I wouldn’t say that meeting Ron Howard was an anti-climax, exactly. I did not, after all, expect the 52-year-old, Oscar-winning director and movie mogul to be like his friend Russell Crowe, an exciting mixture of bluntness and volatility. Nor did I imagine him to be like Don Simpson, the flamboyant Hollywood producer who could put away more proscribed chemicals than a laboratory full of beagles. But there was a big build up to my meeting with him and, with it, a certain anticipation; a tightening of the air.
I had been introduced to him in London, when he was on a flying visit, but his diary manager had been unable to pin him down for an hour-long interview. For this I had to fly to Los Angeles, and keep on my toes as the time and venue was changed several times. With the imminent release of his $125 million film version of Dan Brown’s novel Da Vinci Code, it should be explained, Ron is busy, busy, busy. It is only when I am finally alone with him in the Gene Autry Building, on the Sony Lot, that I realise why his minders guard his time so carefully. He is so solicitous, unassuming and guileless he would, if they let him, chat away all day.
He is a balding, slightly built man — 5ft 9in — with down-turned, close-together eyes set in a skull-like face. He has a ginger beard which he scratches occasionally and comfortable looking boots which he rests on the table as he talks. Behind him is a poster of Silas, the sinister, self-flagellating albino monk in the Da Vinci Code. The words above the picture read: ‘Silas says keep cutting.’ ‘That? The editors made it for me when the film was still over three hours long,’ Ron says with chewy, Mid-Western vowels. ‘We’ve got it down to 2 hours 20 now. I think we have achieved the page turner feel. It’s a design thing, how it’s staged and shot. I was always trying to build those moments into the shot list. It is a more cinematic movie than others I have done. Less naturalistic. More designed.’
On another wall is an Evening Standard billboard: ‘Da Vinci Code: London court drama.’ ‘I’ve learned not to bite my nails over things I have no control over,’ he says, ‘like that court case.’ So he’s not a worrier? He gives an unexpectedly loud laugh. ‘I didn’t say that. I lose sleep on every movie. I lose sleep on a big one like this and a smaller one like The Missing. A lot of people invest a great deal of their time and energy in a movie so it’s a big responsibility. You’re under pressure. There is added pressure with the Da Vinci Code because other people are whispering in your ear that you are dealing with a phenomenon. It truly is a phenomenon. The book never seems to stop selling. I hope people will go and experience the movie on its own terms. But perhaps that is asking too much.’
Howard met his wife, Cheryl, at High School when they were both 16, and they married five years later, in 1975. They have four children. It was Cheryl who first came across the Da Vinci Code at her book club. ‘She passed it on to me and I was gripped. I took it on as a film for the challenge of telling a story that would have a broad popular reach and would stimulate conversation as well. But every film I make represents an opportunity which is, not to be too corny about it, the kind of thing you dream of doing, you know, to have the resources to make a movie.’
He has made 27, nearly all of them box office hits, from Splash in 1984 to Apollo 13 — again starring Tom Hanks — in 1995, and A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe in 2001. That was the film for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director. I ask him if winning that made him feel less motivated. ‘I think because it took me a while to get one, it came as relief. I didn’t want to be the guy who never got one. It gave me a kind of freedom because I don’t feel I have as much to prove. But you didn’t see me weeping with joy on the way home…’ He pauses, rubs his chin. ‘This sounds like… I don’t want to give you the impression I don’t still find this business thrilling. I do. But it’s not quite the same as when I started. There was a time when I-I- I’d be completely giddy because I actually asked a key grip to put down some dolly track and requested that the actor move from the doorway to the car and suddenly all that was happening and I would look at the dailies later and think, Hey! I made a dolly shot! Nowadays I don’t get the same thrill about even the most complicated special effect shot, or crane shot, or stunt. But I do still get a kick from problem-solving, something unexpected emerges and you get round it. You get what you want on screen.’ In the case of the Da Vinci Code he was refused permission to film in Westminster Abbey so he went to Lincoln Cathedral — where there were protests from Christians. ‘Actually of the 200 protesters that were reported, 199  were Tom Hanks fans and one was an angry nun.’ Jacques Chirac personally intervened to allow him to film in the Louvre, though they weren’t allowed to film the Mona Lisa. Five replicas had to be made. ‘I kept one to take home.’
A Beautiful Mind was partly about the rivalry between professors of mathematics. Howard says he can identify with their competitiveness and insecurity. ‘If you define yourself as someone doing good work and it’s in a narrow  field which people don’t know that much about, or don’t quite understand, it does get to be competitive. It fuels ambition. That’s what keeps us going. As to the insecurity well, when you’ve just invested a year and a half in a film, you’re just too vulnerable to read the reviews straight away. It would be masochistic. I collect up the whole packet, the 100 or so, and read them a few months later. His one critical flop, Far and Away (1992) starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, left him feeling ‘miserable’, he says. ‘But you can never choose movies based on what critics want or what you think will win awards. You cannot let intellect rule over intuition. You have to go with your gut feeling. That’s what I always try and do.’
He wants to qualify what he said earlier. ‘I tell you when I get a rush, it’s when I first roll the camera. It is an addictive feeling. I had a dream one time, I‘ve never told this story and it will probably backfire but…’ He tells me about a dream in which he is at a party where there are silver salvers being carried around with mounds of cocaine, like in Scarface. ‘….And I’m saying, “No thank you”. I just happen to be a person who has never tried coke, though I know a bit about it from being in this business…’ Eventually he tries some and ‘I feel a rush and think, So that’s what it feels like. Then I realise I feel that way almost every time I roll the camera. It IS a high. Shooting is the period I enjoy most, for the exhilaration.’
It is a telling — and rather sweet — comment because it shows 1) He is boring enough to tell you about his dreams. 2) He even worries about taking drugs when he is dreaming. In some ways, he’s like the Ned Flanders of Hollywood, a goodie-goodie blessed by the Lord — although when he appeared on the Simpsons it was as himself. He was also referred to in an episode of South Park: when Cartman ‘turns ginger’ he asks a crowd of fellow ginger haired people to name great Americans with the hair colour. The first named is ‘Ron Howard’. When asked to name a second, after a short silence from the crowd, someone responds: ‘Ron Howard’.
He has been a household name in America since he was eight. That was when his parents, both theatre actors, moved from Oklahoma to Hollywood and Ron became a child star as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show.  Anxious that he should nevertheless have a normal childhood, his parents sent him to an ordinary state school. I ask if he was bullied at school for being on television. ‘Yes, I always was. Always.’ Did his red hair make him a target, too? ‘No, that wasn’t a thing for me, it was just being on the show. I was shy, but other kids took this as me being aloof. I would have to do the show then come back to school and stand up to them. It was maybe an important part of my development.’ They called him Dopey-Opie and Soapy-Opie, excluded him from their games and laid traps to humiliate him. He learned ploys to deal with them. For the most part, he simply behaved so pleasantly that the ‘regular kids’, as he calls them, began to see him as a diminishing target.
At 17 he became even more famous as Richie Cunningham the toothy, freckled boy next door in Happy Days. The show was about a group of wholesome, small-town American teenagers who hung out in a milk-bar listening to a jukebox and idolising The Fonz. He stayed on the show until he was  26. ‘That show was my day job, a way of supporting my ambitions to become a director,’ he says. Hardly a day goes by without someone bringing up Ritchie Cunningham, he adds. Does that role feel like a blight on his life? ‘Not any more. It’s odd. It’s odd. Since the Academy Award I get way, way more acknowledgement than I ever had. And I had made so many films before that. The picture of me holding the Oscar really cemented that transition from actor to director more than any of the films or talk shows or anything I had done before.’
He did not lack for self-confidence in his early career; had his parents always been pushing him to achieve? ‘Not really. I was a child actor but really handled in the kindest, most positive way. I was expected to be well prepared and have a good attitude but I wasn’t pressured, or prodded, or bludgeoned. My dad’s an actor so there was an element of him passing a craft on. But I enjoyed it. It’s probably why I enjoy being on a set now.’
I ask if he suffers from Michael Jackson syndrome in the sense that the singer, himself a child star, has said he only ever feels ‘normal’ when on stage. ‘I feel a bit like that on my own set. I have grown up with it. But I’m supposed to be going to visit my daughter Bryce on her set after this — she is in the new Spiderman — and I don’t really like going on other people’s sets. I feel like I’m a nuisance, or a distraction or, worse, inconsequential.’
That unexpected vulnerability again…  Did he have any qualms about his daughter following him into acting? ‘I did yes, definitely. I didn’t mention them to her. I could see from early on though that what she loved was the film process, which I thought was a healthy thing. To her the rehearsal is as exciting as the performance. I felt the same. That sort of person has a chance to be happy working in this business, whereas if it’s all about the curtain call then it is fucking hard work. It makes you so insecure and frustrated. The curtain call is not enough…. I would never stop one of my kids from being in the business — not least because I love it. My father loved it too, even though he never became a huge success. He loves it to this day.’
Ron frequently casts his father in supporting roles. I ask if his father finds that a little humiliating, in a Freudian sense. ‘He’s always made it clear that he was just proud of me. He had no other feelings of … He’s never needed me to make a living. He’s always made his living in the business. He just doesn’t get lead roles, that’s all. In many ways growing up and seeing my dad struggle — but with dignity and real joy when he was working — meant that when I had success I really appreciated it. I never took it for granted. He’s an exceptional guy. Really remarkable. He has this Mid-Western Zen outlook, a calmness. He’s like kung fu man grooving through life.’
Is there an element of his father in some of the more phlegmatic, decent, honourable characters in Ron Howard’s films: the Tom Hanks character in Apollo 13, for example, or the Russell Crowe character in Cinderella Man? ‘I saw a lot of my dad in Braddock [the boxer played by Crowe in Cinderella Man], in terms of attitude about how to get through a problem. And like Braddock my dad had lived through the Depression, as a farmer’s son, so he knew about struggle at the most basic level. My folks never lost their farm but it was all subsistence living. Many farmers did, hence the whole Grapes of Wrath migration story where the Oakies had to go to California to pick fruit.’
I ask him if he has inherited any of his father’s values. ‘I’m not a moralist but I certainly respect those kinds of characters. Do I think I’m a good person? Yes, not a wonderful person, but a good person. Not as good as Jim Braddock.’
Does that make him unusual in Hollywood terms? ‘Not really. There are lots of decent people in Hollywood who get what they want without compromising their integrity. I am competitive but I’m not ruthless. I can lose my temper but not very often as it’s not a very comfortable state of mind for me.  People who know me know when I am being serious and when something is important. I don’t have to be loud. It’s more a matter of my becoming emphatic.’
When I suggest that he might be passive aggressive he says earnestly: ‘Maybe, maybe. My wife would say that I am.’
He is one of the most prolific film-makers in the industry; does he feel guilty when he’s not working? ‘No, not guilty. Useless. I don’t know quite what to do with myself. My wife likes me around for a while but then… well, I’m not going to do a better job fixing that broken lock or painting the stairs than some guy we can hire. I like being a father but my kids are grown up now and don’t need me as much.  I used to do the school run and I kinda miss that. I don’t really have any hobbies.’
There is an extraordinarily graphic self-flagellation scene in The Da Vinci Code movie. Perhaps he could take that up as a hobby? He must, after all, have become an expert on it while making the film. He laughs toothily. ‘What can I say? I cram for these tests. There was almost a time when I could have explained how they get to the moon.’

