The qualities that made Bill Wyman ‘the boring one’ in the Rolling Stones have served him well in his other role – as the group’s archivist. But his new scrapbook is far from dull, finds Nigel Farndale.

It is midmorning and Bill Wyman’s Sticky Fingers burger restaurant in Kensington is empty. Almost. Then a tourist walks in and takes a photograph of a photograph that is hanging on the wall. It is of the Rolling Stones, circa 1968. The man hasn’t realised that one of the rock stars in the picture is sitting a few feet away, watching him. It’s a scene that can only be described as postmodern.

Apart from the black-rimmed glasses he is wearing today, Wyman doesn’t look that different from how he did back then. He was never a tall man (5ft 7in) and his hair is still collar length, if greying now. But he is older: 76.

Indeed, when he orders a vodka and tonic which seems quite rock and roll, given the time of day, he explains that it is, in fact, because he has backache.

The photograph is one of hundreds of items of memorabilia exhibited here in the restaurant, including gold discs, Brian Jones’s guitar and Wyman’s bass (the two instruments together are worth about half a million pounds).

“The stuff here is only a fraction of my collection,” Wyman says. “I’ve got trunks of it at home.” Indeed he is about to publish Scrapbook, a limited-edition volume presented in a clamshell box. It features tickets, posters, programmes, letters, photographs, and much more besides. There’s Wyman’s birth certificate, letters to – and from – fans, a list of expenses for the Stones’ accountant, and even his Japanese work visa application form. In another life he would have loved to have been a librarian, he says, what with all that indexing and cross-referencing. The next best thing was to become the band’s archivist.

Did the other Stones think he was eccentric for collecting all the time?

“Oh yeah, they thought I was mad, they’d say, ‘Why are you bothering to – excuse my language – collect that crap?’ It was quite hard to collect anything because you had to leave a venue so quickly, what with the kids attacking you and jumping over police vans.”

Wyman’s letter to a UK fan. 17th January 1965

Wyman’s letter to a UK fan. 17th January 1965

He says the Stones always went out of their way to be nice to their fans – which must be difficult when, as regularly happened, they attack your car and force you to be helicoptered away under police escort. “There was always stacks of mail waiting for us at venues and we would sit down and start answering it,” says Wyman. “Me, Brian, Charlie and Keith took turns doing the autographs and we learnt to do each others’, because there were so many to do. When the autographs come up at Sotheby’s these days I can often tell they aren’t real.”

But it wasn’t just autographs the female fans were after, was it, Bill?

A grin. “Well, that was Brian and me mostly, the others weren’t that interested, really. But we are digressing.”

Are we? In a way, we are still on the subject of collecting. By Wyman’s own estimates he slept with around 1,000 women. Yes, he says, but it wasn’t how people think. “Before I joined the Stones, a workmate gave me a piece of advice. Always treat a woman like a lady, and I always did that, even when I broke up with one. There are some who I still write to, a friend in Australia who I used to go out with in ’63, ’64. She has grandchildren now. And I’m still in touch with a girl I used to go out with in ’64, ’65. I never treated them like s— and threw their clothes out.”

Presumably he couldn’t remember all their names. “It was a bit of a blur at times. But I can remember a lot of them. I was married so I couldn’t write about them in my diaries. I had to remember when and where. They weren’t one-night stands, though, because I would see the same ones again. Whenever I went to New York there were two black girls I would see. Every tour.” Bill Wyman’s address book: it should be in a glass case in the British Museum. “Yes,” he agrees with a laugh. “But I had it stolen in Spain in 1999. It was in a suitcase they nicked. Never seen again.” What does he make of the current trend for celebrities such as Russell Brand to put their promiscuity down to “sex addiction” and book themselves into clinics for treatment? “Don’t know who that is,” he says.

Michael Douglas, then. “Oh yes, I know Michael. OK, I suppose I didn’t have a sex addiction in that case. I always thought of it as having company when I was lonely and bored on the road. Touring is not a romantic life. It’s exciting for two hours every other night when you’re on stage, the rest is a nightmare of packing and unpacking. So female company helped to pass the time. I didn’t go searching for women, they came to me and were very nice and sweet.

“I was always very careful who I went with. Didn’t go with groupies or anything. Never had any problems with sexually transmitted diseases, as a lot of people did in those days,” He trails off. Looks uncomfortable. “But come on, we shouldn’t be talking about girls all the time.”

