Umberto Eco has made a name – and fortune – for himself in the role of thinking man to the masses. Not that we understand what he is going on about most of the time. Nigel Farndale asks him to explain himself

‘Mooo! Mooo!’ Umberto Eco says by way of opening when I meet him in his high-ceilinged apartment overlooking the piazza Castello in Milan.

‘I’m supposed to do this exercise for my throat,’ the 73-year-old Italian philosopher and novelist explains. ‘Mooo! Mooo! I had an operation on my vocal chords and am still recovering.’ I tell him I will understand if he needs to rest his voice during our interview, or indeed if he needs to moo from time to time.

Though he has a paunch and unexpectedly small, geisha-like feet, Eco has an energetic stride – as I discover when he leads the way along a winding corridor and I try to keep up with him. We pass through a labyrinthine library containing 30,000 books – he has a further 20,000 at his 17th-century palazzo near Urbino – and into a drawing-room full of curiosities: a glass cabinet containing seashells, rare comics and illustrated children’s books, a classical sculpture of a nude man with his arms missing, a jar containing a pair of dog’s testicles, a lute, a banjo, a collection of recorders, and a collage of paintbrushes by his friend the Pop artist Arman.

Although Eco is still best known for his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1980), a medieval murder mystery that sold ten million copies, it is as an academic that he would like to be remembered. He has been a professor at Bologna, the oldest university in Europe, for more than 30 years. He has also lectured at Harvard, Yale, Cambridge and numerous other famous universities and, to fill in the rest of his time, writes cerebral essays on uncerebral subjects ranging from football to pornography and coffee pots.

He is one of the fathers of postmodern literary criticism – the general gist of his approach being that it doesn’t matter what an author intends to say, readers are entitled to interpret works of literature in any way they choose. He was also a pioneer of semiotics, the study of culture as a web of signs and messages to be decoded for hidden meaning.

Doesn’t it drive him mad, always seeing meaning where others just see things?

‘It does become a habit, but you are not obliged to be on duty at every moment,’ he says in his heavy Italian accent. ‘If I drink a glass of scotch I am thinking only of the scotch; I am not thinking about what the brand of scotch I am drinking says about my personality. I know what you mean, though, and I suppose the answer is that I am driven no more mad than a pianist who always has melodies in his head.’

He strokes his beard as he says this, and I notice he wears his watch over his shirt cuff, with the face on the inside of his wrist. Is this meaningful?

‘There are two practical reasons for it – one is that in my job I am obliged to attend a lot of symposia, which are frequently very boring. If I do this to check the time [he bends his arm], everybody notices. If I do it this way [he looks down at his watch without moving his wrist], I can check surreptitiously without showing it.

‘As for the sleeve, that is because my watch-strap gives me eczema. So,’ he says with a laugh, ‘there is a meaning there, but not a terribly interesting one.’

I see he is also chewing on a dummy cigarette. ‘Yes, I gave up smoking five months ago. I find it helps to have something in my mouth. I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work. In the first two months after quitting I couldn’t work. I felt lazy. Then I tried nicotine patches.’ He has, he says, smoked 60 a day for most of his adult life. Hasn’t he left it a little late to start worrying about his health? ‘Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.’

His second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, took eight years to write. It was about three editors at a Milan publishing house trying to link every conspiracy theory in history, including that now famous one about the medieval Knights Templar and the secret of the Holy Grail.

‘I know, I know,’ he says with a laugh. ‘My book included the plot for The Da Vinci Code. But I was not being a prophet. It was old occult material. It was already all there. I treated it in a more sceptical way than Dan Brown did. He had the excellent idea of treating it as if it were true. Millions of people believed him. They took it seriously, but it was all a hoax.’

The Da Vinci Code is one of the few novels to have sold more than The Name of the Rose, I point out. Must be quite galling, that. He shrugs. Has he read it? ‘Yes.’ Did he like it? He shrugs again. ‘It’s a page-turner.’

The Vatican was not keen on Foucault’s Pendulum, by all accounts. Its official newspaper described it as being full of ‘profanations, blas-phemies, buffooneries and filth, held together by the mortar of arrogance and cynicism’. Even the late Pope condemned Eco personally as, ‘the mystifier deluxe’. Is it true he was all but excommunicated?

‘No. The whole affair was nothing but an invention of the newspapers that needed to have an Italian Salman Rushdie.’

Salman Rushdie, interestingly enough, described Foucault’s Pendulum as ‘humourless, devoid of character, entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts’. Other writers, academics and critics, perhaps envious of the success of Eco’s first novel, also put the boot in, accusing the author of wearing his learning too heavily. Was it all just professional jealousy, does he think?

‘When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment. But not all, and it is only after my work as a novelist that I received 33 honorary degrees from universities around the world.’

Many academics, I suggest, seem to have felt that Eco’s main intellectual interest was in showing off. Is that fair? Is he an exhibitionist?

‘I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.’

Even though Eco makes subjects such as metaphysics and semiotics relatively accessible through his playful prose, he must suspect that many of his ideas go over the heads of his millions of readers. I mean, if a clever chap like Salman Rushdie struggles with it, what hope do the rest of us have? He shrugs again. ‘I write what I write.’

Does he worry, though, that some people buy his books in order to impress their friends, but never actually read them?

‘If some people are so weak that they buy my books because they are piled high in bookshops, and then do not understand them, that is not my fault. If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.’

Is he a vain man himself – intellectually, I mean? ‘Obviously there is a pleasure in teaching because it is a way to keep you young. But I think a poet or philosopher writing a paper who doesn’t hope that his work will last for 1,000 years is a fool. Anyway, intellectual vanity does not exclude humility. If you write a poem, you hope to be as good as Shakespeare, but you accept you probably won’t be and that you will have much to learn.

‘I would describe myself as an insecure optimist who is sensitive to criticism. I always fear to be wrong. Those who are always certain of their own work risk being idiots. Insecurity is a great force, apropos of teaching. The moment I start a new class I feel panic. If you don’t feel panic, you cannot succeed.’

It seems remarkable, given his success as a novelist, that he still teaches. ‘My success obliged me to seek greater privacy, but that is the only real difference it has made to my life. It is difficult going to [film] premières, for example, because people want to interview me or hand me their manuscript. I continued with my life as a scholar, publishing academic books. There was a continual osmosis between my academic research and my novels.’

His latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, is about a rare-book dealer who loses his ‘autobiographical’ memory – he doesn’t know his own name or recognise his wife – but still has his ‘semantic’ memory and so is able to quote from every book he has ever read. The hero is the same age as Eco and has had similar life experiences. There is, then, I presume, much of his own autobiography in this book.

‘It is difficult for me to recognise it as autobiography because it is more the biography of a generation. But it is obvious I gave to the character a lot of my personal memories. The “historic” or “public” memories are from my private collection of memorabilia, from the Flash Gordon or Mickey Mouse cartoons of my youth. The illustrations I use in the book are all from my own collection, as displayed in that cabinet back there.’ He directs a thumb over his shoulder. ‘The character lived his childhood through books and cartoons, as did I. They dominated my life.’