To read the Guardian’s ‘corrections and clarifications’ column is to tap a rich seam of unintended comedy: ‘We misspelled the surname of actor Ashley Jensen as Jenson in a preview of the new Ricky Gervais comedy series Extras,’ one entry began. ‘An accompanying photo caption mistakenly described her by the name of her character, Maggie Jacobs, and we called her a newcomer when she has two feature films, 28 TV dramas and 23 stage appearances to her credit.’
That was last summer and, with a lilting Scottish accent, Ashley Jensen says of it now: ‘It doesn’t pay to take yourself too seriously.’
She has a nice line in self deprecation, this Jensen with an ‘e’. When I mention a recent TV appearance of hers — Jonathan Ross’s chat show — her raised hand goes limp at the wrist. ‘I was only asked on because someone dropped out. They rang me at half twelve on the day and said, “Will you do it?… Great. We’ll send a car at five thirty.” All I could think when I put the phone down was: ‘But I haven’t got anything to wear.”
Ashley Jensen is a gentle woman with a slightly camp manner and an easy laugh. She is, she says: ‘Quite Scottish in that if I’m having too much fun I have to find something to worry about. Don’t get too carried away with yourself.’ She has a ‘ditzy blonde’ side to her, she adds, and is prone to getting distracted half way through a sentence. ‘I will suddenly look out the window and say, “What is that bus doing on that route?” My boyfriend Terry will say, what conversation are we on now?’
The self deprecation, though, rings a little hollow now that she has won two British Comedy Awards for her role in Extras, as well as a nomination for a comedy Bafta (the winner to be announced on May 7). She says she finds the accolades flattering but a little disconcerting. ‘This time last year I was a 35-year-old jobbing actress, doing some jobs for the money, some for the art, some simply because they were in London. A lot of the work was serious acting. I hadn’t thought of myself as a comedy actress particularly.’
So is she expected to be funny at dinner parties now? ‘I do feel a bit of pressure to be more funny or, rather, less boring. I still think of myself as an actress first, but now I’ve got two comedy awards I suppose I am OFFICIALLY FUNNY. Twice.’
Extras, written by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, was the eagerly-awaited follow up to The Office. It managed not only to live up to expectations but surpass them, and a second series is about to begin filming — under great secrecy. The first, you see, featured cameos from big Hollywood names such as Ben Stiller, Samuel L Jackson and Kate Winslet. Even so, the surprise star, with her fine comic timing, was Ashley Jensen. Gervais had wanted her character, Maggie, to be a foil to his, Andy —  as he put it, he wanted a Stan Laurel to his Oliver Hardy. They play platonic friends — as one writer put it, ‘they generate less sexual tension than an episode of Songs of Praise’ — and they make a gloriously understated double act. Maggie is hapless and embarrassing, but also vulnerable: a hopeless romantic who can’t find love, only sex. She always seems to dress inappropriately for her age: ankle socks with high heel shoes.
Today, sitting in the high-ceilinged drawing room of her flat in Holland Park, Ashley Jensen is casual in jeans, sheepskin boots and a loose-knit cardigan. She has the face of an Edwardian doll — with large blue eyes set wide apart, puffy lips and a doughy softness to her skin. ‘I think I have grown into my face in the past ten years,’ she says. ‘Felt more comfortable. That said, I do sometimes think I look half baked, as if I’ve come out of the oven too early.’
Is there anything about herself she would change? ‘I don’t think so, though I am always shocked at how short I am — I’m only 5ft 3in. I feel like a taller person. When I’m walking along and I catch my reflection in a shop window next to other people I think: You really are a runt.’
Despite what people tell her, she doesn’t think she is conventionally attractive. ‘I can look really bad, really easily,’ she says with a laugh. ‘For one episode of Extras, I had to dress up as a Bosnian civilian in a war zone. Ricky wanted me to look as ugly as possible so I was given this ratty wig and black eyes. But I was supposed to be flirting with this good looking actor and as soon as we started filming Ricky started giggling: “Stop! Stop! She looks like a witch. You can’t have a witch flirting with a good looking man, it doesn’t work.” So they took off the wig and make up and made me television ugly rather than real life ugly.’
In the Holland Park flat there is a piano, a designer stack of old leather suitcases and, on the floor, a rubber bone. I discover who this belongs to when, in a blur of pale hair, a large wolf-like animal jumps on the sofa between us. ‘This is Barney,’ Jensen says roughling the beast’s main. ‘He’s a cross between an Alaskan malamute, a German shepherd and a Siberian husky. The breed name is  utonagan.’ Delivered with Scottish vowels, it sounds musical:  ‘Oot-on-aa-gan.’
An only child, Jensen was born in Dumfries and brought up in the Scottish border town of Annan. She was an athlete at school, running the 100 meters for her region. After taking her highers she studied drama at Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh. She adores her mother Margaret, who teaches children with special needs and still lives in Annan. Her mother raised her single handedly from an early age after her father had an affair, walked out and re-married. He is now a wealthy property developer. Does she have any contact with him? ‘No.’ This is said with a pursing of the lips. ‘And that’s the end of that story.’
Does her parents’ separation make her nervous of commitment? ‘No not at all. I don’t know what it’s like to have two parents, but I don’t feel deficient, or cautious, or commitment phobic. No more than anyone else.’
She lives with Terry Beesley, an actor. They met in 1999 when they were both appearing in King Lear at the Royal Exchange. Does she ever feel as if she is in competition with him, or vice versa? ‘Not at all. We are never up for the same parts. We try not to talk shop too much at home or behave like actorly actors.’ They have just returned from a trip to Italy where Terry was filming on location. What about when they are working in different locations? Does that put a strain on their relationship? ‘We’ve been lucky because our work hasn’t kept us apart too much. We always try and get back at weekends. If you value your relationship you have to find a way to make it work. Have big phone bills.’
Are they planning to marry? ‘I don’t know when we will fit it in. Maybe, if there is  a window.’ Does the same wait-and-see approach apply to having children? ‘Yes, when we can fit it in: we’ve only been in this house a few months and are stilling doing it up. That’s our big project at the moment. We’ve got a dog, that’s a start.’
I wish her luck at the Baftas and ask if she has picked out a frock for the big night yet. ‘No, and I didn’t buy one for the Comedy Awards either. Do you think I should have one of those tits-up-to-here dresses?’ She demonstrate with two cupped hands. Yes, I say. Definitely. ‘No, I think I’m too old for that. Besides, I’m too Scottish to spend a fortune on a new frock. I’d love to be able to buy a dress without feeling guilty.’ She stares out of the window. ‘I bet I wake up on the morning of the Baftas with a bloody great cold sore.’