Guests Gina Lollobrigida and Suzanne Accosta at the Sticky Fingers Cafe’s 4th Birthday Party. 6th July 1993

Guests Gina Lollobrigida and Suzanne Accosta at the Sticky Fingers Cafe’s 4th Birthday Party. 6th July 1993 Credit: Alan

It’s obvious why not. He says he usually stayed in touch with his old flames, but not with his second wife Mandy Smith, presumably? “Not after we broke up, no. Since the settlement I haven’t spoken to her.” I’m 48 and it is sobering to think that Wyman was my age when he first slept with her. That was in 1985, when she was 14. They married in 1989 when she was 18 and he was 52. With no irony whatsoever, Hello! magazine called it a “fairy-tale” wedding, a headline it would not get away with in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal. In the past year, indeed, Wyman’s name has been cited in several newspaper reports as an example of a celebrity who had sex with a minor.

Brave of him to include a snapshot of Mandy Smith in his Scrapbook, I note. “Yes, that was before we broke up. I have many wonderful pictures of her, but I didn’t want to dwell on it because it’s a sore point in my life. People have always treated it badly, when it wasn’t bad. I don’t want to talk about it because it upsets my [third] wife and my [three] daughters, who are the age she was.” He trails off again.

“We all have a skeleton in the cupboard, it’s just if you’re a taxi driver in Halifax no one ever hears about it. But if you are a celebrity everyone does. In my case it was publicised to the world and that wasn’t really fair, I don’t think. No, it’s a tough one. Thirty years ago.”

Does he still feel nervous about prosecution? “There was never a complaint so…” Again, the trailing off. Then he says, “I went to the police and I went to the public prosecutor and said, ‘Do you want to talk to me? Do you want to meet up with me, or anything like that?’ and I got a message back, ‘No’. I was totally open about it.”

His affair with Mandy Smith was “a heart thing”, not “a lust thing”. “It was very emotional and special at the time. It wasn’t how it was reported, and the only time it ever happened in my life. A lot of people understood, but a lot didn’t. The media certainly didn’t. They treated me like crap.”

The heart can make a fool of a middle-aged man, is that how he sees it? “That was why I married her, but it didn’t work out, by then she was changed, but we mustn’t talk about this any more because my wife will get upset.”

OK, let’s talk about the Stones, then. I know he has said he has no regrets about leaving the band in 1993, but when he sees the kind of money they are still making from touring it must give him pause for thought. “When I said I wanted to leave they told me I was probably giving up £20 million for the next two years. But I had three great houses and some nice cars.” He felt he had enough? “Yes, and I got married again and worked on books, and started a band to subsidise my living expenses. And I don’t regret it because I’ve never been happier.” He looks over my shoulder at something.“I’m sure I’m happier than they are in their lives, I really do.”

Wyman seems a likeable man, about as far removed from a one-time rock legend as you can imagine. He was, after all, always characterised as “the boring one” in the Rolling Stones. Indeed, when he left the band Mick Jagger claimed not to have noticed. “How hard can it be to play bass?” he said. “I’ll do it myself.” Certainly Wyman didn’t do drugs; his main requirement on the road was Marmite and Branston pickle. In conversation he uses quaint expressions such as “hark at me”, and when he swears he apologises. His main passion these days is metal detecting.

And his comments can seem quite Eeyorish. It still rankles with him, for example, that his contributions to the Stones were unacknowledged with writing credits. “None of us got them, Brian, Mick Taylor. If you came up with a riff that turned an ordinary song into something special it was never acknowledged.” Would Mick and Keith acknowledge the riffs privately? “No, not really. The riff on Miss You was mine. And the one for Jumping Jack Flash. There was one interview where Keith acknowledged that ‘that was Bill’s song’. Then about 10 years later he denied he’d said it.”

He sighs. “I don’t push it. You have to swallow your pride and let it go, otherwise you get knotted up. I went away and had the biggest solo success of anyone in the band with (Si, si) Je Suis Un Rock Star. A world hit.” You get the feeling there is little love lost between him and Jagger: “He can start a sentence by saying Yes and by the end of it you realise he has said No.”

But they do have a passion for cricket in common, I say, trying to act as go-between. “Except I play it and he only watches it.”

He’s feeling distracted now, he says, because he keeps noticing that a picture of Jagger on the wall behind me is on a skew. “I’m a bit OCD,” he explains. “Have you noticed I’ve been straightening these serviettes and forks as we’ve been talking.” As I get up to straighten the picture for him, he asks the waiter if the music can to be turned down “because it’s a bit ’orrible”. His wife Suzanne arrives.

Time for one last question. He played bass on Satisfaction and Brown Sugar. He was on stage at the legendary Hyde Park concert in 1969. For some fans, the Stones without Bill Wyman are not really the Stones at all. Do people still think he is in the band? “Yes, taxi drivers still say after all these years, ‘When are you touring with the Stones again?’”

Actually, he did rejoin them briefly on stage at the O2 last November for their 50th anniversary. What was it like?

“Bit disappointing, really,” he deadpans. “They only let me do two songs.”

As he unveils his biggest exhibition yet, the ‘transvestite potter’ seems set to join the art world’s big beasts. But will his ladylike alter ego and childhood teddy bear be joining him?