So cartoons are to him what the madeleine was to Proust, a trigger to memory? ‘No. I had to fight against Proust in this book. If you write a novel about memory, you have to. So I did the contrary of the great Proust. He went inside himself to retrieve senses, smells and memories. My hero does the opposite because he is only confronted with the external memories, public memories which a whole generation shared.’

At one point in the book the hero remembers fighting with the Resistance during the war. Although he was only a teenager, Eco did something akin to this, having first been a committed Fascist.

‘In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles – a compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists, that is for every young Italian. I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject, “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.’ He recalls being proud of his Fascist youth uniform. ‘I spent the following two years among the Germans – Fascists and partisans shooting at one another – and I learnt how to dodge a bullet. It was good exercise.’

Can he recall exactly when he became disillusioned with Mussolini? He gives the question a contemplative nod before answering.

‘There were two letters I wrote nine months apart. I found them when I was doing research for this book. In the first, which I wrote when I was ten, I was, rhetorically at least, a fanatical Fascist. You see, as a child I was exposed every day to the propaganda. It was like a religion. Saying I didn’t believe in Mussolini would have been as shocking as saying

I didn’t believe in God. I was born under him – I never knew anything else. I loved him. It would have been perverse if I hadn’t. In the second letter nine months later I had become sceptical and disillusioned. I tried to work out what had happened in between. It might have been that

I was no longer optimistic about the outcome of the war, but more likely it was to do with the radio and with reading American cartoon books.

I did research and remembered that at the same time as we were hearing official Fascist songs on Italian radio we also began listening to silly humorous songs on Radio Free London – we were learning about everyday life elsewhere. I began to fall in love with the idea of Englishness. I began to read about Jeeves and Bertie.’

Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, a medieval fortress city in the Po valley in northern Italy. His grandfather was a typographer and a committed socialist who organised strikes. His father was an office clerk for a manufacturer of iron bathtubs. He describes his family as being ‘petit bourgeois’.

Did his father have aspirations to be an intellectual? ‘He never had the chance. He was the first child of a family of 13. They were poor. My father left school early and went to work. But he was a voracious reader and went to the book kiosks and read books there so he didn’t have to pay for them. When they chased him off he would simply go to another kiosk.’

His father died of a heart attack in 1962, and his mother died ten years later. ‘My father didn’t want me to be a philosopher, he wanted me to be a lawyer,’ Eco says. ‘But he accepted my decision when I enrolled at Turin university. It was important for me to show him it could be a fruitful experience, and I think he was pleased when I became a lecturer at 24. I think he was proud, too, when I published my doctoral dissertation on medieval aesthetics. I know he secretly read it entirely, even though he couldn’t understand all the Latin in it.’

Eco clears his throat. He does another ‘Mooo!’ Clearly, after an hour and a half of talking, his vocal chords are feeling the strain. Promising that this will be my last question, I ask whether the success he had with The Name of the Rose was diminished because his father was not around to see it.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘absolutely. I was 50. As a consequence, the pleasure of that success for me was diminished. To this day, every day, I silently tell my father about what I am doing. He could be sceptical, and every time I was too enthusiastic he was there to provide me with a cold shower.

‘We are always children, I think, even when we are old. We always need parental approval. I never needed it as much from my mother, though, because I knew she was convinced I was a genius from the age of five! With my own children I tried to strike more of a balance between my mother’s approach and my father’s.’

He married his German-born wife, Renate, the year his father died. She too is an academic, teaching architecture at Milan university. The couple have two grown-up children: Stefano, a television producer, and Carlotta, an architect.

‘I honed my storytelling skills by telling my children complicated bedtime stories,’ Eco recalls. ‘When they left home I didn’t have anyone to tell the stories to, so I began to write.’

Now he has grandchildren to tell stories to, when his voice is strong enough. They reward him by painting portraits of him. One, pinned to the wall, is by a four-year-old. It shows a round, jolly face with glasses, a scruffy beard and a big grin. Oddly enough, the likeness is uncanny. •

She’s a 57-year-old spinster with teddy bears in her bedroom, her mother in the spare room, and a loathing for introspection. So why is Ann Widdecombe, politician-cum-novelist, about to try her hand as a television agony aunt? By Nigel Farndale

Be honest, if left alone with Ann Widdecombe’s fridge, could you resist a peek inside? You could?

What if you arrived early for a meeting with her and she asked you to wait in the kitchen and help yourself to coffee, adding, ‘the milk is in the fridge’? Exactly. With a clear conscience, then, I can reveal that Ann Noreen Widdecombe keeps a well-stocked fridge.

There is single cream and lettuce. There are tomatoes, eggs and cartons of New Covent Garden soup. So far so healthy; she must be sticking to ITV’s Celebrity Fit Club diet, the one that so publicly helped her lose three stone in 2002.

But what’s this? Eight chocolate-chip brioche rolls? A couple of bottles of champagne? A tub of tiramisu?

Ann Widdecombe, the 57-year-old MP, novelist and incurable attention-seeker, lives in a terraced house in Kennington, south-east London. It has a lilac painted front door.

Although her 93-year-old mother Rita has lived here since 1999 – perhaps the tiramisu is hers – it is very much a single woman’s house. The mirror in the bathroom is placed low over the sink (she is 5ft 11/2in and, as she says, ‘don’t forget the half’), there is a bowl of sanitary pads on top of the lavatory – for guests? – and there are cats wandering in and out.

On one wall of the sitting-room there is a samurai sword alongside a ceremonial naval sword (her father was a senior civil servant in the Admiralty and for a few years was stationed in Singapore, where Widdecombe lived between the ages of five and nine).

There is also a framed photograph of Widdy, as she calls herself on her website – ‘the Widdy Web’ – with the Pope (she converted to Rome in 1993, in protest over the Anglican church allowing the ordination of women).

As we sit down on pale green leather sofas, I notice the crucifix around her neck. It reminds me that for all her frivolous appearances on television – she has done Louis Theroux and Basil Brush, as well as Celebrity Fit Club, and in February will star in her own agony-aunt show for the BBC (entitled Oh No! It’s Ann Widdecombe) – she considers herself to be a high-minded moralist.

The political subjects associated with her tend to be either coloured by her Catholicism (anti-abortion, anti-gay rights), or her aversion to libertarianism and liberalism (she is pro the ban on fox hunting and pro the reintroduction of the death penalty). She also writes serious novels which sell well and meet with favourable reviews.

Her first, The Clematis Tree, was about a family struggling to cope with a handicapped child and her second, An Act of Treachery, was a love story set in occupied France. Her third, Father Figure, which is published later this month, has a topical theme: the rights of fathers over their children.

I ask her, then, whether she thinks her flirtations with lowbrow television undermine her seriousness as a politician and novelist.