In a small, private cinema in Soho, Richard E Grant is introducing Wah-Wah, the autobiographical film he has written, directed and, to all intents, produced (though that’s a long story). ‘The audiences we have tested it on so far have both laughed and cried,’ he says, baring his teeth in a smile that looks more like a grimace. ‘So no pressure.’ This might be a tougher audience than most: a dozen gnarled distributors who watch films every day. But the screening begins and they duly oblige with the odd chuckle and sniffle. Afterwards, in his intense way, Grant seems pleased, his pale blue eyes slightly mad and starey. We find a dimly lit corner and the 48-year-old actor sits forward, straight spined, as he talks and talks, earnestly and articulately, spooling out sentences like tickertape.
The film, set in Swaziland during the dying years of British colonial rule, tells the story of his parents’ divorce, as seen through his adolescent eyes. It opens with a scene in which Grant’s mother (played by Miranda Richardson) has sex with his father’s best friend in the front seat of a car. The 11-year-old Richard is pretending to be asleep in the back seat but sees everything. He is horrified. He tells no-one. Grant’s father (played by Gabriel Byrne) is the minister for education. Like all his peers in Swaziland he speaks ‘Wah-Wah’, Wodehousian English punctuated with phrases such as ‘toodle pip’. Confronted with his wife’s adultery, his cheerfulness disintegrates. He turns to drink and, over time, becomes an alcoholic.
One particularly affecting scene shows the young Richard E Grant sniffing a lipstick mark on his mother’s wine glass after she has abandoned him. ‘Oh yes, I am obsessed with smelling everything,’ he now says. ‘My food, clothes, cars, books. I’m only just retraining myself from sniffing this sofa.’ It is brothel red, the sofa, and velvet covered. Grant, with sweptback hair, paint-flecked old jeans and beads on his wrist, looks bohemian sitting on it. ‘The sniffing obsession is a legacy of my mother’s adultery and of her walking out on us. Another was a facial spasm I had. A compulsive disorder. I couldn’t stop myself.’ He shows me, suddenly opening his mouth wide and twisting his face. ‘It’s an involuntary spasm which was to do with having to keep a secret. It was as if the secret had to come out somehow. I was teased at school for it. When I am particularly nervous or anxious even now I can feel the ghost of that spasm hovering in my face, waiting.’
We talk about the time he tipped away a crate of his father’s whiskey in a bid to stop the drinking. His father, in a drunken rage, held a revolver close to Richard’s forehead, fired a shot and — obviously — missed. ‘He was provoked by me. He said, “I’m going to blow your brains out”, and chased me around the garden. I felt utterly helpless but I goaded him, saying, “Go on, get it over with”. I thought I was going to die. The bullet whistled past my head. The reality was that at that point there was nothing I could do about it. It was like a near death experience, a chemical in my brain made me accept that I was going to die. I thought: “He is going to shoot me now. This nightmare will end.” I felt very calm. The shock of it only hit me afterwards. Then I became frightened and ran away.’
I suggest that even Freud would have been stumped as to how to interpret such a nightmare. ‘Yes, a father trying to kill the son is against all nature, isn’t it? But then my father was very drunk at the time. When he was sober he was a gentle man who loved me.’
But to try and kill someone you must really have to hate them; surely that must make him doubt his father’s protestations of love when he was sober? ‘Yes but after my father tried to kill me he turned the gun on himself and tried to kill himself. He was full of self-pity and remorse.’
So that makes it all right? ‘Alcohol changed his character, like Jekyll and Hyde. He wasn’t himself when he was drunk.’
Didn’t it worry him that the ‘bad’ drunken father might be, as it were, his true father; the ‘good’ sober father, the impostor? He shakes his head. ‘I think if my father had had no friends then I would have thought he was is completely abnormal and a bad person. But he was incredibly popular and garrulous. You ask about the split between the things my father said when he was drunk and sober…’ He pauses. ‘Which reality has more credibility? Well, the vestige of that is that when I am feeling especially vulnerable, or have been turned down for a job I wanted, or panned by a critic, my father’s drunk voice squats in my brain and says: “You aren’t good enough. You are a shit. You are ugly. You are untalented.’ That comes back. But…’ Another pause. ‘I had psychoanalysis for 18 month when I was 42 and worked out that this was only the drunken voice talking, it wasn’t him. He couldn’t even remember saying the things in the morning. But because the abuse was so insistent and regular when he was drunk, when I am vulnerable it creeps up on me unawares. So as much as I know I should ignore it, if the world looks like it is saying it doesn’t want me, thinks me useless and untalented, doesn’t like me, doesn’t want to give me a job, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. It saps my confidence and I don’t get the job. Despite the fact that I have worked regularly throughout my career, there is still that marshy bit in my brain that says: ‘Yep, your dad was right.’
In his career there have been many hits and misses — and those toecurling ads for Argos. The hits have included Martin Scorsese’s Age of Innocence and Robert Altman’s  The Player and Gosford Park. The misses have included Hudson Hawk with Bruce Willis, a film Grant himself describes as ‘excruciating’.  But all can be forgiven for the film for which he is still best known, his first, the sublime, transcendent black comedy Withnail & I (1986). As the acerbic, drunken out-of-work actor Withnail, Grant created one of the most obnoxious yet likeable characters in cinema history. ‘Some people tell me they have watched it 200 times,’ he says.
Do they still confuse him with that character? ‘Yeah, people think if you play a drunk convincingly you must have first hand experience of it. But actually  from being around my father I had first hand experience of drunk behaviour. I had a fast track on how to act drunk.’
Was it his father who put him off drinking? ‘Yes and no. I have an allergy to drink, I get a terrible rash and get ill for about 24 hours and, at first, I thought this might be psychosomatic. But I went to a doctor when I was 19 and he said I had no enzyme in my blood that processes alcohol. He asked if I had Japanese blood. Or Inuit. Or Native American, because they have none of this enzyme. The French as a tribe have the most of it. It wasn’t for lack of wanting to do it, it was just I am unable to, which is ironic because when I say I don’t drink people say, “Oh, are you in the programme?”’
Richard E Grant lives by the Thames in London with his wife Joan, a voice coach. ‘We married in 1986,’ he says. ‘I’m a very loyal person. I think I put a higher value on monogamy because I witnessed the emotional cost of my father’s cuckolding.’ The couple have a teenage daughter, Olivia, who has a cameo in the film. How did his strained relationship with his parents affect his relationship with his daughter? ‘Well there was a generational difference so I’m not passing judgement here. My parents were very non tactile. Stiff upper lip. You didn’t wallow around feeling sorry for yourself. With my daughter I tend to be the other extreme — over tactile and talking about everything.’
Given that Grant sees himself as a contradictory mixture of low self-esteem and large ego, I ask him if he has ever really come to terms with feeling rejected by his mother. ‘I suppose it is telling that I became an actor, a profession where I would have to replay the rejection scene for the rest of my life. Repeating the pattern of rejection. We are drawn to that which hurts us. It’s like a masochism, because part of me believes they are right to reject me.’
The film led to a reunion with his mother, now 77 and living in South Africa. ‘It’s been amazing. I’ve seen her and we have reconciled and written long  letters and opened up to each other. I have finally heard her point of view of what happened 35 years ago. It had never been explained to me. Pain has no sense of time. If something was painful then it will be painful now, but you get used to living with it. You accommodate it.’
There has been no reconciliation with his younger brother, Stuart, though. ‘No, none at all. He hasn’t read the script or seen the film, though he claims to have done both, apparently. I feel pity for him that he is so troubled and unresolved about what has happened.’ Stuart, an accountant living in South Africa, once sold a story to a newspaper describing Richard as ‘a pansy who played with dolls’ as a child. Richard took his revenge by writing Stuart out of the film, portraying himself as an only child. The last time the brothers met was at their father’s funeral in 1981. Stuart subsequently accused Richard of arriving at the funeral with dyed blond hair and theatrical self-obsession. ‘He said I was being disrespectful,’ Richard says. ‘Well I only dyed my hair blond because I was in a play at the time that required me to dye my hair. I was playing a Nazi. Stuart has projected his own failings and shortcomings onto me and blamed me because he feels guilty. There is nothing I can do about it. I accept it. And we never had anything in common so it’s not as if we had a relationship that went rotten and can be salvaged through mutual understanding. I’ve been so estranged from him for so long, if he walked down the street I wouldn’t recognise him, quite frankly. He has never met my wife and children [he also has a stepson, Tom], but I have heard from other people that he has said appalling thing about them in the press. He can attack me all he likes. But them? He doesn’t do himself any favours by doing that.’
In the mid-90s, Grant published a wonderfully waspish memoir of his years in  Hollywood. Though the comedian Steve Martin is still a close friend, the book alienated many of his contemporaries. As Bruce Robinson, who wrote and directed Withnail & I, has warned: ‘Richard is a terrible gossip – tell him nothing. I’m convinced that when he’s on his own he gossips about himself. It is part of his bitter-charm.’ Grant has confided in a daily diary since the day he witnessed his mother’s adultery at the age of 11. He finds it a consolation. He is about to publish a journal — also called Wah-Wah — about the making of this new film. It is a gripping account of the hell that is trying to get a movie financed and made. It chronicles the way he would yo-yo from jubilation and despair on a daily basis: ‘My nerves are so shredded that I lie face down and blub like a bitter baby.’ It covers his battles with banks, lawyers, the Swazi government and, most of all ,with his producer, a French woman whose name he pretends he can’t pronounce. When I suggest that his book is unlikely to affect a reconciliation with her he laughs grimly. Has she read it? A solemn shake of the head. Does he have a helmet and bullet proof vest ready?  ‘Libel lawyers have been through it and I have proved everything I’ve claimed about her. The catalogue of incompetence. The failure to reply to important emails. If I thought it was only a personality clash between her and me I wouldn’t have dwelt on it, but she has managed to alienate almost everyone she has come across.’
I suggest that from her perspective she might consider him to an obsessive; an anal retentive even? ‘She would no doubt say I was pig headed and intransigent, all those things you need to be.’