Being an accommodating man, Grayson Perry has asked if we – that is, the photographer and me – would like him as Claire or as himself. Actually, it was someone from his gallery who asked on his behalf, but still, it is an intriguing distinction, one that I will try to unravel here. He is far from consistent on the subject.

For now, though, it would be as well to remind ourselves, as if we could forget, that not only is 51-year-old Perry a “conceptual artist who works as a craftsman” (his definition) but he is also a transvestite, and that when he dresses as a woman it tends to be as one who wouldn’t look out of place in a pantomime. Indeed, when he won the Turner Prize for his ceramics in 2003, he was wearing a Little Bo Peep outfit. “It’s about time a transvestite potter won this prize,” he quipped.

His pointed sense of humour is one of his defining characteristics, and it runs through his work like the seam of gilt he put in one of his vases to make it obvious it had been broken and repaired (because that was what the ancient Orientals used to do, making a feature of the repair).

We have opted for “as himself” today, which means he is wearing red trousers, pumps and a linen jacket, and his unribboned blond curls reach down to his collar. He has poured himself a coffee, peeled a banana and taken a single bite from it, but the rest of it remains in his hand, which is poised on his knee as if he were an Edwardian posing for a tableau vivant.

We are meeting in the director’s dining room at the British Museum where, from this week until mid February, there will be a major exhibition of his work. And when you approach the columned entrance of the museum and see a long banner announcing it, you do realise what a big name, literally and figuratively, Grayson Perry has become.

Must put a spring in his step when he sees that, I say. “First time I have seen it, actually. But yeah, the big banner outside the British Museum feels pretty good. Oooh!” He talks quickly and fluently in a resonant voice, and though you wouldn’t necessarily work out straight away that he was born and raised in Essex, there are still some traces of the county in his accent.

His exhibition is called Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman and it features his own work alongside objects he has selected from the eight million on display here. The “unknown” in the title seems to be, well, rather knowing on his part, because he himself is far from anonymous as an artist and craftsman.

In the past he’s described Claire as an “alter ego”. Is that still the case?

“I might have done in the past, in my naive pre-therapy days, before I became fully merged. There’s no part of my personality I hive off any more. I’m fully integrated. It’s not an alter ego, it’s a fetish. It’s just me in a frock.”

I ask whether, when he first started cross-dressing in public, the thrill was in passing himself off as a woman. “I never got into dressing as a woman to deceive anyone, so I thought why not embrace it openly? I wanted to say ‘I am Grayson in a dress, deal with it’. There are some trannies who are happy to blend in. If you’re a bank manager, you probably won’t be able to express your transvestism in the same way as an artist can.”

His attitude seems to be that he acknowledges there is something inherently funny about wanting to dress up as a member of the opposite sex, so you may as well be in on the joke and take it further, in his case with baby doll dresses and bonnets. Ritualised humiliation seems to be part of the appeal, too. Can he imagine reaching an age when he will no longer feel the inclination to dress up? “I don’t know. I’ve met trannies who were in their nineties and they said their libidos went years ago. There is a psychological element to it as well as a sexual one, you see.”

Although he has said that his love of pottery may be connected to having to wear a tight rubber smock during his first pottery lesson at school – he became excited by the sensation, broadly speaking – he seems to regard his transvestism as coincidental to his art. But has it, in fact, helped his career? “It hasn’t hurt. It’s a part of me; therefore it must have contributed to my success. In the crowded cultural landscape, it doesn’t hurt to be known for something different.”

He may now deny that Claire is an alter ego, but when he puts a dress on, does he find himself stepping into a character, a public persona that is different to his private one? “I never really use the name any more. I kind of regret it because it came out of me being in a transvestite society when I was younger and they insisted on a fem name for anonymity. If I started in my forties, I would have said ‘call me Grayson’.”

If he were dressed as Claire today, would there be no difference? “I might sit nicer!” He gives an unexpectedly raucous laugh that makes me jump. “Wouldn’t be so casual! I do sit and walk a little more ladylike when I’m dressed up. It’s appropriate to the look.” He says he’s learnt to avoid the places where his appearance might lead to trouble. But can he handle himself? “Never had a fight.” I ask this because his stepfather was an amateur wrestler. Was he a violent man? “He could be very frightening. That sort of person would be someone I would avoid. I still have a reaction to machismo.”

His biological father was a “manly man” too, an engineer who rode motorbikes. “Motorbikes aren’t manly,” he says. “Look at mine.” True, his is pink and turquoise. “If a bloke has to prove his machismo with a motorbike, then he isn’t very macho.” The motorbike and his father, with whom he has little contact, are integral to understanding his new work. They are linked by Alan Measles, his childhood teddy bear, who features heavily in the new exhibition. Perry recently toured Bavaria on his motorbike accompanied by Alan Measles, who sat in a specially constructed shrine on the back. It was, the artist said, a mission of reconciliation with their old enemies, the Germans. In his solitary and unhappy childhood, you see, Perry imagined Alan as a heroic member of the French resistance.