‘I often hear politicians complain that they can’t get their message across because they are unrecognisable,’ she says in her fluty voice. ‘Well, I always score high in recognition polls. Always. And when people recognise me, what they say is not, “Oh, you used to be the Shadow Home Secretary”, but, “You’re that MP from Fit Club.”

‘If you appear on programmes such as that, the next time you are on television talking about politics, viewers pause to listen for three sentences instead of three words. But there are limits; I turned down Ruby Wax.’

As she talks she constantly blinks her pond-black eyes. It makes her seem vulnerable, which must be an illusion because, as she tells me, she has ‘no hang-ups’, never suffers nerves, never cries, and has no interest in analysing herself. Yet she doesn’t seem to mind analysing others.

Her new television programme, after all, sees her attempting to solve family crises, love quandaries and workplace spats and is, in turn, a spin-off from a bizarre, no-nonsense agony-aunt column she wrote for the Guardian called ‘Buck Up’.

But, looking for fissures in her armour-plating, I wonder whether Widdecombe’s mad whoring after applause is simply a matter of her raising her political profile, as she claims. Could there have been a degree of masochism in her agreeing to humiliate herself on Celebrity Fit Club?

‘I did it because I wanted to lose weight,’ she says matter-of-factly. So why not do that in private? ‘Because I had a serious point to make which is that our obsession with physical perfection is out of all proportion.

‘I argued with the experts on that show most of the time about their “councils of perfection”. We marginalise the disabled, the disfigured, the odd, simply because we’ve got this image which now is entirely physical. I mean, the spiritual side of life is just being kicked to one side.

‘People are willing to undergo the most horrendous operations for the sake of increasing their bust size and I think, “Is there nothing more important in this world?”’

Perhaps there isn’t, I suggest, given that cosmetic change is ultimately intended to help us procreate.

‘It’s nothing to do with procreation at all! If you think of the women’s magazines, television, all the programmes about losing weight, having face-lifts, the multimillion-pound business that is the cosmetics industry, I mean, the whole thing’s gone mad!

‘Do you think the war generation thought for one second how straight their teeth were? I mean, it’s crazy!’ In terms of her appearance, there is little you can say about Ann Widdecombe that she hasn’t already said about herself. Her descriptions have included the words ‘short’, ‘fat’, ‘ugly’, ‘spinster’ and ‘crooked teeth’.

Presumably this was partly a defence mechanism: saying it before anyone else can. Also she may have reasoned that if she made no effort with her appearance she could justify being single, not only to herself but to the world. Yet she took it further, seemingly revelling in the mockery she received about her looks.

When she heard that her nickname around Westminster was Doris Karloff, for instance, she took to answering the phone by saying ‘Karloff here’. Now the black, pudding-bowl haircut has gone, along with the extra pounds. Was it belated vanity?

‘Now, look. I always said if ever there was a health reason for my losing weight, I would probably do it, but that I wasn’t interested in it for cosmetic reasons. And if I had been remotely interested in it for cosmetic reasons, I wouldn’t have gone all my political career with your profession being rude and spiteful and nasty – and just not minding. I would not have done it.

‘So you are wrong to say it was vanity. It was, very straight-forwardly, backache. As for the hair, I see no reason why someone shouldn’t go blonde if they want to try it out.

‘I had been keeping in my natural dark – dyeing the rest to match it – and the white was taking over. I mean, your lot in the press gallery of the Commons were talking about the zebra crossings in my hair as they looked down.’

Did she find that hurtful?

‘Oh, no. I didn’t. But I do occasionally find it irritating.’

Widdecombe did a documentary with Louis Theroux before she lost weight and went blonde. She seemed prickly and defensive in that. She seemed much more friendly and jolly when she did Fit Club some time afterwards. Was this because beginning to lose weight improved her self-esteem?

‘No. I was very wary of Louis Theroux. I mean we had a bust-up on day one because he asked questions which I’d said I wouldn’t answer.’

The questions were about her virginity. She doesn’t believe in sex before marriage and once threatened to sue a journalist who expressed doubts that she really was a virgin. I try a more tactful approach. How many times has she been in love?

‘In love? Er… once. In Oxford.’

She refers to her fellow student Colin Maltby, now a married banker. Their relationship was chaste and fizzled out after three years. So he was the one love of her life?

And does she ever look back and regret not having married him?

‘No, I don’t. I don’t think it would have been right for either of us. He is now very happily married. Successful man. Great family. I think both of us have been happy, as it turned out, not marrying each other.

‘Um, if you’re asking me in the broader sense, do I wish I’d married, the answer is no. It was never a conscious decision not to marry. A lot of people say, “Oh, you put politics first,” well, tosh, I didn’t.

‘It was chance, because Mr Right didn’t turn up. It was also choice because he was never a big enough priority to go out looking for.’

Was it partly that she had a low sex drive?

‘I don’t know, I’ve never bothered. You know, I’m very ha… I take myself as I am. If I was sitting here depressed that I hadn’t married, I might be asking myself those questions, or if I was sitting here with a failed marriage behind me, I might be asking myself those questions…’

Her mother calls from upstairs.

‘Oh, hang on. Yup! I’m down here! Hello!’

She disappears and returns a few minutes later.

‘Right, where were we?’ I ask about her mother. ‘I love having her here and I very much hope that I outlive her, because I wouldn’t like her to have to cope with losing me.’

It’s a strange comment, but I think I know what she means. Does she ever think about what it will be like to go back to living on her own?

‘No, but I mean, my Mum’s only lived with me since ’99, after Dad died.’

When she lived on her own and got home at night, did she ever wish someone was there? A companion?

‘It is that moment when I’m always grateful to be solo. It’s when I come in, after a dreadful day in politics, shut the doors, and there are no demands at all. I mean, there might be a cat crying for food [Widdecombe owns two], but that’s it.’

So she prefers her own company?

‘I think that the brute truth is that I’ve enjoyed being alone. I love my own company. I’m the best company I know. I mean, I can make myself laugh uproariously.’

Not everyone in Widdecombe’s party finds her as funny as she claims to find herself. When I asked one senior Tory what he thought of her he said she was a ‘freak show’, a ‘dinosaur’, and ‘the political equivalent of the Taliban’.

Part of the ill feeling must stem from the unhelpful ‘something of the night’ comment she made about Michael Howard in May 1997. It undermined the future leader badly. As she will be fighting a Tory seat in a few months’ time, does she now feel any regret or guilt about what she said?

‘None at all. None at all. None at all.’

‘I don’t take back a single word I said in 1997, including the famous phrase, but, that was 1997, and we are now in 2005.’

If she doesn’t retract it, it means she still believes it.

‘I’m not going to re-rehearse it, either. I’ve moved on, he’s moved on, the world has moved on and I’m living in 2005.’

Ann Widdecombe is a stranger to self-doubt. She has the masculine traits of literal mindedness, remorselessness and a bluff refusal to concede weakness. When I ask her about these traits she says, ‘No, they are not masculine traits they are human traits.’

