my intuition is right more often than not.”

there are parallels between Carlsen and Bobby Fischer, the only other “western” chess world number one. Both made their name at a tender age with an audacious queen sacrifice, both had their childhoods distorted by fame and both are fanatical about physical fitness. Carlsen is a member of the gym in his new apartment complex; he is also a keen skier and football player. “I’ve recently started playing for a team here in Oslo. I play at left back where I can do least damage.”

And yet I’ve heard that, when not exercising, he is quite lazy. Is that fair? “Yes, I am quite lazy, I like to sleep in until noon. Most of my friends have jobs.” He does “a bit of yoga”, although he adds: “So far I haven’t thought of any brilliant chess moves while lying down.”

Does he dream about chess in his sleep? A long sigh. “Occasionally, but these dreams are usually connected with something negative. I am losing to players I never normally lose to and I am arriving late and being defaulted; that happens so many times in my dreams – I don’t know why.”

Fischer was single for most of his troubled life. Carlsen doesn’t have a girlfriend at the moment. “I haven’t had too much time to develop any serious relationships, recently anyway. I’m hoping after the world championships I will be able to change that.”

I imagine a girlfriend will have to be at least knowledgeable about chess. “Yeah. Probably. But it’s also nice to…” He trails off. “I really don’t like it when I go out and some girls start talking to me about how they played chess with their grandfather as a kid, I can’t stand that. It’s boring. I want to talk about whatever else.”

I ask about his emotional landscape: does he cry? “I was really upset yesterday when I tried to install my new TV and there was no sound. But that was more frustration. Cry? I don’t really. I get angry, but mostly about chess.”

I suppose the issue I am circling around is the one he jokes about, “the crazy”. Is he protective of his mental health, worried about losing his mind in the way Fischer did? “It was probably only the chess keeping him sane. He would have gone insane much quicker without it. His story is very different to mine. He had a difficult upbringing. Difficult relationship to his family. I have lived a much more sheltered, normal life. As normal as it could be, considering how much I travelled.”

Shortly before he became a grandmaster at 13 (Fischer became one at 15, Kasparov at 17) Carlsen’s parents sold their car, rented out their house and took him and his sisters out of school to explore the world for a year. Their travels took them to Reykjavik, Iceland, scene of the epic Cold War-by-proxy Fischer-Spassky match – and it was here that Magnus himself took a leap into legend when he found himself playing the great Kasparov. They drew, but not before the young Magnus had got bored and wandered off. Kasparov was rattled but has since become Carlsen’s champion, even working as his coach for a while. He has said, indeed, that such will be Carlsen’s dominance of the game for the next couple of decades, it will be known as “the Carlsen era”.

In August, Carlsen was out in Chennai, India, doing a recce, and was greeted by 2,000 cheering fans, mostly female. One reason for the trip was to try the food in the hotel where the tournament will be held, to check it wouldn’t make him sick. Still, he’s planning to bring a Norwegian cook along anyway.

“I generally try to eat healthily, avoid quick carbs that make your blood sugar go up and down, which is bad for concentration.” He eats one and a half hours before a game, and tries to sleep until as close to the start of the game as possible, “because my mind works best four or five hours after I wake up”.

In the nearby harbour a foghorn sounds. Carlsen’s manager enters and says our photographer is ready. As we head up to the roof terrace, he asks me if I play chess. Before I can answer, Carlsen says: “Yes, I played him when I was 13.” He has remembered. Of course he has. He then vaults athletically over the railings. A grandmaster, yes. A typical one, no.

‘Women didn’t like me when I was a sex symbol’

What can it be like being Greta Scacchi? In the Eighties and early Nineties she enjoyed – if enjoyed is the right word – huge fame as a film star, winning awards and critical acclaim, but she never seemed comfortable with her image as a sex symbol – one who didn’t seem to mind taking her clothes off on screen – and in due course she turned her back on Hollywood in order to be taken more seriously as a stage actress.