He was also an unbeaten racing driver, and a fighter pilot. He has now taken on the role of a “personal God” and “the embodiment of everything that is good about masculinity”. In the exhibition catalogue, Perry describes Alan as “the benign dictator of my fantasy worlds. He was my prime candidate for deification and I set about making works that celebrated his heroism.”

Presumably, by giving a teddy bear all these manly characteristics, his intention was to mock them? “No, in my childhood, Alan was a transference mechanism to help me survive emotionally. I needed a reassuring male figure, so I constructed it.” But why not project on to an Action Man? “Well, I’m sure there are kids who have done it with an Action Man, but for me it happened to be my teddy bear. I never wanted to be in someone else’s imagination. Teddies are universal. They don’t have distinctive characteristics. That’s why he’s like a god.”

People project on to God what they would like Him to be. Alan struggles with the whole business of religion. There is a piece in the show called Hold Your Beliefs Lightly in which Alan says to the world’s religions: “Calm down, dear, it’s only a belief system.’’ What Alan Measles is most, as Perry discovered when he had therapy, is a surrogate father. He is also his male psyche. Indeed, on one of Perry’s vases there is a scene in which Claire is marrying Alan. “Many problems in society come from an imbalance in the way these two sides of our personality are dealt with,” he has written.

Perry’s wife Philippa is a psychotherapist and they have a 19-year-old daughter, Florence. He denies that he gets free sessions, although “We talk about therapy all the time… there are still a lot of people who are suspicious about it because people see it as a fluffy, middle-class indulgence. I think it will become more popular in the future because it is a b——-free zone. Therapists tell it like it is. They peel back layers.” In conversation, he often seems to refer to emotions. And as much as anything, his new exhibition seems to be an exploration of public emotion.

The Unknown Craftsman is, of course, a reference to the Unknown Soldier who became the focus for national grief after the First World War. “I found it very moving reading up about the Unknown Soldier,” he says, “because public displays of emotion intrigue me. I found the Diana funeral moving in a way a lot of middle-class commentators dismissed. Yucky working-class people being vulgar and emotional.” Would he say he’s now part of the art establishment? “No. There is an art elite which meets in Venice and it is partly a class thing because they prefer intellectual difficulty to emotional. They sneer at anything accessible because they think accessibility means dumb.”

Perry has broad appeal and I think it’s because people find him accessible, engaging and witty. “I’m sure there are people in the art world who struggle to like me because they have an academic, insular version of art. Difficult art is collected by galleries rather than individual patrons and it’s a kind of closed system. The public aren’t paying for it and their attention isn’t sought. The elites don’t realise they are a little village.” Is there rivalry between the big beasts, by which I mean him, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Gilbert & George and the Chapman brothers?

“I’m the littlest of the big beasts. They make miles more money than me. Wish I had their money. I don’t do enough work and don’t have a big team of assistants. This exhibition is two years’ work for me. They make the kind of work that they are happy to see expanded and out of their control.” Me-ow! Is there rivalry, though? “I’m glad to meet any of them. We have things that we like and we don’t like about each other’s work. It would be weird if we didn’t. We’re not treading on each other’s toes.” He adds that his ambition is “to make art that is happy and accessible and decorative. The idea that art has to be difficult and solemn is not very English. And I’m very English.”

It is telling that he refers disparagingly to “the middle classes” as if they are not his tribe, when clearly they now are. He listens to Radio 4 all day when he’s working in his studio, for goodness sake. But, for all this, there is something endearingly, and perhaps surprisingly, unpretentious about Perry. The interview done, and the banana now eaten, we wander over to where the exhibition is being constructed. He hasn’t made an appointment to visit the site and the security guard is not convinced he is who he says he is. How much easier it would have been if he had come as Claire.

Father of a two-year-old, medieval historian, and now champion of church conservation – Terry Jones talks about the unlikely turns his life has taken since the Monty Python years.

Just as an ex-Beatle will always be an ex-Beatle, so an ex-Python will forever be an ex-Python, even one who goes on to have a successful second career as a historian specialising in the Middle Ages, as Terry Jones did. It’s just the way of things.

In his airy study overlooking Hampstead Heath, the shelves of books reflect this duality. The collected Python scripts take up as much space as the volumes of medieval history. And what’s this? Peeping out from behind some taller books is the corner of a blue plaque. It was supposed to go outside the house in Colwyn Bay where Jones grew up, yet here it still is, hidden away.