From where does her political certainty come? The Bible?

‘I think the answer to that is, yes, to some extent, obviously. But if you take the pro-life issue, most people think I’m pro-life because I’m a Catholic. Actually, I’m probably a Catholic because I was pro-life.’

And she has vices to confess?

‘I think everybody does. I think people have… quick tempers, um… people have resentments.’

What does she think happens to people who have sex before marriage?

Well, do they go to hell?

‘We don’t know who goes to hell. But it’s not to do with totting up every single thing you’ve done and when you cross a certain line you’re dispatched off to the infernal region. I mean, come on! I have lots of friends who have done things I disapprove of.

‘But I am not their judge. They know I disapprove and the interesting thing is they remain my friends.’

Although she is reluctant to analyse herself, she does concede that her doggedness and ambition probably come from her father; while her brother, Malcolm, a vicar who is ten years older than her, is more like her mother – more gentle and placid.

‘But I don’t analyse things in all this great depth. I mean, I know it’s very fashionable to look into every last possible motivation, and to think therapy is the answer to everything, but as far as I am concerned there were things I wanted to do, and I’ve managed to do most of them.’

There is something slightly otherworldly about Ann Widdecombe. She didn’t own a television until her mother moved in five years ago. Her speech is peppered with oddly outdated words such as ‘golly’, ‘darn’ and ‘bunkum’. And I notice the teddy bears in the room. Are they hers?

‘No, they’re mother’s. That’s mother’s corner there. We’ve even got a camel that sings.’

She picks up a fluffy camel and it starts singing an Arabic song.

‘Friends bring them. Those two were gifts from friends. That one I got at some exhibition. They get eaten by the cats and discarded and others come.’

The camel continues its song.

‘Sorry, he does shut up in the end.’

She stares at it in her hand.

‘I do have a fair collection of bears.’

Given her suspicion of therapy and analysis, presumably she doesn’t see anything regressive about an adult collecting teddy bears?

‘I don’t consciously collect bears. People give me bears, you know, and I’ve got bears – I mean, I’ve got bear plates, I find that very endearing. Most people find it quite yucky, and I say, “Doesn’t matter, you don’t have to look at it.” ‘

‘You know, the whole world may laugh at my bear plates, but if I like them I’ll have them because it’s nothing to do with anybody else, and it does nobody an iota of harm that I have bear plates up there. If I want them there, I’ll have ’em there.’

He lives like a Spartan, wears his tracksuits to bed and still dry-cleans his mother’s clothes – even though she’s been dead 31 years. But Sir Jimmy Savile insists he’s not an eccentric, writes Nigel Farndale

Park Crescent in London W1 is a smart place to have a flat. But it wasn’t the address that appealed to Sir Jimmy Savile. It was the garage space. He can park his Rolls-Royce here, he tells me.

“I’m just off to buy my 18th this afternoon,” he adds, chewing on an unlit cigar. “Off to Jack Barclay’s showroom. That’s where I always go. Trade in my old one.”

You would never guess this cramped flat was the London residence of a wealthy man. It has woodchip wallpaper. An empty kitchen. A bed. A chair. A Hoover. A framed cover from the Radio Times. And an exercise bike.

“I live in gymnasiums,” he says, pointing at the machine. “I have five places to live and they are all littered with weights and exercise machines like this. No lady would stand for it, which is just as well.”

There has never been a woman — sorry, lady — in Sir Jimmy’s life, other than his mother, who died in 1973. The Duchess, as he called her, lived with him and when she died she carried on living with him, for five days.

He has preserved her room in his Scarborough flat — most of his flats are in his home county of Yorkshire — and he dry-cleans her clothes once a year. Nevertheless, he implies constantly that he has an active sex life: one-night stands only.

Beneath his in-evitable tracksuit, for instance, he is wearing a T-shirt which reads: “For good luck, rub my tummy (ladies only)”.

It is, he says, his “never-fail T-shirt with the ladies”. He has never been in love, he tells me — “Not really.” And has never slept the whole night with a woman.

“I like my freedom too much,” he says. “I enjoy the ladies and they enjoy me. And that’s it.”

With a rattle of gold jewellery, he flops down on the bed, legs apart, his long, white hair resting on the shoulders of his tracksuit top. I ask him if he thinks he dresses appropriately for a 78-year-old.

“I don’t know what a 78-year-old is supposed to dress like. The reason I’ve worn these tracksuits all my life is that you can take your shoes off, climb into bed, go to sleep, wake up in the morning, put your shoes on and you’re dressed. ”

Does he still dye his hair?

“Never have done. I bleach it. Still do. Take the colour out of it. The reason is, I worked for Coca-Cola for nine years and learned about product recognition from them.”

It is a telling comment. Sir Jimmy sees himself as a brand to be marketed. That is partly what the cigars seem to be about as well. They were the subject of a storm in an ashtray the other day when he posed with one — wearing only his boxer shorts — for the Stoke Mandeville charity calendar.

It was reported that his picture was to be dropped from the calendar because a hospital couldn’t be seen to condone smoking. This seemed a bit rum: after all, without Sir Jimmy there would hardly be a Stoke Mandeville.

He has raised about £40 million for various charities over the years, £15 million of which went to founding the spinal centre at the hospital. A compromise was reached: the cigar was airbrushed out. Even so, did he feel hurt at the ingratitude?

“I did it on purpose. I knew they would have to object to it because it is a hospital. And they knew that I knew. It — was — a — bit — of — fun.”

This is how he talks. In staccato sentences, with his eyes scrunched up in mock concentration. His speech is an odd mixture of warm, northern patter (“now then, now then”), pedantry (“fantasy is your word, I prefer dream”) and non sequiturs.

Bearing in mind how health-conscious he is — he ran his 217th marathon a few months ago — you would think Sir Jimmy wouldn’t want to damage his lungs with cigars anyway.

“The cigars don’t make any difference to my lungs. And I’m not going to give them up. Every time I light one it’s like a celebration.”

This is another intriguing comment. He has spent a lifetime celebrating his escape from childhood poverty. He worked down the coal mines until an injury forced him to look elsewhere for work.

He founded the first disco in 1947 and went on to make his fortune managing 52 dance halls. This he consolidated with television work: becoming the first presenter of Top of the Pops in 1964 and then, in the 1970s, the eponymous star of the hugely successful Jim’ll Fix It. Does he know what he is worth?

“Not really. I’ve given most of it away. What do you need in life? A bacon sandwich.” And a Rolls-Royce.

“No, that is different. That is about living the dream. When I worked down the pit I was earning 21 shillings a week. I had a picture of a Rolls-Royce pinned up in my wardrobe and I dreamed about owning one.

“I don’t use the Rolls much. I actually run around in a panel van up in Leeds. I also have a 200mph Ferrari because that’s my game. Knotty ash. Flash.”

Is the flashiness a compensation for his youthful poverty?

“I’m not sure. I wake up in the morning and have a bit of fun, at no one else’s expense. Don’t hurt nobody. Don’t slag nobody off.”