There is bamboo in every room of Anchee Min’s house in the hilly East Bay area of San Francisco. It is to remind her of China. The mud on her clothes and in her long hair today also reminds the author of China, specifically the banks of the Yangtze River near where she grew up. ‘I have been out gardening,’ she explains in a Chinese-accented American. ‘I like getting mud on myself. My daughter hates it when I pick her up from school looking like this though. She says I look like a peasant.’

It was looking like a peasant that helped Min escape a Chinese labour camp in 1976.  She was selected to play Madame Mao in a propaganda film. ‘They wanted someone who looked like a peasant. I was the opposite of the Chinese notion of beauty which was to be like Empress Orchid [the subject of Min’s fourth and latest novel, which is favourite to win the British Book Awards later this month]. She had a small mouth and I had a big mouth. She had a tiny nose and I had a big nose. She had fine skin and I had weather-beaten skin. She had pencil thin eyebrows and I had eyebrows like caterpillars. Also I was strong. I could carry 300 lbs of manure. The main reason I was selected to play Mother Mao was the calluses on my hands and shoulders.’

Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. She was  seven when the Cultural Revolution began. She soon became a model member of the Red Guard. ‘I was beaten all the time at school by bullies,’ she says, ‘but I soon learned that if you worship Mao and memorise the Little Red Book then the beatings stopped. I could recite all 73 pages of it. So I came to see Mao as my saviour — the man who protected me from beatings. I loved him. I became the top student because I was the most committed communist in the class. I was brainwashed. I had a sense of purpose: I thought the rest of the world’s children were much worse off than we were and we could save them.’ Her family of four lived in a one and a half room apartment with a single lavatory shared between eight other people. ‘We all got tape worms and one girl at school died from it. So after that I took some medicine and dragged my tapeworm from my anus. It was very long.’

On her wall she had a portrait of Mao. ‘I took down my mother’s drawing of a lotus flower to make room for it and that upset her. I could never understand why she wouldn’t put up my award certificates for being the best Maoist in the district. I had won one for going on stage and denouncing my teacher as an American spy, even though she was my favourite teacher. She was sent into exile. I couldn’t understand why my mother wasn’t proud of me for that. That is how a regime of terror works: you turn the children against the parents.’

I ask if she ever considered denouncing her mother. ‘Oh I would have, I would have — especially if I had known she was a Christian. Only years later did memories came back to me of seeing her praying at three in the morning in the dark, on her knees. She never once spoke about her religion. It was a secret.’

Min would also have denounced her father, an astronomy teacher, but  one of his pupils beat her to it. ‘When he said that the Sun was the brightest star in the galaxy this was considered an attack on Mao because Mao was supposed to be the brightest star.’

Was there a particular moment when she became disillusioned with Mao? ‘At 17 I was sent to work on a collective farm near the East China Sea. I worked an 18 hour day carrying bags of manure that were double my body weight. My nails were stained brown from fungicide. My back was white from the dried salt of sweat. I was one of the five tigers which means I was one of the five strongest women in my platoon of the Red Guard. We also had to be guards as well you see. I was patrolling the coastline for Taiwanese spies one day and caught a friend of mine having sex in the rice fields. That was not allowed because it was thought decadent. We reported her and she was interrogated and forced to say that her boyfriend had raped her. That was punishable by death. We had a Peoples’ Trial and the guards shouted to all of us: “Should he be executed?” We all shouted “yes”. The boy was taken off immediately on a tractor and shot. His family was billed 26 cents — the cost of the bullet. I live with the guilt of that every day of my life. After that I was confused about Mao. We all were. How could this be done in his name?’

As she became disillusioned, Min realised that it was not only wrong to suppress sexual desire but difficult. She had a lesbian affair with her commander. ‘If Yan had been a man I would still have had sex with him. It wasn’t a question of being a lesbian, but of falling in love with a fellow human being.’ It was a passing phase (Min is now married to her second husband, Lloyd Lofthouse, a Vietnam veteran turned teacher). But the experience of harbouring an illicit love amid all that alienation taught Min to rebel. When the opportunity to appear in the Madame Mao film arose she seized it — but before the film could be made Mao died and, a month later, his wife and her ‘Gang of Four’ were arrested. ‘After that I was considered one of Madame Mao’s people,’ Min recalls. ‘I was denounced as a “bourgeois individualist”. It went on my record. I was told I would be sent back to the labour camp. I wanted to kill myself. Then a man in the studio took pity  on me and let me stay there doing menial work, sweeping up.’

After eight years at the studio, Min befriended Joan Chen the actress who was later to move to America and star in the Last Emperor. ‘Joan wrote to me from America saying I should try and get a place in an American college as a way of getting out of China. I got a friend to help me fill in an application form in English. It was for the Chicago Art Institute because I was good at drawing Mao murals. I sent some examples. They must have thought they were experimental.’ She lied that she could speak English and was offered a place. ‘The official in China who dealt with my visa asked if there was a proletariat in America and I said, ‘Yes’. He said: ‘Do you intend to promote revolution there?’ And I said, ‘Yes’. And then he said: ‘Is America like Albania?’ He clearly didn’t known anything about it so I said ‘yes’ and he let me go.’

Min arrived in America in 1984. She was 27. ‘It was like a different planet. I went to the airport bathroom and was amazed that the toilet paper wasn’t scratching and it was free.’ She was frightened because she had been trained to think of Americans as the enemy and all she could think at first when she saw tall men with blue eyes was: ‘Shoot! Shoot!’

‘My college was annoyed that I had lied that I could speak English. All I could say was ‘thank you, thank you,’ with my eyes on the floor. They said I would have to learn English in six months or I would be deported. I learned from watching Sesame Street.’