Such, it seems, is the modesty of the man. As for his famed affability, well, there does seem to be a permanent chuckle just below his surface and, combined with his distracted air, this makes him seem like a don who can’t remember where his next lecture is supposed to be. His croaky voice adds to this impression, and it’s tempting to think this might be caused by years of playing all those screechy Python women, such as the waitress in the Spam sketch.

More prominently displayed is a photograph of Jones with what you might assume is his granddaughter. He is 69, after all. But this is, in fact, his daughter Siri, who has just had her second birthday. Her mother Anna, a 28-year-old Swedish Oxford graduate, greeted me at the door and is now downstairs making an apple crumble. They met six years ago and, when he realised he had fallen in love, Jones confessed all to his wife Alison, a biochemist with whom he has two grown-up children. He clearly still finds the subject of his separation a difficult one. When we discuss it, he becomes even more halting than usual.

Has he always lived round here? “No, 26 years in Camberwell.”

His wife is still there? “Um, yes.”

Must have been hard for both of them, after so many years of marriage. “Yeees, fairly horrible. Harder for her than me, obviously.”

But didn’t they have a fairly “open” marriage anyway? “Um, yeeeah.”

Are they still married? “Yes, but, um, about to get divorced, mainly because it causes tax problems if you don’t.”

And will he re-marry? “Um, yes. Again, there are tax implications if you don’t.”

He is less hesitant on his favourite subject: misconceptions about medieval England. On Thursday, indeed, he will be giving the annual lecture for the Churches Conservation Trust on this subject.

“We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition,” he says, pronouncing his r’s as w’s. “We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.”

What’s behind this negative image, then? “I think it’s because, as a human race, we like to think we’ve progressed. In fact, they were very sophisticated and subtle.”

Isn’t he partly to blame for the misconceptions, though, given the impact of Monty Python and the Holy Grail? “I think we were guilty of perpetuating one myth and that was that everyone had blackened teeth. It was before the opening of the sugar trade with the West Indies, so actually people had very good teeth.”

Has he ever fantasised about going back in time and seeing for himself what life was really like then? “No, it’s more fun speculating. And anyway I don’t think my knowledge of Chaucerian English would be good enough. The funny thing about history is that we imagine that people didn’t laugh in the old days, but of course they did, at stupid things. Henry II’s favourite minstrel was ‘a whistle, a leap and a fart’. And he paid someone a lot of money to fall off his horse.”

His daughter appears at the glass door and he waves at her and says in a high-pitch voice: “Hello, Siri! Hello! What’s that mischievous face?” When he lets her in, she shows him a birthday card and then she heads back downstairs. “She’s such a sweetie. I can’t remember my other two children at this age,” he says, “Because we were in the middle of filming Holy Grail.”

I guess that’s why grandparents often have good if not better relationships with their grandchildren than they did with their children, because they have more time. “It’s the same with Siri and me, actually. Occasionally, I find it hard to get to work. In my old house I had a study at the top, far away from everything. But Siri likes to pop in and see what I’m up to, and with those big eyes it’s hard to say no!”

Does having a child at his age make him feel younger? “I kind of feel about 15 anyway. Probably 20. It takes you a while to catch up with what your real age is, but I’ll be 70 next year. Terry Gilliam [another ex-Python] had his 70th earlier this year at a speedway track.”

And the nights, how does he find them? “When she was younger, we shared the night duties. But now Siri is sleeping through, so it’s not too bad.”

As well as his history books, he’s written some lovely children’s books; he must be great at telling bedtime stories, I say. “Not really. I’ve never been good at improvising. Writing them is a different matter. Anna’s very good with the songs. She knows so many Swedish songs, and she sings them to Siri in the car.”

His relationship with his own father was more distant. “I remember seeing him for the first time when I was four and half. I’d only seen photographs of him before then because he had been based in India during the war, in the postal service. I grew up with women doting on me – my mother and grandmother – and when my father came back he wanted to impose some strict Edwardian values. I suppose I resented the intrusion.”

His mother adored him. “Even more than she did my older brother, I think. She treated me like her little pet. I felt my first duty was to please her, and that could be onerous.”

Was his mother compensating for his father’s absence? “I suppose so, but she was very loving anyway.” He stares out of the window. “My mother always said she had something she wanted to tell me, and she never did. She died suddenly from a heart attack [when he was 30] and didn’t get the chance. It was a mystery.”

Was he conscious of being cleverer at school than his peers? “No, I’m not that clever, actually. This medieval stuff might look academic, but I’m hopeless at academia, really. I could never remember anything. I’d read history books and not remember anything. It was a real strain.”

He and the other gentle ex-Python, Michael Palin, met at Oxford and tended to write together, whereas the other comedy writing team in the group – John Cleese, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman – met at Cambridge and were always considered more dangerous and provocative. “Mike and I just wanted to be loved,” Jones has said in the past.