Every single day is a bit of fun? There are no days when he feels down?

“I don’t have down days. I’m very boring, I don’t do drugs, booze or underage sex.” Is he an eccentric?

“That’s not how I see myself. I’ve always thought everyone else was odd. I just have a bit of fun.”

It is the Monday of Christmas week. This interview will appear on Boxing Day. How will Sir Jimmy have spent Christmas Day? With family?

“No, I ain’t got any left. They’ve all pegged it. I was youngest of seven. Actually, I’ve got one sister who is 90.”

Friends then? Does he have any? Close ones, I mean.

“What is a close friend? Last week a couple of old friends from my days down the pit came round for a cup of tea in the morning. That’s close. Today I’ll have this bit of carry-on with you then I’ll go and see my new Rolls-Royce. Then I’ll get on a train back up to Yorkshire. I’m as free as a bird.”

He flaps his arms. It hasn’t been for lack of opportunity, this single life he has led. I mean, he pretty much had groupies in his heyday, didn’t he?

“More in the 1960s than now, because it would be unseemly for me to go to clubs and pursue ladies now, even though, physically and mentally, I’m still up for it. But one has to accept that it is not the done thing.” Does he know how many women he has slept with?

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea and I wouldn’t even like to work that out.”

He is, he says, never lonely. Also, he claims never to have lost his temper. Yet he can be quite touchy and he is certainly self-aggrandising. He talks himself up and shows off about his wealth but he is also emotionally immature and perhaps even arrested. I ask him to describe himself.

“It’s Monday. I’m healthy. I’ve got a few quid. Nobody looking for me with a gun. I’ve got pleasant prospects. I love Christmas. Spend it on my own because I choose to. Free as a bird.”

He laughs gently. If there is a psychological malaise behind all this bravado it surely has its roots in his materially deprived childhood. I ask him if he thinks he was starved of affection as a child.

“On the contrary, I had plenty. One thing with a big family is that you have to be a survivor. We were a skint house so when food went on the table, if you didn’t cop yours, the other six had it away.

“My dad was a quiet, laid-back, line-of-least-resistance man. He never wanted to argue.” (His father, a bookmaker’s clerk, died when Jimmy was 27.)

“The Duchess had a very strong sense of right and wrong, which she instilled in me.”

I ask if he idealised his mother.

“No, not really. She wasn’t perfect. With the Duch I was not her favourite. I was the only one who didn’t marry, and so she could live with me rather than somewhere else.

“By the time I was in television, I realised my mother was a character. You could never contradict her.

“When I moved to Scarborough she was talking to these two ladies and told them that I had opened the Post Office Tower. I told them I hadn’t; that The Queen had opened it. The Duch said: ‘He did open it. He forgets, you know.’ ”

Has no potential wife been able to live up to the Duch?

“No, the reason I never married was that I would have had to give up the business — because I couldn’t have had a wife at one end of the country and me at the other at a gig surrounded by 800 girls and stay faithful.”

“Girls, women, whatever, females. We’re talking dance halls and discos here.” Surely he must be aware of the rumour about him and underage girls?

“Oh, you get rumours about everything. I tell you where it comes from: if I go on a cruise, say, and there are a dozen teenage girls they all come round to talk to me. Chat, chat, chat. To the casual observer it’s: ‘Oh, look at those young girls with that geezer.’

“They don’t realise that the only reason the girls are talking to me is that I know the people they idolise, which is the pop stars. But if I were to suggest anything to them they would be mortally offended. I’m an ancient punter.”

It is not unheard of for a young, impressionable woman to be attracted to an older man who is rich and famous.

“No, you are moving the goalposts. You were talking about young girls. Young girls are not attracted to power and all that. In fact, it puts them off. The teenagers today are very moral.

“The last thing in the world you would do with a teenage girl is try and tell her a mucky joke. Wouldn’t work. They are highly moral in their own peculiar way. So if I was going out on the pull they would be dreadfully offended, and I wouldn’t dream of it anyway. People get the wrong idea because people have had the wrong idea forever.”

Does he feel hurt by the rumour?

“No. It would be a lot worse if it were true. And as it’s not true I don’t give a shit anyway.”

Sir Jimmy claims to have no introspection. No emotions, come to that. I ask if he has ever cried.

“No. When you’re in what I call the living and dying business — visiting people in hospitals — you have to have a bit of strength.

“There was a couple of 17-year-old girls up at Leeds and they were both terminal and I would joke with them and be outrageous and make them laugh. I would say, ‘OK, tonight, ladies, I’ve decided you can have me. We can pull these beds together.’ And they would say: ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’ They loved it.

“Then I had to go off for a month to do a charity bike ride from Land’s End to John O’Groats and when I went back to see them there was only one there. I asked her where her friend was and she said, almost apologetically, ‘Oh, she died. She didn’t want to. She wanted to wait till you came back.’

“I shut myself in a toilet for two hours, after that. I don’t know whether I cried but there was turmoil inside.”

It’s a tender story, and it shows he is capable of feeling a kind of love. He’s smoked down to the end of his cigar. As he stubs it out he tells me a poignant story which he hasn’t yet had time to polish up into a self-deprecating anecdote. It happened only last night. He went to mass in Spanish Place.

“When they came with the collection plate they walked right past me like I was a penniless mugger or something and I had to laugh to myself. You see, I had a score ready to put in the plate.”

John Taverner says his music comes from above – ‘I see myself as a conduit’ – and reveals the secret of the ‘Jesus imagination’. He talks to Nigel Farndale

If you didn’t know what Sir John Tavener did for a living, you could guess from his long hair, domed forehead and unworldly air that he was a composer.

“I do stand out,” he says in a gentle, croaky voice. “I am tall and thin and very bony, but I suppose it is the hair. I got a lot of bullying at Highgate [school] until they realised I was a talented pianist. After that I grew my hair long and cultivated what I thought was the look of a pianist, as a form of self-preservation.”

He went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music, and his first break came in 1968, when his father, who owned a Hampstead building firm, did some work for John Lennon. He introduced his son. The two musicians, both in their twenties, hit it off and spent the evening sitting on the floor, eating macrobiotic food and playing tapes of Tavener’s orchestral music.

The next day Lennon telephoned to say he wanted to sign Tavener to the Beatles’ Apple label. Though Tavener continued to compose, it was not until 20 years later, in 1989, when The Protecting Veil, his haunting concerto for solo cello and strings, had its premiere at the Proms, that Tavener could claim a wider renown.

The concerto became one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time – Tavener attributes its appeal to its femininity and tenderness – and, along with his Song for Athene, sung at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, it is probably the work for which he is still best known.

Until recently his work was strongly influenced by the Greek Orthodox Church – sustained chords, sinuous chants and spiritual themes. He has a house in Greece, and at his home in Dorset there are Orthodox icons around the fireplace. But now he has, he says, moved towards a “universalist view”, in which all religions are equally valid.