In her private life, meanwhile, she seemed to go from one controversy to another, which is why she doesn’t like to talk about “that stuff” in interviews. But today she is finding her personal life a hard subject to avoid because she is in the middle of rehearsals for Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, and, well, let her explain…

“The play resonates with me personally because it’s about the predicament of a single working mother with two children. When it was written [in 1944] that was a rare thing. Single mothers would be ostracised. Amanda, the character I play, is fearful that her children will repeat the destructive patterns of…” She checks herself. “Having children growing up who remind her of the absent father…”

Scacchi with her partner Carlo Mantegazza
Scacchi with her partner Carlo Mantegazza

She has seen where this is going. That “her” could equally be a “me”. Scacchi was three when her father, an Italian art dealer, walked out on her mother, an English dancer. And Scacchi’s daughter was six months old when her father, the American actor Vincent D’Onofrio, deserted her. It was a painful episode in her life and she more or less became a recluse for four years afterwards. She subsequently had another child, a son, with her first cousin, Carlo Mantegazza, which caused much media excitement and, though it was perfectly legal, was disapproved of by her family. Her personal life is complicated. And it is understandable that she doesn’t like to “go there”.

Scacchi has a way of smiling while she is talking that is almost as disconcerting as the way she directs her cold blue stare at you. Trying to ignore both, I move on to safer ground, and note how often parents wait for their children to grow up before getting a divorce. But then it happens again: “I know, I know,” she says. “I remember when… No, I’m not going to tell you about my personal stuff. The question is this: is a 19-year-old more resilient to the divorce of his parents than a 10-year-old? I don’t think you can make up rules, because whatever you do you’re going to f— things up.”

Femme fatale: Scacchi made her name in White Mischief
Femme fatale: Scacchi made her name in White Mischief

There is another parallel between the play and Scacchi’s life I want to explore. Amanda, the faded Southern belle she plays, has a complicated relationship with her children, even coming to resent them. Scacchi’s relationship with her children has not been complication-free either. Her daughter changed her surname when her school friends started Googling it and found themselves directed towards websites specialising in clips of celebrities in the nude.

What advice does she give her daughter? “I’ve given up! I don’t give advice.”

Really? “Actually she’s 23 now and much more interested in what I have to say to her. Much more respectful. I learnt that there is this maternal urge – love is too broad and overused a word, it is more a genuine care and concern – but it expresses itself in a clumsy and sometimes hurtful way. I remember through my daughter’s teenage years having so much I wanted to say and knowing that I had to bite my tongue and wait.”

When I ask what advice she would give her 23-year-old self, if she could meet her, there is a long pause. “Don’t know…” Another dramatic pause. “Don’t know.”

Scacchi in the Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust
Scacchi in the Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust

In 1983, at the age of 23, Scacchi shot to fame when she played a sultry femme fatale in the Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust. After that came other sultry femme fatale roles, notably in White Mischief (1987).

So what about her film career? Any advice for her younger self there? “I would say don’t spend so much energy worrying about being typecast. If there is a hook, run with it. Then once you have gathered experience playing the femme fatale, you can use it as a platform for other things. I was so self-conscious about it, I kept turning down films which repeated that male fantasy thing.”

Are we talking about Basic Instinct here, a role she rejected? “That was very much to do with that. There was no way I could have coped with playing that role [which went to Sharon Stone]. I didn’t like the script and didn’t want to play a character who was essentially a male heterosexual’s lesbian fantasy. I thought that offensive.”

So no regrets when it became a blockbuster? “No, funnily enough.”

Although she says she wanted to do European art films instead, and had no interest in doing “commercial Hollywood stuff”, she did co-star with Harrison Ford in Presumed Innocent (1990), and succumbed to the usual demands from the director that she get her kit off. How did she find working with a star of his stature? “He was quite shy, actually. All crooked grins and one-word answers.”

After that she landed a part opposite Tim Robbins in Robert Altman’s Oscar-nominated The Player. The director told her to “take your knickers off and do what you’re paid to do” but this time she refused and won. Did she feel bullied by male directors? “Some of them were bullies. You are very much at their mercy.”

I imagine her background was quite liberal and bohemian. Presumably she was relaxed about nudity? “Yeah, I didn’t have a hang-up about nudity. I felt like I learnt a lot about different cultures in the way some of my work was responded to: the French, as long as my lipstick was perfect, were very relaxed about my nudity, the Italians would give you a standing ovation every time you flashed something, but the British were very uptight. They found the nudity titillating.”