Yet he must have been made of pretty strong stuff because he was the one who directed their three cinematic triumphs: The Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and The Meaning of Life. Must have been a hard job having to direct all those big personalities. “Well, you didn’t really need to direct them. With John, you might sometimes have to say, ‘That’s over the top’, and he would tone it down. But, as we had all written the scripts between us, it was more like being a Woody Allen-type of director. You didn’t need to direct because it was so perfectly cast.”

He’s being modest again. As to the question of whether the ex-Pythons will ever come together to be Pythons again, he reckons they are all too comfortable these days. The edginess and hunger has gone. But you never know. Most of them have contributed to A Liar’s Autobiography, an animated film based on the memoir of Graham Chapman, the Python who died in 1989. And the success of Spamalot, the Broadway musical, shows Python fans are still desperate for more.

For now, Jones has the unusual distinction of having three of his films banned in Ireland. Life of Brian may always come top of polls of the funniest film ever, but it is still considered blasphemous in religious circles. And now here he is giving a lecture on behalf of the Churches Conversation Trust! “I hadn’t thought of that!” he says with a chuckle. “It was Michael [Palin’s] son who, um, suggested I do it. He’s very involved in the conservation of old buildings. But actually the thing to remember about Life of Brian is that, er, it wasn’t blasphemous, it was heretical. There is, um, a difference.”

TELEGRAPH, 9 DECEMBER 2016

Kirk Douglas celebrates his 100th birthday today. For this interview, originally published in July 2011, Nigel Farndale spoke to the Hollywood star about his remarkable life

No sooner does Kirk Douglas sit down on the silk-covered sofa in his drawing room than he stands up again. He then sits down once more.
“Would you like me to show you again?” he asks with a grin. He stands up again. I’d asked how his knees were, you see, because six years ago he had them both replaced in an operation, against his doctor’s advice. Pretty good seems to be the answer.
In fact he’s in pretty good shape all round, considering his venerable age, 94, and the scrapes he has been in over the years. In 1991 he survived a helicopter crash, a mid-air collision with a light aircraft in which two people were killed. He got off relatively lightly with a compressed spine that left him three inches shorter. (read more)

Has he seen a therapist? Does he have OCD? Or a secret yearning to study French poetry? Lord Sugar tells all<

f Alan Sugar, Lord Sugar, were a dog he would be a short-bodied, wire-haired dog. A terrier of some sort. A snarling, bristling, silver-coated terrier. This thought occurs to me as I watch him stride into the cavernous supply room where our photographer, Dan Burn-Forti, has set up his lights in front of an abandoned red leather chair.

“You’ve got seven minutes,” Sugar barks. He only ever poses for seven minutes; indeed, he once refused to sit for David Bailey because he wanted more than that. Dan knows the seven-minute rule already, having photographed him twice before.

He also knows that he must not ask Lord Sugar to point his finger at the camera, as he does when he says his catchphrase, “You’re fired!”, on The Apprentice, a new series of which is about to start on BBC One. This will only annoy his lordship, and given his reputation for being prickly, Dan knows that you really don’t want to annoy him.

The storeroom is on the third floor of Amshold Ltd, a large corrugated building on an industrial estate just beyond the M25 in Essex, the headquarters for Lord Sugar’s business empire, and it is full of the everyday supplies a company needs, from cleaning fluids and pens, to printer paper and lots of watercoolers.

There’s also a dusty old Amstrad computer from the Eighties, the product on which Sugar built his fortune (he is thought to be worth about £840 million, with most of his money these days coming from property). For my generation, your first computer was nearly always an Amstrad (mine was the 9512). Sugar had the simple, yet inspired, idea that if computers could be made affordable, everyone would want one.

The photographs over – seven minutes exactly – we repair to Sugar’s office. Light slants through a semi-shuttered window. His wooden desk forms the top of a giant T, the bottom being the long, granite desk at which his visitors sit, at an angle to him. Symmetrically arranged on the desk are two phones, two silver-shaded lamps, two glass in-trays, two model aeroplanes and two computers. Behind it, on the wall, are evenly-spaced family photographs. Sugar has been married to Ann for 43 years. One is tempted to describe her as the long-suffering Ann, but she has been quoted as saying that her husband is “softer” in reality than he appears in the media.

For his part, Sugar has said that he doesn’t know what she saw in him at first. He wasn’t exactly romantic, eventually proposing in a minivan on the Stratford flyover. They have three grown-up children. All were privately educated. Two of them work for his company.

The interview begins with a brusque: “Now what can I do for you?” The compulsive watch checking also begins, not a surreptitious, corner-of-the-eye check but a full-on, rude, I’ve-got-more-important-things-to-be-doing-right-now check.