He has also pared down his music. Critics, who tend to like complexity, have accused him of attracting audiences by over-simplification. But this is, surely, to miss his point. Tavener strips away the complexity to get to what he calls the “essence”. A good example of this is The Veil of the Temple, a seven-hour vigil that had its first performance at the Temple Church in London last year, which will be performed in a shortened, three-hour version next week.

“I didn’t sit down and recompose it,” he says, “but tried to reflect something of its gradual ascent, starting with hardly any sound whatsoever.”

We are talking in his house in Dorset. Outside there is a willow tree and, beyond that, a medieval church tower. Woodpigeons can be heard, and cockerels. It seems a pastoral idyll, in other words. He composes on long walks here, without a notebook, and does not worry that he might have forgotten his composition by the time he gets home.

“Increasingly, I understand Blake who referred to the ‘Jesus imagination’,” he says. “The imagination is a divine thing and is not capable, in its true, pure sense, of having a profane idea. These ideas that come like that put me in a state of semi-ecstasy and leave me feeling revitalised.

“There is no way I can forget them because they seem to emerge from deep down in the subconscious. I can’t get an idea out of my head because it’s part of me, in a way. Sometimes I have the sensation that I’ve known it already. Like deja vu. Not that it was another piece of music, but that one has known it before. I think Yeats experienced something similar in writing poetry.”

Sir John refers more than once in our conversation to “the angel of inspiration” and talks of having “auditory visions” in which music is dictated to him.

“That’s how it seems to me. Maybe I’m crackers. That’s possible. I see myself as a conduit. It has to be effortless. Effort for me means existential angst and ego and I don’t want any of that in the music. Music must be about transcending the ego rather than being imprisoned by it.

“Once you start seeing the ego of Beethoven, his music can seem self-conscious, particularly in the late quartets. But then you look at the late Bagatelles and there he seems to . . ,” he trails off, ” . . . he gives up the effort and it is sublime.”

He stands up, glides towards his grand piano, lays his elongated fingers on the keys and plays, most affectingly, Beethoven’s delicate B flat Bagatelle. “There, Beethoven doesn’t do anything with it. Perhaps he was too tired to make it effortful.”

Sir John can, he says, explain Bach and Beethoven, but not Mozart. “Mozart is inexplicable. Everything in his music is ecstatic. If you just change the position of a single chord, the whole thing falls to pieces. It’s so perfectly poised. That’s why it moves me. And if music doesn’t move one, if it doesn’t inwardly reduce you to your knees, what’s the point of it?”

Inspiration in his terms may be divine and revelatory, but what, for him, is the distinction between a religious experience and an aesthetic one?

“You almost have to become childlike in relation to a religious experience. I never have doubts when I’m writing music. I may well have quite strong atheist thoughts the rest of the time but that is perhaps irrelevant because when I’m actually composing I have my proof. I have a certitude.”

Sir John is 60 and lucky to be alive. At 30 he had a stroke, followed later by heart surgery to correct a leaking valve, an effect of the Marfan syndrome (a condition affecting the body’s connective tissue and found in unusually tall people) he has had since birth. He has also suffered in recent years from temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition associated with out-of-body experiences and quasi-religious visions.

Does he ever wonder whether his angel of inspiration might be a trick of biology?

“My neurologist kept asking me after my first attack, ‘Has your music changed?’ and I said, ‘In a way it has, yes, it has become more contemplative.’ He told me about the conversion of St Paul, that they knew in some form that he had epilepsy. But, my neurologist said, this in no way discredits the authenticity of the experience of a vision – indeed medical conditions can actually bring about this spiritual state.”

So if his music is divinely inspired, what is he, as a composer, adding to it?

“Well, when I return from my walks, my ideas get noted down on different pieces of manuscript – probably in the end there are a hundred little jottings and scribblings strewn all over the room. That’s where the medieval concept of composer as craftsman comes in.

“The ideas that come from that other place, wherever it is, may seem chaotic, but they are not. That’s what’s really mysterious. I look at all these sketches and scribbles and see there is a connection between all of them. That is the stage at which I wrestle as a craftsman with the mathematics of the composition, the form and structure. But that’s a wonderful wrestling, there’s no angst involved, no ego.”

Does he worry that one day the angel will stop visiting him?

“Yes. As I draw near to the end of a piece of music, I have an almost obsessive desire to start another one, just in case. Nowadays I have faith that it will happen, but even if there are two hours when there is music not actually coming to me, then that bothers me. It’s very difficult for me to relax in that sense, because I’ve always said that writing for me is prayer, it’s my umbilical cord, my reason for existing.”

He offers me a bowl of raspberries. “Picked this morning. I’m not much of a gardener, but it’s nice to wander around.” He’s not practical around the house, he adds, “pretty hopeless really. Although I am capable of cooking when left on my own.”

He’s not particularly materialistic, he thinks. Although paradoxically he does have a love of expensive cars, a passion he shares with his friend the Prince of Wales.

“Yes, I’ve always had that. If I want to relax coming back from London by train, I buy Auto Trader and I scour it for cars I might buy. I do love them. I don’t know why.”

He has always had muses, he says. His first, in a sense, was his mother who died in 1985. She dominated him to such an extent that when, in the 1970s, he married a Greek dancer he wouldn’t leave the parental home to live with her. The marriage was annulled after eight months on the grounds of non-consummation.

Did his mother, I ask, feel guilty about that?

“Yes, it was all sort of tacky, that. She didn’t really want me to marry her, that’s the truth. It was consummated, though. I think it probably was a case of my mother telling me: ‘You should say that it was never consummated, dear. Just say that to get the annulment.’ ”

Other “muses” include the Indian soprano Patricia Rozario and Bjork whose “primordial” voice Tavener adores. But his longest partnership was with his some-time librettist Mother Thekla, an Orthodox nun. He would ring her at two in the morning and ask her to interpret points of metaphysics for him.

“She didn’t mind the late-night calls. I think she rather enjoyed them. We had a sort of fall-out for a while but now we are back communicating by letter. I feel that I’m much more my own person now and I follow my own vision and I feel this has helped my music.”

The three most important females in his life these days are his wife, Maryanna, 39, and their two daughters, 11 and nine. “The girls do play music,” he says. “In term-time they begin practising at seven o’clock in the morning. There’s quite a cacophony going on, one is playing a flute in one room, the other is playing a cello in another room.”

Doesn’t that offend his musical sensibilities?

“It doesn’t seem to bother me too much. I can bear any human activity when I’m composing.” He frowns for a moment. “Except drills.”

The restless, jiggling knee, the repetitive tapping of cigarette over ashtray, the way he keeps saying ‘yeah, yeah’ – loudly, impatiently, running the words together – all give the impression that Ewan McGregor has been, somehow, overwound. He even strains forward in his seat, as though about to spring up for a quick lap of the room. He can, it seems, hardly contain himself, his energy, his confidence.