She learned well. Ten years later, Min had published the book for which is best known, Red Azalea, a haunting memoir about growing up in Mao’s China. Four novels were to follow and her latest — Empress Orchid about the last empress of China — is proving to be her most successful internationally. She will, indeed, be coming over to London next week to attend the Nibbies. Although all her books have been international bestsellers, Red Azalea is still banned in China. ‘The authorities there think my book brings shame on China. But they don’t. They bears witness to what really happened. China is still in denial about Mao. He is still revered. It is hard to admit guilt because it is a collective guilt. I feel guilty because I had been a part of that brutal, murderous history. I was a victim but I was also the water that kept the Mao boat afloat.’

Imagine trying to write an obituary for Jane Fonda. Where would you start? Is she best known as the archetypal 1960s sex kitten Barbarella, or the clench-fisted 1970s political activist Hanoi Jane? Or did her defining moment come in the 1980s when she pulled on a leotard and persuaded half the planet to join her in feeling ‘the burn’? And then there’s the husbands to consider (three), and the Oscars (two) and the famous father and brother (one of each)… Well, perhaps we should ask her. What does she think the opening line of her obituary ought to be? A long, long pause. ‘Jane Fonda was loved and reviled.’
I like her for saying that. It suggests a certain self awareness and sang-froid. Anyway, it looks as if it will be many years before the obituary writers get to practice their dark art on her. She may be 68 now, and she may have to walk with a stick — she has just had two operations on her hip and one on her knee — but the years of fitness training have left her looking supple, and her good cheek bones still give her face a sculptural quality, even without the inevitable Hollywood airbrushing. Her remarkably frank autobiography —  My Life So Far — is published in paperback this week and, judging by its title, Jane Fonda thinks she has a few years left in her, too.
She’s not kidding about being reviled, by the way. At a book signing recently a Vietnam veteran walked up to her and spat in her face. The cold fury that the words ‘Hanoi Jane’ provoke has not wearied with time. In 1972, it will be recalled, she visited Hanoi on a one-woman peace mission and was photographed wearing a military helmet while sitting at the trigger end of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, a publicity stunt that looked worse than it was. She also made radio broadcasts to US Servicemen, telling them they were guilty of war crimes. A 20,000-page dossier was compiled on her by the US intelligence agencies and US congressmen called for her to be charged with treason. I ask her if, after all this time, the spitting incident surprised her. ‘No, because we’ve not come to terms with the Vietnam war still. It was such a traumatic experience for the men who fought it and for the people who stayed home. It divided the country. No wonder the myth of Hanoi Jane lives on and is bigger than me. I was a lightning rod, someone for American vets to blame for losing the war. Even today it provides right-wingers with material to keep people from protesting about Bush and the Iraq war. Better not do that or you’ll become like Jane Fonda. Look what happened to her. Well, that would be what now? What? Huh? What happened?’
Well, she was hanged in effigy from a tree — but we shall come to that. For now it is worth considering what happened to her before the Hanoi Jane period. Her formative experiences were coloured by her distant relationship with her mother, Frances. ‘I didn’t like her to touch me,’ Fonda says. ‘Because I knew she didn’t love me.’ When Jane was 12, her mother, a manic depressive, committed suicide by cutting her throat with a razor. I ask the actress if she ever worried that she might have inherited her mother’s mental illness. ‘Very briefly. Not for long.’ Her relationship with her father, the Oscar-winning actor Henry Fonda, was similarly icy. ‘My father was remote,’ she tells me. ‘I wanted him to like me but circumstances early on taught me that he wasn’t going to like me as I was so I had to become what he wanted me to be. That doesn’t disappear when you grow up. It effected my relationships with men, my husbands, I mean.’
The first was the French film director Roger Vadim. He was a domineering man 10 years her senior and, when they met, he had just separated from his first wife Brigitte Bardot. He coerced Fonda into having threesomes with prostitutes. She went along with it, but now admits she hated it. Could she really not have said ‘no’ to him? ‘No, I couldn’t. Well, I could have but I was psychologically unable to. That is not uncommon in women who depend on a man to support them. But that wasn’t the case with me. By that time I was famous.  I was a movie star. I was earning my own living, yet even so I wasn’t able to say, “I don’t want to do this”. Unless we do what the man wants, he is going to abandon us. It shows how deep misogyny goes, this sense women have of being worthless.’
The way she describes it, she was almost as much a misogynist as he was. ‘Why’s that?’ Ah. Her tone is suddenly cold. What I mean is, um, she had been bullied into believing that women were inferior to men. ‘I don’t think that made me  a misogynist. One thing that set me apart from other women was my drive to get to know the women he would bring into our bed. I needed to humanise the situation by getting to know who they were. It was an antidote to objectification. I still have friendships from that time. Even now when we talk about those years it is painful. It still hurts me to think that a man who I loved and who loved me was not able to sense the pain it caused me.’
She became bulimic, an illness that had its roots in her father always telling her she was fat. ‘As a child I was always made to feel not good enough. That feeling attaches itself to the body around adolescent and a numbness sets in. I numbed the pain through my eating disorder.’
Presumably when she reached her early 20s and people started telling her she was a sex symbol she didn’t believe them? ‘Yes, it was like they were talking about someone else. I was looking over my shoulder to see who they were talking about. It was a strange and not pleasant feeling. I felt out of focus.’
So even after becoming a model, and an actress men fantasised about, she didn’t see a beautiful woman when she looked in the mirror? ‘No. No, I didn’t.’
And when she looked at herself naked did she see the body of fat woman? ‘For many decades I did, yes.’
When she looks back at those pictures now can she believe she ever thought that? ‘Um. Yeah. I can go back and understand exactly how I felt then. I can’t claim to be 100% over it. I grew up thinking that if I wasn’t perfect no one would love me.’
But men did fall in love with her, despite her perceived imperfections. Her next husband was Tom Hayden, the civil rights and anti-war campaigner who later became a senator. Is it fair to say that, with him, her personality changed from being a submissive sex kitten to a feisty political activist? ‘I’ve always been feisty. The only time I wasn’t feisty was in the bedroom.’
Did she feel an intellectual equal to him? She laughs. ‘How to put this? I had become an activist by the time I met Tom, but he was the one with the experience and knowledge. So I became an acolyte. I was in awe of him. Next to him I felt so stupid. I’ve been rereading some of my speeches from that time, the FBI helpfully recorded them for me, filed everything away, and they are not bad. But I could never speak when Tom was there. I was tongue tied.’
Does she regret the fateful trip she made to North Vietnam? ‘No. It changed my life. I think it was important for someone to go there and expose what the Nixon administration was doing. The only thing I regret is that picture on the anti-aircraft gun. It was a lapse of judgement that will haunt me until I die. They had sent me an itinerary that included a visit to a military site and I wrote back and said ‘no’, but once I was there I kind of lost my voice.’
So the North Vietnamese used her? She sighs. ‘You know something? I was 32 years old. I was a grown up. I take responsibility for it. If I was used, then why not? Who can blame them?’
She says she only regretted the picture but what about the radio broadcasts, surely they were much more regrettable? ‘Not at all. Not at all, no. I’m proud of those radio broadcasts. There was nothing treasonous about them. As someone with military intelligence actually testified at the House un-American Activities Committee: all I did was ask the servicemen to think.’
And what she was asking them to think about was whether they should disobey orders for fear of being prosecuted for war crimes. When she returned to America she famously asked: ‘What is a traitor?’ I put it to her that a traitor is someone who gives comfort and aid to the enemy — and that was exactly what she did on that trip, especially in the way she tried to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of US bomber crews. ‘Um.’ She pauses. ‘The fact is, the North Vietnamese did not need any comfort from us. They knew what they wanted to do and they were succeeding. If I said anything treasonous I would have been tried. I wasn’t. Instead they tried to convict me in the court of public opinion. It opened me up for attack. But you have to remember we were being lied to. It was a desperate time. You did desperate things.’
On her trip she met some American PoWs who told her they were anti the war. When they returned to America they claimed they had only said that to her because they had been tortured. She said they were lying. But why, I ask her now, would they have lied about that? What possible motive could they have had? A longer pause. ‘The Nixon administration wanted to damage me any way they could. They used one particular PoW, David Hoffman. He didn’t want to get into trouble for telling me he was anti-war so he decided to say he was tortured into saying it. I think he is probably suffering from that because you can’t get in touch with him at all.’
She’s tried? ‘Yes. He’s separated from his wife and you can’t get a hold of him. I knew he hadn’t been tortured because the North Vietnamese stopped torturing PoWs in 1969. It was well documented.’
But those documents have only emerged in recent years, how could she have been sure at the time that Hoffman wasn’t tortured in 1972? ‘I’d talked to PoWs about it. I knew Hoffman hadn’t been tortured. I generalised when I said they were all liars, hypocrites and pawns, but I had him in mind.’ And that was when Vietnam vets hanged her in effigy.
As the right wing pundit Ann Coulter has noted: ‘Axis Sally was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Tokyo Rose got six years. Hanoi Jane makes aerobics videos.’ How did Fonda square such anti-war serious mindedness with the frivolity of wearing a leotard and making the Jane Fonda Workout? Did she not worry that it would undermine her serious message? ‘On the outside it did seem like two different people, but Hanoi Jane was a myth created by the right wing. I was in a leotard from the age of 20 because I always danced and did ballet. Besides, the workout was a way of raising money for Tom’s political movement.’ She donated £8.5 million of the profits from the video to her husband’s quasi-Marxist political organisation.
Another paradox, by then she had become an outspoken feminist. She had also been the star of ground-breaking films such as Klute, Coming Home, and the searing They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Yet when she married Ted Turner, the multi-billionaire founder of CNN, she abandoned her distinguished acting career to become a trophy wife. Is that how it felt? ‘I worried about being a trophy wife in the beginning but as I got to know him, it wasn’t the case. Ted is not cynical. He lives modestly, apart from the private plane. The trappings of huge wealth were not part of his life. We spend most of our time fishing and riding. He could be quite insecure, like a child. But he changed when he was with me. I think I gave him confidence. He became an easier person to be with.’
Is she a difficult person to live with? ‘No, I’m an easy person to live with. All pleasers are!’
It can’t be the whole truth, you suspect, given that her marriages ended because her husbands had affairs. Now divorced, Fonda lives alone in Atlanta, near to one of her two grown up children. The woman who comes across from her autobiography is sympathetic, cool and measured, if not necessarily loveable. In person she seems somehow softer, even though she claims her years of bulimia have left her with brittle bones. She seems more at ease with the world; more reconciled to being loved and reviled. I ask her if she is still angry. ‘I feel angry with Bush. And scared. I feel angry and scared and disbelieving about what our country is like now. But I’m not as angry as I once was, no.’