While it’s possible that he only does this with me I suspect he does it with everyone, not least because he often describes himself as an impatient man. Restless. Easily bored.

Yet, in contradiction of this, he can’t bear disorder in his life. Everything has to be aligned, from the clams on his plate to the pictures on his wall. He is fanatical about cycling and perhaps there is something about the constant rhythm of peddling, the order it represents, that he finds therapeutic.

I suggest this because about 20 minutes into our conversation I notice him aligning the pens around his desk with his jotter. When I ask why he does this, whether it is evidence of obsessive compulsive disorder, he says in a deadpan voice: “Yeah, there’s a man with a white coat waiting outside. Partial insanity. I’m just going to move this pen over two millimetres.” He measures with a ruler. Nice self-mockery.

A psychotherapist would read much into this, I suggest. Has he ever been tempted to see one? “No, no, no. As a young man some friends of mine had some kind of visionary round their house to read what was going to happen to them and I happened to turn up and say it was a load of nonsense. And they said I should try it and the man said, ‘I can tell you have had a bad day today. You’ve had a big row with your boss and I can see it’. And I said, ‘I haven’t got a boss, I work for myself.’”

It’s an anecdote that tells us you don’t have to be a particularly talented “psychic” to guess as soon as Sugar walks through the door that he has had an argument with someone that day.

If he were to see a therapist, I suggest, he or she would want to explore why, when most people need to be liked, Alan Sugar doesn’t. In fact he seems to enjoy making enemies. (He joined Twitter last year and soon found himself embroiled in a war of words with Kirstie Allsopp, calling her “a lying cow” for saying he was “uncharitable”.) Why is that? “I don’t make enemies, it’s just I’m not afraid to speak my mind, which can sometimes mean people don’t like what I am saying. They become, in your terms, enemies.

“I tell it like it is, but I’ve got some employees who have worked for me for 25 years. I can’t be that bad if they stick around.The only people whose opinions I worry about are my wife, my children, and my employees. And as long as they still like me the rest of the world can,” he checks himself, “make its own mind up. I don’t go out of my way to schmooze people or make friends.”

So has he deliberately cultivated a television persona which is, well, what is it? “Dare I say it, the reason I think people like watching me is that I speak a lot of common sense. They know I’m not talking rubbish. There’s no complexity in what I’m saying on The Apprentice. It’s not highbrow, intellectual speak. It is obvious.”

The youngest of four children brought up in a council flat in Hackney, Sugar began his career selling lighters and car aerials from the back of a van. Clearly his is a story of determination, guts and a strong work ethic, but it is also one of single-mindedness and self-belief. Where did that come from, does he suppose? His parents?

“I don’t think so, they came from a completely different era. Very cautious and non-adventurous. Had a difficult life. My mother was a housewife. My father was a garment worker. What I did was totally alien to what my father would have done. So no.”

Did he worry about outshining his father? “No, no problem there at all. I’d broken the mould of working in a factory culture. You’re not a psychiatrist are you? Do you want me to get on the couch?”

If that would make him feel more comfortable. “Well can we get back to talking about The Apprentice.” It’s not a question. But I had a good run, and I’m surprised his patience took as long as it did to wear thin.

So. A new series of the Bafta-winning reality show begins next week and this time, instead of winning a £100,000 job in one of Sugar’s businesses, the winner will go into a 50/50 partnership with him. He will invest £250,000 in a start-up company of the winner’s choosing. Sixteen candidates, as usual. Twelve tasks. Cue Prokofiev music.

The firing stage. Does he ever get emotionally engaged? Feel moved?

“Yeah I do, especially on the penultimate programme because you have had people who have been working hard trying to impress you for 11 weeks and it gets difficult when you have to make a decision because they can’t all be winners. The firing tends to be soft landings towards the end because I don’t want to be suppressing someone who has tried their best but just wasn’t quite good enough.”

Before this interview his lordship was being interviewed by Evan Davis for Radio 4. Isn’t the new format a “leetle” bit like Dragon’s Den? “Yeah, well he seemed to think so, but as I told him, we’re the ones who keep winning the awards and he hasn’t won one yet.”

Sugar thinks there is an “expectancy culture” out there. Young people think they can come in at a high level, bypassing all the dirtying hands stage. “They look at the young fellow who invented Facebook and think they are going to find a venture capitalist who’s going to give them 10 million quid. But he was an anonomy. The guy that invented YouTube is an anonomy. The guy who invented Amazon is an anonomy.” I think he means anomaly, except that, having given three examples, they aren’t exactly anomalies.

“What they forget is that all these people were anonomies,” Sugar continues. “But when you look at the Sugars, the Bransons and the Greens, we started with nothing, at the bottom, and we learned from our mistakes and we hustled. We ducked and dived. What we want to demonstrate to the viewers is that you can still start with very little.