Perhaps this is how someone behaves when they are struggling to keep their ego in check – trying to come to terms with being, at the age of 32, an international film star who flies by private jet, earns £5 million a film and finds himself cast as the love object of characters played by, among others, Nicole Kidman, Cameron Diaz and Rachel Weisz. Actually, it’s a good question: how does Ewan McGregor keep his ego in check? ‘I’m not sure I always do,’ he says with a Perthshire burr and a lupine grin. ‘Perhaps I don’t.’

With his dimpled chin and wide blue eyes, he is good-looking, no question. But he hasn’t had the mole on his forehead removed, or his manly nose narrowed and prettified. And he doesn’t have expensive teeth, or Hollywood muscles. He is a lean, 5ft 10 1/2in and, if anything, in tank-top and white, snakeskin shoes, he looks a bit dorky today. Or perhaps natural is the word. And this may explain why he never had to go through a starving-in-a-garret period.

‘No, I never starved. I wish I had had that, in a way. I’d have liked to have had the time to read the classics and reflect about things. But I was in such a rush. Such a rush. I was hungry for success. I really was.’

He landed his first starring role – in Dennis Potter’s television drama Lipstick on Your Collar – in 1993, shortly before graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Soon afterwards, aged 23, he won a leading role in Shallow Grave (1994), the acclaimed film directed by Danny Boyle. In Boyle’s next film, the even more acclaimed Trainspotting (1996), he shaved his head, shed two stone and was given the lead as a lovable junkie.

By then he was being talked of as the most exciting and dangerous British actor since Gary Oldman, the most versatile and subtle since Daniel Day-Lewis. A mixed bag of films followed – some charming, small and British, such as Brassed Off (1996), Little Voice (1998) and Rogue Trader (1999): others, well, with greater commercial appeal, such as Star Wars (The Phantom Menace, 1999, Attack of the Clones, 2002), and Moulin Rouge! (2001).

His latest two offerings, released this autumn, reflect his almost bizarre eclecticism. Down With Love, in which he co-stars with Renée Zellweger, is a frothy homage to the Rock Hudson/Doris Day romantic comedies of the 1960s. Young Adam, based on a novel by the Scottish existentialist writer Alexander Trocchi, is a dark, erotic thriller in the style of Hollywood films noirs of the 1940s and 1950s.

McGregor plays the anti-hero Joe, a selfish, brooding, promiscuous drifter who works on the canals around Glasgow. He emotes without words, seduces without feelings – the character he plays is so unsympathetic it was a struggle finding financiers to back the project. If it hadn’t been for McGregor’s persistent lobbying of the UK Film Council, the film wouldn’t have been made at all.

‘It’s the story of a man’s moral decline,’ he says. ‘That’s what attracted me to it. I felt it either had to be made authentically, without any compromises, or not made at all. I’m only interested in playing characters; playing someone who isn’t an all-out good guy doesn’t worry me. I like the film because it’s fucking edgy. It’s strong.

‘There was a pressure to shoot a final scene where Joe walks towards a police station and hands himself in, but I wouldn’t do it because it would have made a mockery of the film. Young Adam wouldn’t have been made in Hollywood. They just don’t make films like this. They don’t.’

A leitmotif which runs through Ewan McGregor’s work, from the BBC costume drama Scarlet & Black (1993), his performance in Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw at Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 1994, and Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), to the glam rock film Velvet Goldmine (1998), is full-frontal nudity.

The actor is, it seems, very, very proud of his willy, as well he might be given that Elle magazine once described it as ‘incredibly handsome’. I tell him that it almost came as a relief when the thing finally put an appearance in Young Adam – it meant that the audience could relax and concentrate on the story.

‘Yes, thank goodness,’ he says with a laugh. ‘The film wouldn’t have been right without it. I felt it was slightly underused.’

Being naked in public is, for most normal, vulnerable men, the stuff of anxiety dreams. Why is he so relaxed?

‘I’m not blasé about it in everyday life, but on a set it doesn’t bother me. I like the idea very much. Being naked on set is like swimming naked – it makes you feel powerful.

‘I think it adds to the realism of a film, because we are showing people’s private lives. Part of private life is nudity. It’s very effective if you have two actors lying naked on a bed having a chat. It makes their relationship very real if you glimpse their genitalia. It’s a short cut to making it clear that here are two people at ease with themselves, who are lovers.’

Does he blank out the film crew when doing a sex scene?

‘No, I’m never aware of the crew anyway. You shouldn’t be. I could have a sound man lying under the bed and I wouldn’t notice him. My only concern when I’m doing a sex scene is that I don’t get my arsehole in shot, also that my penis doesn’t show when I’m supposed to be having sex with someone – because that would be a bit of a giveaway, wouldn’t it?’

But what if…? I raise my eyebrows. He grins.

‘That doesn’t happen. Not sure why. Because it’s not real, I suppose.’ He shakes his head. ‘Actually, it has happened to me. I’m not pretending there haven’t been moments.’

So how does he, um, cope?

‘I just take a few moments. You know, the director says, “Let’s try that again,” and I say, “No, give me ten seconds.” It happened to me [with Alice Krige] on Scarlet & Black. I had to lie on top of her and because they wanted to see me and her naked, we couldn’t wear underwear. It was a bit awkward. I’ve heard that Stephen Fry taped his to his tummy for a love scene in Wilde. I wouldn’t fancy doing that. I mean, having to pull the tape off afterwards. Quite painful.’

I suspect that, in the age-old Hollywood tradition, film publicists encourage rumours about Ewan McGregor and his female co-stars, but they are without foundation. He married Eve Mavrakis, a French set designer and producer, when he was 24. They have two young daughters, Clara (seven), and Esther (nearly two), and the family always travels with him on location. For all his nonchalance about sex scenes, McGregor seems quite puritanical about sex, or at least depictions of sex in inappropriate contexts.

‘Sex is so out-there these days,’ he says, his knee jigging up and down furiously. ‘In every shite magazine. Magazines for 14-year-old girls in which they are told how to give a blow job. Fucking outrageous. I think it’s all wrong, seeing six-year-old kids with boob tubes and miniskirts. It’s wrong. Just wrong. I think their parents should have a fucking good look at what they are doing. Really, I do.’

Is it because he has daughters?

‘Yes, perhaps. I probably feel more protective. I’m sure that is it.’

Were his parents broadminded about sex?

‘I kind of left school before I started, so I wasn’t having sex aged 14. Once I’d left home I’d left home, so I didn’t have to bother my parents with it.’

He and his elder brother, Colin, were raised in the small town of Crieff, in Perthshire. They attended Crieff and Morrison Academy, a public school where their father, Jim, was the games master; their mother, Carol, is also a teacher, of special needs children in Dundee. The young Ewan was regularly hauled before the headmaster for antisocial behaviour, and he now thinks he felt depressed at school because he found it hard to live up to his brother.

‘There was some sibling rivalry, I guess. Not fighting as such. But, well, Colin was academic and sporting, you know, captain of the rugby and cricket teams, and those were the most important things at our school. Music and artistic studies, the things I was interested in, were deemed wasters’ activities. Copping out. We are different in every way.’