Shy and lazy, that’s Terry Wogan, according to Terry Wogan. They’re not words you would readily associate with a 67-year-old who rises at 5.30 every morning so that he can ‘talk rubbish for two hours’ — as he puts it — for the benefit of nine million adoring radio listeners, who include ironically-minded students, large swathes of Middle England, and HM the Queen. Yet, as he elaborates, I realise he is, for once, being serious, if a little disingenuous.
It is mid morning, he has just come off air and we are sipping coffee in a dimly-lit bar around the corner from his Radio 2 studio in Broadcasting House. He is looking defiantly beige: beige socks, beige cords, beige polo neck. Defiantly, because there is something quietly subversive about Sir Terry. He ignores fashion. He mocks modern, Metropolitan manners. He crosses picket lines. He is even rude about the BBC, his employers for almost 40 years. He can afford to be. Much as it might pain them at times, they know that he knows where the centre of gravity is in this country — that is, pretty much wherever Terry Wogan happens to be standing.
‘I always had a clear idea of who the audience was and what I ought to be doing to get them to identify with me,’ he says in a subdued voice with shoulders hunched and hands pressed between his knees. ‘I can’t stand it when presenters read out sycophantic letters about themselves. I would never read out a letter saying “love your show.” That not how friends are. Friends are mutually abusive. What I try to encourage is good natured, and sometimes ill natured, badinage. I will get the occasional letter saying: “Why don’t you shut up and go back to where you came from?” — and I will always read it out.’
Wake Up To Wogan regularly wins awards and has the largest audience of any radio programme in Europe. He looks uncomfortable when asked why he thinks this might be. When pressed, he says: ‘A lot of commercial stations think it is all about play lists, but why would you want to listen to a radio station for that? You can get that on your iPod. It’s the presenters people want to listen to. We’re not slaves to the music on my show.’ Realising this sounds a little pompous he adds: ‘Although I am a keen break dancer, as you know.’
But at least on his radio show he gets to deal with normal people, I point out. Later this month he will be returning to television to present his chat show, and that will mean having to deal with celebrities. A dreadful prospect surely?
He purses his lips. ‘That is right, and now you’ve made me question why I’m doing it.’ The show — Wogan: Now and Then — is a follow up to Wogan which began in 1985 and ran three times weekly for seven years. ‘The original show could be trying at times,’ he recalls. ‘I would find myself interviewing a Hollywood star who was the worse for illegal substances, one way or another, either monosyllabic and depressed, or hyperactive.’ There were some memorable English guests, though, from David Icke pronouncing himself the son of God, to a drunken Oliver Reed and a grumpy Prince Philip.
David Icke will be one of the guests reappearing in the new show. ‘You have to compliment the people who are prepared to come back on, particularly the women because they are going to be looking at themselves as they were 20 years ago. Notwithstanding the fact the at I am going to be looking at myself on a regular basis as well.’
Judging by the trailers for the new show — Wogan now apparently sitting opposite Wogan then — he hasn’t changed much. ‘It’s the plastic surgery,’ he says. ‘The miracle of Botox. I also have a bull clip at the back of my neck.’
Certainly his hair has aged well, refulgent and scarcely threaded with grey as it is. But what about his aggressive interviewing technique? Will that have changed with time? Does he think he has mellowed? He shows his dimples as he grins. ‘I know, I know, I would be criticised for bland interviewing. But how long would you last if you came on like Clive Anderson? How long did Clive Anderson last? If you are sharp and highly critical, pretty soon no one will want to come on. I mean, I was never going to risk Mrs Merton. I’d never risk going on Have I Got News for You? I’ve been asked several times.’
That, I say, surprises me. I hadn’t imagined he was so protective of his public image. Can we conclude from this that he is a vain man? ‘No, it’s not vanity. It’s that someone else has the edit. It’s not a live show. It is edited to show Paul and Ian in a favourable light.’
Surely an ego as healthy as his can take a bit of ribbing? ‘No one wants to come out looking like an eejit. Of course they don’t. Anyway, it’s not the teasing. I could stand that. But I couldn’t stand my ripostes ending up on the cutting room floor.’
Hmm. Interesting. And judging by what he goes on to say, the ego jibe is clearly bothering him. ‘I never watch or listen to myself because I would find it embarrassing. I’ve got a very low threshold of embarrassment. I get embarrassed very easily. I used to hate it when females guests touched my knee.’
He’s not tactile? ‘Well I am, but on my own terms.’
Isn’t it masochist of him to be in the profession he is in, given his self-consciousness? ‘Yes it is. I am in the wrong business. But you evolve a technique for doing it. I hide behind technique. I would rather not see my audience, that is all.’
Interesting again. There is something about his television persona — the  awkward body language, the coy looks to camera — that could just be an exaggeration of his natural shyness. ‘Exactly. This is why radio is more my medium that television. When I do occasionally catch a glimpse of myself on TV, it’s never me. There is what the ancient Greeks used to call “a hedge of teeth” getting in the way.’
Could he cope with the scrutiny of being a Celebrity Big Brother housemate? ‘God no, never. I never give enough of myself away. It’s the Irish thing. WB Yates. Never give your whole self away. Keep something back, always.’
So there is a dark side to Sir Terry’s character that he would rather the great British public did not see? ‘No, everyone is entitled to their privacy and their own thoughts. I’m  not a loner exactly, but I was an only child for six and half years before my brother was born and you develop the ability to be alone. I’m not a gregarious person. My wife makes all our friends. I grew up in Limerick but had to leave all my friends there when we moved to Dublin, I then left all those friends when I came to London.’
His father ran a grocer’s shop in Limerick before becoming the director of a drinks firm. After leaving his (private) Jesuit school, the young Terry worked as a bank clerk in Dublin for five years. Then at 21, he entered and won a competition to become an announcer on RTE in Dublin. In 1967 he came to London to present Late Night Extra on BBC Radio 1.
Shyness is not incompatible with high self esteem, it seems. ‘It’s true. I don’t doubt myself much as a person. I think I’m all right. I can cope with disappoint and criticisms. There was no question that I felt loved by my parents. In fact I  think for those first six years I was probably put on a pedestal by them. But, generally, my parents were shy people. Catholics in Ireland were taught that, after sex, vanity was the worst sin. You couldn’t show off. Looking in the mirror was anathema. If you scored a try in rugby you ran back to the half way line almost shame-faced because it was a team game. I’m still offended if I see someone score a try and punch the air.’
So the Wogan self-deprecation is authentic? ‘And so it should be. People always assume that self deprecation  is a way of messaging your own ego or fishing for compliments. Not in my case. I get embarrassed by praise.’
I’m curious to know how he squares this lack of vanity and aversion to showing off with the success he has enjoyed in his cut-throat profession. Surely he has had to be controlling and ruthless and tetchy and prima donaish and ambitious? ‘No, no, no. That’s a cliché it itself. You don’t have to be any of those things at all. You don’t need to be pushy or nasty or confrontational to get on.’
I bet he can be a bit. ‘No, honestly. I’m not ambitious. I’ve never knocked on a door and said: “Give me a job”. I don’t fuss about the hole in a studio carpet. I can be impatient and fastidious, I suppose, but I’m not the kind of person who shouts at people.’
Don’t people take advantage of him, then? ‘No, I’m not stupid. No one takes advantage of me.’
This said, Terry Wogan has at times felt undervalued at the BBC. Its young, Guardian-reading, black-wearing, Soho House dwelling executives tend to faun over cool and intellectual presenters such as Jeremy Paxman. Wogan nods. ‘They do think I’m uncool, and they are probably right.’ He also concedes that 1993 was the lowest point in his career. That was when his TV show was axed by the BBC and replaced by the doomed soap Eldorado. It was a humiliating experience and, understandably, he felt vindicated when he took over the Radio 2 breakfast show and increased its listener figures from three million to nine million. But he is in magnanimous mood today. ‘I hope I have their respect. They don’t abuse me. We come to mutual agreements.’
It occurs to me that it may partly be laziness that has kept him at the BBC. ‘There were always things I wanted to do,’ he says. ‘I would have loved to have been a journalist, for example, but I never did anything about it, I drifted into the bank instead. I never pursued things. I could have gone to university but I felt I’d done enough. I’m lazy. I have so little capacity for working hard. I like to do programmes live simply because I’m lazy. I hate rehearsal.’
What’s going to be in his autobiography? ‘Well, I’ve nearly finished it. It’s inconsequential. It’s only a life: me and my family and what I do.’
He married Helen, a house model for Balmain, in 1965. The two of them were virgins on their wedding night. They celebrated their ruby wedding last year. What, I ask, is the secret to a healthy marriage? ‘You sound like a man who has been through a few.’
Me? No. Just the one. ‘Of course,’ he says with a laugh. ‘I was forgetting. You’re married to a Catholic aren’t you?’ I nod. ‘That means you can’t get out of it. There’s no secret,’ he adds. ‘It’s luck. You do sometimes take each other for granted but as long as you’re aware that your taking each other for granted it’s OK. Consideration is the key. The things we argue about are so small and petty, like, “Where are me socks?”. Helen is my confidante. She knows me so well.’
So he daren’t leave her! All that stuff she could tell the tabloids… ‘No, she never would. When we married there was never going to be anything else. I always used to tell her at the time she married me that she was the luckiest woman in Ireland.’ He grins to show he’s joking.
The couple have three children, now in their 30s:  Alan, Mark, and  Katherine — who once said she grew up fearing her friends only wanted to be with her because of her famous father. I ask Sir Terry if he thinks his children suffered because he was in the public eye. ‘I don’t know. I kept my own name when in retrospect it would have been easier on my children if I had changed it and taken a nom de plume. But they’ve coped very well. They seem happy. We’ve got two married now and the elder boy is walking out. He works with The Sanctuary, Katherine was an actress for a while and is a full time mother now and my second son Mark works at the agency which represents me. He’s very good at it.  Terrific networker. Don’t know how he does it.’
Was he a strict father? “No, I always thought that would be a mistake. Parents assume their children are going to be the same as them, with the same drives and standards and they are not, of course. You’re children are always going to be a permanent surprise to you.’
Do they tease him? ‘They do, but I never talk about what I do when I’m at home. Well, I do a bit now Mark is in the business. But I think they were vaguely ashamed of me when they were at school and I was doing Wogan.’
Ashamed? ‘Well you don’t want your father on television. Makes you a target. I didn’t envy them. Children want to be conventional. Teenagers don’t want attention drawn to them. It gave them though, I hope, an extra layer of character.’
Teenagers might not want attention drawn to themselves, but I’m pretty sure that, for all his protestations to the contrary, Sir Terry does. Perhaps that is the thing he wants to ‘keep back’. His self-deprecation, after all, clearly, comes from an underlying security, a robust sense of who he is and of his own value. He may not have a dark secret, but he does, as he admits, have a ‘technique’ he can hide behind: the easy laugh, the folksy charm, the whimsy. He hams up the public Terry Wogan – the conceit that he is an innocent just arrived off the boat from Ireland. Yet in private, I have heard, he can be quite serious-minded and bookish, as well as puritanical and scornful. He is also more sophisticated that he likes to let on: a wine connoisseur with a second home in France and a sizable commercial property portfolio. Shy and lazy? I don’t think so.