Years of intermittent work, mostly on stage and television, followed her rejection of Hollywood, and then, in 2013, she finally fulfilled an ambition to do Shakespeare, when Jonathan Miller cast her as Regan in King Lear at the Old Vic.

Scacchi in rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie
Scacchi, centre, in rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie

To her great credit, Scacchi more or less looks her age, which is 55. Unlike other film stars of her generation, she has eschewed plastic surgery and often, as today, she faces the world without make-up. She seems comfortable in her own skin, then, and tells me she has no superstitions and doesn’t suffer stage fright.

But I don’t get the impression that the fame of her youth brought her much happiness. She certainly didn’t enjoy being a sexual fantasy figure to men. “I found it strange. But now I’m older it can be helpful. Women go into that paranoid phase where they feel invisible. People are not normally going to imagine a 55-year-old woman without her clothes on, but with me they project, they’ve got a certain memory, I suppose.” She covers her face in mock horror. “I don’t know why I said that! Lets not talk about this stuff.”

Scacchi, who speaks four languages fluently, describes herself as restless, independent and a feminist who found it insulting to be defined by her good looks when she was a young actor. “I consider myself to be an analytical person and so have always found it uninteresting to worry about my appearance. Probably I should worry about it more.”

She has no interest in writing a memoir, either, “though some of the stories I could tell you about Hollywood you would find horrifying”. I get the impression that one of the reasons she enjoys being herself more now than “then” is that women like her more.

This comes up when I ask how “the sisterhood” reacted to her in the days when magazines routinely described her as one of the most beautiful women in the world. Did she inspire envy?

“I’m enjoying these later years much more now that that thing has subsided. I think it was there [the envy]. There was a point when I could have done with more support from women. There was a phase when I thought, women don’t like me.” She rocks back in her chair. “But let’s not talk about this. Let’s get back to the play.”

As the songwriter’s work is reimagined in a new London show, he talks to Nigel Farndale about the price of fame

Before I meet Burt Bacharach at his hotel in London, I sit in on rehearsals for a new show of his music, a montage arranged and performed by Kyle Riabko, a 27-year-old Canadian. Because Bacharach, who is 87, had so many hits – 70 in the States, 50 here, usually with lyrics by the late Hal David – the show can’t include them all, not in an hour and a half.

But The Look of Love features in the show along with (They Long to Be) Close to You, I’ll Never Fall in Love Again, Do You Know the Way to San Jose and What the World Needs Now is Love. And just when I feel my heart can’t take any more, Riabko puts down his electric guitar, picks up a ukulele and plays Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.

He is sitting with me now as we wait for Bacharach to arrive, explaining, in quite technical terms, why these songs are “so damn good”: it’s to do with the shifting time signatures and irregular phrasing, apparently. “The best way to explain it is in terms of geometry,” he says. “He creates lots of musical shapes but never ends up with a square.”

As well as being the latest of more than 1,000 recording artists to have interpreted the Burt Bacharach songbook – including Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick – Kyle Riabko is also a fan, but one with a difference: Bacharach is a fan of his.

The two became friends, despite the age gap, after meeting in an LA studio three years ago. The younger man then sent the older some demos on which he had breathed new life into the songbook — and Bacharach said it was “like receiving a love letter”.

He invited Riabko to his house in Santa Monica to play the demos to his youngest children, Oliver and Raleigh (now 22 and 19) and the demos evolved into What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined, which became a hit revue in New York. As well as Riabko, it features half a dozen other young singers and musicians and is directed by Steven Hoggett, the Olivier-winning choreographer. It is now transferring to London’s Menier Chocolate Factory.

Bacharach arrives with his manager, who promptly expresses concern about how cold the room is. She rearranges the chairs so that Bacharach, who is wearing a padded outdoor jacket, doesn’t have to sit near the air conditioner, then she leaves us.

“I was on stage last night at the Hampton Court Festival,” Bacharach says in a voice that sounds like bourbon poured over gravel, “and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so cold in my life. At one point I put a cough drop in my mouth, just before singing Hey little girl, and I tried to chew it as quickly as I could, but didn’t finish it in time for my next song and started coughing into the mic instead. I tried to get it out and then my fingers made the keyboard sticky.”