His uncle, Denis Lawson, the actor best known for Local Hero (1983), would visit Crieff from London. Often dressed in flares and an Afghan coat, he would leave a trail of glamour in his wake. Does McGregor think he would have become an actor if he hadn’t had a cool uncle making a big impression on him as a teenager?

‘I think I would have been drawn to music and art. I was in the school pipe band and the choir [McGregor has Grade 7 French horn.] ‘I also became the drummer in a school band. I wanted people to call me Bones. No one did. I can see now I was wanting to perform. Ever since I was tiny I would mime to songs at my parents’ parties, aged four or five, putting on a show. I had a huge hankering for old films at the weekend on BBC2, anything black and white and romantic.

‘And pantomimes were hugely erotic experiences – I always became sexually excited about the principal boy, who was a woman in fishnets. Does that sound dodgy? I would fall in love with her during the performance and dream about her when I got home that night.’

McGregor left school at 16, joined the Perth Repertory Theatre and then enrolled on a one-year drama course at Kirkcaldy College of Technology. The theatre must have seemed a bohemian place compared to tweedy Crieff.

‘Rep was quite bohemian, yes, but I was too young to realise. I was rather shocked because I came from a tiny town. I met a gay man for the first time, also the first couple having an [extramarital] affair. I was going, “Fucking hell, what is going on? Does his wife know?”

I did get swept along a little in the high campery, the “darling” thing. It was the world I had secretly always wanted to be in. There is a magic to theatre. You don’t want to find out the actors are real people. You don’t want to meet them in real life. When I take my eldest daughter to shows

I often get asked backstage, and it’s a shame because I don’t want to be rude and not go and say hello, but I also don’t want to shatter the illusion and mystery for my daughter. Already she knows how it all works because she has been on film sets. She has seen how much of it is an illusion. Believe me, as one who has appeared in Star Wars, which has the most acting to a bit of tape on a stick in history, I know all about the illusion side of it.’

How much of an illusion was it when his character took heroin in Trainspotting? Had he actually tried the stuff in real life?

‘I don’t know what it feels like to shoot smack because I’ve never done it, but I do know what someone looks like when they do it, because I watched a lot of people who did. At one point I did discuss trying it. I thought me and Danny should do it together and John [Hodge, who wrote the screenplay], being a doctor, should administer it, to make sure we didn’t die.

‘We thought it should be done properly in a hotel room. Then we started working with heroin addicts and I just thought it would be hugely disrespectful to do it. I’m glad I didn’t. I don’t think it would have helped bring depth to the performance, but it would have been an excuse to try it.’

Has he ever caught himself using his actorly gifts, the skills of the illusionist, to manipulate people off-screen?

‘I’m sure I did in my youth, but you learn to be truer to yourself as you get older. It never made me feel good about myself so I wouldn’t do that now. If you are acting in an everyday situation to get your own way, you are lying to the people around you. If you want to be straight with your wife, it’s better to say: “I just don’t want to change that nappy,” or whatever, rather than to lie.

‘But I don’t mind changing nappies. I changed Clara’s more than I change Esther’s. I don’t know why that is. It’s not that I am repelled by the dirty nappies. Maybe I’m just lazy. Maybe I’m lazy in that respect. There is an element of me seeing myself as the breadwinner.

‘Eve brings other things to the marriage. She is a much better organiser than me, for instance. We’ve just been on location for five months [in Alabama, filming Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton] and she is the only one who can get all the arrangements right for moving a family for that long. If it was left to me, we would get there and not have anything we needed.’

He uses the tip of the Marlboro he has just finished to light up another one.

‘Five months would have seemed a lot longer if they hadn’t been there with me. It would have been unbearable. I have a great family and I am at my happiest when I am with them.’

After Alabama McGregor went to Australia to work on the next Star Wars film. He and his family have not spent much time at home in Belsize Park in London this year – or indeed in the past five years. I ask McGregor if he has considered sending his children to boarding school when they are older, if only to give them some stability?

‘Definitely not. They will have to change schools if I am away on location. That will be much better for them. I can’t see any benefit in being separated from your parents.’ (In part, McGregor’s policy of always taking his family with him on location was prompted by a near-fatal illness Clara suffered as a baby. She spent three weeks in hospital with meningitis. McGregor flew back from America where he had been appearing in an episode of ER. ‘I was shaken by that experience,’ he says.)

One of his recent films, Black Hawk Down (2002), filmed on location in Morocco, is said to be a personal favourite of President Bush. It has gritty action scenes and, to prepare for his role, McGregor trained with the US Rangers, something he revelled in. Has he ever fantasised about being a manly soldier rather than an effete actor? He laughs.

‘Yeah, yeah, whenever we watched the war coverage from Iraq my wife had to keep reminding me that I’m not a soldier. I did go through a period of thinking acting was a stupid thing to do, but that may have had more to do with a feeling I had at the time that I was stupid.’

He flicks ash from his cigarette, and misses the ashtray.

‘My brother is a fighter pilot in the RAF and I’m an actor. You can’t think of two more diverse professions. We are close, though. I love him very much. He took me up in his Tornado once, we did a lap of Scotland, and I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life.

‘The hatch closed and I could just see a slither of my brother’s helmet as we were taxi-ing down the runway and I felt such pride. He’s seen all my work and I’d never seen his. He was doing such a manly thing, a proper job for a man. He fucking flies at 500 miles an hour 200ft above the ground. Incredible. Whereas I wear make-up for a living.’

Tellingly, McGregor likes to test his courage on his motorbikes, namely a powerful Ducati 748 SP.

‘It’s truly my passion, my real passion. From the moment I first rode on a race track something happened. The bike leapt ahead. It was so exhilarating. Made me feel more alive.’

Is it that he appreciates not being cosseted and mollycoddled by over-anxious film executives for a few hours when on the track?

‘Yes, you have complete control of the machine and where you go. No one can bother you. I don’t wear a phone piece in my helmet. There’s something that happens on long journeys. I love it. It represents independence for me. You are making your own decisions on a bike, and, as an actor, when you’re working, your decisions are made for you. You are met by drivers and your breakfast is always waiting for you, just as you like it, and you have people telling you when you have to go where.’

Sounds like a hard life. He laughs.

‘I know, I know, poor me. And before Christmas I had to have a four-month holiday.’

I ask what happens when he bumps into old friends, who don’t fly by private jet and get paid to kiss Nicole Kidman. Do they smile the frozen smile and mutter “jammy bastard” under their breath when he leaves? ‘I think it’s “fucker” they mutter. “Jammy fucker.” I suppose it’s hard, oh God, this is going to sound crap, I suppose your real friends aren’t affected by it.

‘But that can’t be true. Everybody is. It’s hard. Going back to Crieff, going back to the pub, I don’t do that any more. I wish I could but…’ He laughs. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I’ll shut up now.’ l