If Jon Stewart didn’t have his daily show, called The Daily Show, he thinks he would sit around at home all day in his underwear screaming at his television set and occasionally firing bullets at it, ‘like Elvis used to do’. Actually, he has three sets, permanently tuned to Fox News, MSNBC and CNN respectively. The 42-year-old American  ‘anchorman’ of The Daily Show, a satirical current affairs show that has won five Emmys and a Peabody award, watches the news addictively, he explains, all day, looking for comedy material in order to produce ‘a nightly half-hour series unburdened by objectivity or journalistic integrity.’
The show, which can now be seen on our screens, on the recently launched More4, starts with Stewart tapping his papers on his desk and saying in his deadpan way something like: ‘Good news for war buffs tonight. The Middle East peace talks have ended in failure.’ He often shows clips from his bete noir, the right-wing Fox News, and follows these with a sceptical lift of his eyebrows, or an incredulous rub of his eyes. When Condoleezza Rice admitted to the Senate that she had seen a presidential daily briefing in August 2001 entitled ‘Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United States’, Stewart showed the clip and afterwards stared into the camera for 20 seconds. He then buried his face in his hands, lifted his head up and moaned: ‘You’re fucking kidding me, right? Please, please say you are kidding me.’
It is mid morning and Stewart is at home in the Manhattan brownstone he shares with his wife Tracey and one year old son Nathan. A pitbull in the next room puts in an occasional bark. On his show he is always cleanshaven and wearing a sharply-tailored suit, at home he is a jeans, sweatshirt and stubble man: ‘I have a pit crew on the show whose job it is to make sure I don’t look homeless,’ he says in a chewy, Eastern seaboard accent. ‘I put on whatever they lay out for me. Then a make-up artist comes in and spray paints me.’
I ask how, for the benefit of any English viewers yet to catch The Daily Show, he would describe himself? ‘Shorter than you probably thought I was. That is what works on television. That and having a head slightly too large for your body. The closer you resemble a Peanuts character the better.’
Although he is 5ft 7in, he is being self deprecating about his hawkish good looks. He has good cheek bones and thick, dark hair frostings at the temples. His face, moreover, has appeared on the covers of Newsweek and Rolling Stone and, in 1999, when he began hosting The Daily Show, he was voted into the top 50 most beautiful people in the world by People magazine. ‘That is true,’ he says when I point this out. ‘I am adorable. Or at least I was. I had been gradually climbing the ladder of most beautiful people, going from 119 to 78, and then finally I made the top 50. But by 2000 they had decided I was ugly once again.’ Pause. ‘Look, I was never thought of as good looking until I had a television show. In American being on television automatically makes you beautiful. You could put a cantaloupe on television in America and someone would want to fuck it.’
Stewart and a few of his collaborators on the show are coming to London this month for a one night show, essentially a reading of his bestselling book America (The Book) A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. ‘It will be a chance for British people to turn up and get any question answered about America that they want. Any question at all.’
I ask about the claim he makes in the book that America invented democracy. ‘Sure, we did,’ he says with a shrug. ‘That and teabo.’
Will he also be discussing Britain’s special relationship with America? ‘Yeah, I think for the purposes of the discussion, though, it would be easiest just to merge Bush and Blair into one, Primesident Blush.’
Though Stewart says he is not comfortable being more than two minutes away from a joke on the Daily Show, he does secure interviews with political heavyweights, who have included Bill and Hilary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, former Republican presidential challenger Bob Dole, General Wesley Clark, and counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke. John Kerry bantered with him in a bid to seem more human. Vice-presidential hopeful John Edwards announced his candidacy on the show. Stewart’s response was: ‘I have to warn you, we are a fake show, so you might have to do this again somewhere.’
He is polite and mildly mocking with his guests, rather than scratchy. ‘I don’t think we are partisan. I’m curious to know what makes these people tick. I mean, I have five minutes and if you can’t find out exactly what makes a man tick in five minutes then…’ He’s joking again. You have to wonder, though, why these politicians come on. ‘I think it’s because they think no one they know is going to be watching,’ Stewart says. ‘We exist outside the world of politics. Also politicians are salesman and they think we have a captive audience of disaffected youth who they can market to. The only demographic that seems to matter to them is the young people, even though the young tend not to vote. It’s a feeling that if you can tap into their life force then you can be immortal.’
He has a point. The New York Times often refers to the ‘Jon Stewart generation,’ meaning young Americans whose only knowledge of current affairs comes from the Daily Show. He has been credited with energizing an otherwise apathetic youth electorate. (‘A lot of them are probably high,’ Stewart says by way of explanation.) The politicians are trading on his cool image, clearly; does that, I ask, make him feel used? He laughs. ‘I could give a shit. Look, if you are going to have good sex you might as well satisfy both parties. People think we have a political agenda on the show, but if we do, it isn’t working. Since we have been on these past five years the world has gotten worse. So, if anything, we have a corrosive effect. We thought we were helping but as it turned out The Daily Show has destabilised the Middle East.’
His debut on the show coincided with the dimpled chad election of 2000 and, with George Bush in the White House — a man not to be misunderestimated — he has not been short of material since. He must, presumably, consider this the best of all possible worlds in which to be a satirist? ‘I wouldn’t wish ill on the world for my own personal showbiz gain,’ he says. ‘Then again I’d like to have a pool.’
He is contracted to stay with the show until election 2008, who does he think that will be between? ‘Well I image it will be Hilary Clinton and Jed Bush, the House of Clinton versus the House of Bush. As you in England move away from a monarchy we move toward it.’
Since 9/11 the Bush administration has made much of the concept of American patriotism; does Stewart consider himself an American patriot? ‘Patriotism is an antiquated term that they have tried to rebrand, like New Cola. I think they use the patriotism charge against dissenters because they are not keen on having their record dissected. There are lots of ways to dismiss your critics and in a post 9/11 world probably the most visceral one is to say you are a traitor. That seems an extreme and artificial viewpoint to me. Michael Moore is celebrating his ‘subversion’ with great wealth and fame, he is not sitting in a gulag.’