An endearingly self-deprecating anecdote, one that emboldens me to ask if he has ever heard one of his songs being played as background music in a lift? “Look, it’s a high compliment to hear your music played anywhere. I remember once Jane and I were having dinner in Italy and the pianist was playing That’s What Friends Are For, and there is a tricky chord change and he didn’t have it. A little later I went over and said, ‘Can I show you what that chord is?’ In a nice way, like it was a gift from me to him.”

We talk about how each generation of pop stars seems to discover the Burt Bacharach songbook for themselves and want to interpret it, from the Stranglers and the White Stripes to Elvis Costello and Dr Dre — and, of course, Noel Gallagher, who became obsessed with Bacharach.

What does he think is behind this cross-generational timelessness? “It’s a curious thing,” he says. “There was a time when you heard Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, very attractive songs, but three months later their music was gone. I think what gives my songs longevity is they have some meat to them, some depth.”

When pressed on what he means by this, he says one explanation might be Hal David’s lyrics. The two had a falling-out over royalties and didn’t speak for 10 years except through their lawyers, but they eventually patched things up.

“I will take the count for that one – my fault,” Bacharach said at the time of David’s death at the age of 91 in 2012. The lyrics often came first, he explains, and they tended to have difficult internal rhythms, such as What’s It All About, Alfie? They would force Bacharach to be creative in the way he accommodated them, using what Frank Sinatra called Bacharach’s “hat size” phrasing. “Alfie would never have been written without Hal’s lyrics coming first,” Bacharach says, “because it became a 10-bar phrase rather than eight. Or take Raindrops, that was from scoring Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They were dummy lyrics from Hal, a real mouthful, and he kept trying to change them, but he couldn’t come up with anything better.”

Just as well he didn’t as that song was not only a No 1 around the world, but also won them an Oscar.

“I have no rules apart from one,” Bacharach says. “Don’t make it difficult for the listener.” Just the singer. “Yeah, there were a few complaints,” he says with a chuckle. Complaints? There is a clip of Cilla Black recording Alfie at the Abbey Road Studios in 1965 and she looks like she is being tortured. He chuckles again. “Yeah, I made her do about 32 takes, then George Martin said to me, ‘I think we had it on take four, Burt’.”

His melodies are always tender, but also often melancholic. Has he ever moved himself to tears when writing one? “I can get emotional. I sometimes have to get away from the piano and go and lie down on the couch.”

But he says he rarely thought of the women he was in love with when he was writing. “There may have been some subconscious stuff going on, but it was more a matter of solving musical problems.”

His autobiography in 2013 revealed a layer of darkness, showing he could be not only crass and sexist but also as insensitive in his daily life as he was sensitive in his songs. So I ask him if he is difficult to live with. “Yeah, difficult to live with because of the hours I keep. But nowadays I try to go to bed at a quarter-to-ten. And I try to conform to dinner hours that work for the kids.”

Known as a prodigious womaniser – his nickname in the Manhattan of the Sixties was the Playboy of the Western World – Bacharach nevertheless managed to commit to marriage on four occasions. If he met his 16-year-old self and told him that’s what would happen, would he be surprised? “Well I don’t know about my 16-year-old self, but I know that I’m surprised. I thought I was a good kid, and I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but when you wind up being married four times, there are a lot of bodies strewn in your wake.”

When I ask what advice he would give his 22-year-old son Oliver, his answer speaks volumes about the self-absorption/selfishness that can go with creativity. “My advice? If it’s not working then get out. Whatever it costs, and however much emotional damage it might cause, you have to get out, because you only have one life.”

And for his daughter Raleigh? “Don’t get knocked up in college.”

He is back on friendly terms with his second wife, the actress Angie Dickinson. “I called Angie on the way to the airport to see how she is, and I take her out to dinner about three times a year.” The two have a painful bond: a daughter who was on the autistic spectrum and who killed herself in a fit of depression at 40. “It was hard losing Nikki for both of us, but especially for Angie, because they were very, very close.”

Despite an even more bitter divorce, he is also now friends again with Carole Bayer Sager, his third wife, who wrote the lyrics for his 1981 song Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do), another No 1 and Oscar winner.

“And we share a son, but hey,” he says, shrugging, “you shouldn’t hold on to the past too much, even the good stuff.”