The reference is telling. Stewart may be a staunch Democrat — his nickname is Lefty — but he is a much more thoughtful and witty man than Michael Moore, with whom he is sometimes compared. Whereas Moore is irritating and smug, Stewart is dry and droll and offers a more charming, warm and acceptable face of American liberalism. Asked to compare his work with Moore’s, Stewart says simply: “He’s an activist. I am a more passive editorialist.’ Frown. ‘I always find it odd when asked about my political views; where I come down on certain issues. The truth is, I wish I were ideologically strong enough to understand whatever position I have, but it changes quite frequently. If anything, I’m a confusedocrat. Some days I feel clear about what we should do, other days I’m as baffled as the next guy. My views are usually coloured by the last person I talked to, which makes me shallow but probably very typical. I still find in my heart I can be persuaded and that is a nice place to be. If I hear a cogent argument I am open enough to add that to my viewpoint. I would hate my mindset to calcify.’
Has he ever been tempted into politics himself? ‘There are pictures I have of myself in a shoebox here that would preclude me from working at the post office, let alone Capitol Hill. I can basically write the negative campaign about myself right now.’
If he were in charge, would he bring ‘the boys’ in Iraq home? ‘ I don’t even know what that means. It’s like ‘would you prefer people didn’t die?’ I don’t think we should have been there in the first place. To me it made about as much sense as attacking Australia after Pearl Harbor. I’m not sure what Iraq had to do with the War on Terror.’ Pause. ‘Bush and Cheney say we shouldn’t criticise the war in Iraq right now because it is bad for the morale of the troops. No. Improvised explosive devises left around by insurgents are bad for the morale of the troops.’
‘Dude, I totally want to smoke a bong with you,’ Stewart told a Christian fundamentalist guest on his show who had been explaining the theory of creationism. It seemed like a clash of cultures. I ask whether, from his home in liberal New York, the conservative, moral majority heartland of the Mid West looks like a different country? ‘Yes but the people of Kansas must look at our gay pride parade and think we are a different country. I think most people in the world could find common elements if they tried, but most of the world is run not by moderates but by extremists, because extremist kill more, the moderates have lawns to mow.’
Stewart always seems relaxed and nonchalant on television, is that all a front? Is he a screaming tyrant as soon as the cameras are off him? ‘Yeah, Thorazine takes the edge off. What you see on television is a post medicative state.’
Has he always been a joker? ‘People don’t go into comedy because as a child they were morose. I think it’s a brain tick. As a youngster it’s more obnoxiousness. All it was good for then was getting my ass kicked and getting suspended. As you get older you hone it, learn to make points. Like most things in life, making people laugh is about being liked and, ultimately, about getting laid.’
Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz, as he was then, grew up in suburban Larenceville, New Jersey. His was a middle-class household: his mother taught gifted children, his father was a physicist who worked in laboratories developing x-rays and lasers. Was he under pressure to follow in his father’s academic footsteps? ‘My family was aware early on  that I was not going to be following in anyone’s intellectual footsteps. My older brother is quite brilliant in those matters. At table, he and my father would be drawing graphs on napkins while I would be rubbing pizza on my forehead. As Rummy would say, you go to war with the army you have.’
Stewart nevertheless attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he was something of a soccer star. ‘Soccer took up most of my time but I did come away with a psychology degree,’ he says. ‘I started out doing chemistry but they kept wanting the correct answer rather than the long answer. In psychology you can give any answer as long as you do it in ten pages or more.’ He started using his middle name as his surname when he began as a stand up comedian in 1987. ‘Leibowitz sounded too Hollywood,’ he says. No, really, I press, why did he change it? ‘No, really. To pretend I wasn’t Jewish.’ He keeps his face straight. Why is it, does he suppose, so many of America’s greatest comedians have been Jewish? ‘If you had our history wouldn’t you try to be likeable? Might as well be funny.’
When I suggest that his constant funniness might make him difficult to live with he says: ‘Hey buddy, I bet you’re no picnic either!’
Fair enough, but I don’t have a compulsion to make people laugh all the time. ‘I think I am probably hard work, but not for that reason. I spend all day writing jokes. When you do that for a living it scratches the itch. I am like a dog after you have thrown him a ball. Earning a living from jokes means I don’t have to be the centre of attention. Away from the show I cocoon myself. At dinner parties, friends don’t await my witty repartee. They are aware what a dolt I am, their expectation are very low.’ He thinks he would be considered neurotic were he not on television. Instead his self-loathing is considered endearing self deprecation. ‘I don’t think I’m a crying on the inside clown. I’m quite optimistic, though I do have a permanent look of exhaustion.’
He says his one year old son has inherited that look. ‘He has bags under his eyes. People think he’s tired but its genetic. In other ways Nathan is the antithesis of me. He doesn’t understand that I am a night person. He hasn’t gotten that yet. He would be Finland to my America. The timing is completely off.’ Stewart’s wife, a vet, is pregnant again, a girl due in February. When I ask how they met he says: “You mean how did a comedian come to meet a vet? Well I met her on a blind date, but I imagine you could meet one just by carrying a sick dog around.’
A happy image on which to end.
The Daily Show is on More4 every night at 8.30. America (The Book) is published by Penguin. Jon Stewart will be at the Prince Edward Theatre, London, on December 11.
THE WIT AND WISDOM OF JON STEWART
‘It is often said that America ‘invented’ democracy. This view is, of course an understatement; American invented not only democracy, but freedom, justice, liberty and ‘time-sharing’
‘The human race is by nature brutal, amoral, unreasonable and self centred, but for the first few hundred thousands years of our existence as a species, we were way too obvious about it.’
In 1300BC God gives Ten Commandants to Israelites, making them His Chosen People and granting them eternal protection under Divine Law. Nothing bad ever happens to Jews again.’
‘The fact that Magna Carta was written in 1215 is, by law, the only thing you are required to know about it.’
‘thanks to blessedly isolated geography, a can-do spirit and an indigenous population with primitive weapons and surprisingly weak immune systems, the United States has experienced consistent growth and expansion over its entire history.’
‘The story of Africa in the modern age is one of war, disease, corruption, repression and poverty. On the upside, there are tons of monkeys and you never need a jacket.’
“Which of the following is the best combination of reasons to vote for a candidate? a) Issues and eyes; b) Party affiliation and hair; c) Background and teeth; d) Religious zealotry and tits.”