“I’ve given this latest mob £250 and they’ve turned it into £1,500. Did they need a bank loan? No. Did they need a big factory? No.”

And it shouldn’t matter in terms of starting up that we are in a recession? “No, that’s all rubbish. I’m sick and tired of hearing about the recession. It’s all c—. I started in 1967, one of the worst recessions in living memory. It’s all about being positive.”

Part of Sugar’s morbid appeal on television is that he is always trying to keep his anger in check, stop himself from swearing. In his autobiography, What You See Is What You Get (2010), he writes: “The niceties weren’t instilled in me by my mother and father. I was never taught any social graces, not even simple things like saying, ‘Hello, how are you?’”

In the book he also admits to feelings of guilt (towards his mother, with whom he didn’t spend enough time when she had depression towards the end of her life), of “gut-wrenching anguish” (during his 10-year period as the owner of Tottenham Hotspur) and to moments of self-doubt: “Am I a one-trick pony?”

Is this evidence of introspection, I wonder. Of an examined life? I try to steer him back to the personal stuff. Does talking about it make him feel uncomfortable? “No, it’s just this isn’t a profile about me.” Yes it is. “Well it’s all in my book. Read that. First two chapters.”

I like to hear things from the horse’s mouth, not that I’m comparing him to a horse. “Well people do say reading that book is like listening to me talking. I dictated it.”

Not only does he not write books, he doesn’t read them either. Or listen to music. The closest he comes to culture is watching a bit of television, Law & Order. And yet clearly, to have done as well in business as he has he must have, as he puts it, genius and brilliance.

Does he regret not having had a formal education, going to Oxbridge, perhaps? “I don’t think the outcome would have been any different. And I would perceive three years at university as a waste of time. I would have already made £200,000 by then. I’m a commercial person, not an academic.”

Those three years may be a waste of time financially but not in terms of his cerebral development, surely. He might have acquired a taste for French poetry, for example, which might have enriched his life in profound ways, giving him intellectual depth.

“Not really. The thing is, I’ve been in the university of life, you see, and you can say to these people who come out with their two-point-ones, or whatever, that’s fine but you know nothing. We’re going to put you into a practicable environment now where you begin to learn.”

Isn’t that rather patronising? I mean, he doesn’t know these people with their two-ones. And all the Nobel Prize winners this country has ever produced went to university.

He raises his voice. “All it is is a badge that shows they have a brain. That’s all it is. You’re not a dummkopf. But you are not an expert in economics. I’m sorry. You are not an expert in business. You are not an expert in electronics. When you become an expert is when you start rolling up your sleeves on the shop floor.”

Clearly he is a good judge of character, a quick judge, too. Is that down to his impatience? “I have instincts but I know better than to react to them straight away because that’s knee jerk. It’s bad, bad, bad practice to form an opinion of someone after only 20 minutes, unless they are being abusive.”

Does he have an instant prejudice against public-school types? He sighs. “Not really, but if you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth, it doesn’t mean that you have a brain in your head.

“If your parents can afford to send you to Eton that’s not your fault, but Eton isn’t going to make you brilliant. It can make you charming and polite, that’s good, but it doesn’t make you better than anyone else.”

What motivates him to carry on with his businesses? How much is enough? “I have got enough yes. Don’t need any more. But I like making it. That’s in my nature. It’s like a footballer likes scoring goals.”

What does he like about it? “It’s the buzz, isn’t it?

Creating something. Making something. Being successful. That is the buzz. Having a deal. It’s a buzz.”

And his motivation for carrying on with The Apprentice? “There is a certain amount of ego involved, to be fair. It is nice to be recognised, nice to be famous. But my main motive for doing it is to instil entrepreneurial skill and enterprise into young people.”

At the beginning of the show he lists what he doesn’t like. “I don’t like cheats. I don’t like schmoozers. I don’t like a— lickers.”

When I ask him now what he does like he says: “The first daffodils of spring, Shakespearean sonnets, walking barefoot in the sand.” No, of course he doesn’t. He’s all about the not liking.

Having talked about the folly of making instant judgments, I will now make some. After an hour or so in his company, I would say Lord Sugar is repetitive in conversation, intellectually complacent, distracted, and, yes, impatient. He is almost certainly an anal retentive and did I mention repetitive?

Like David Brent, he shouts you down, has no social skills or tact, and is boastful, though I do get that he is sending himself up when he says how brilliant he is.

I don’t share these conclusions with him, but I do ask if he ever slips into self-parody. “No, I’m pleased to say I’m not an actor. What you see is what you get. I’ve met you before haven’t I?” Nope. “Yeah, you’ve been here before.” Nope. “Yeah you have. It obviously wasn’t a memorable moment for you.”

And with that slightly bizarre exchange we part company, me blinking into the sunshine feeling slightly punch drunk, him barking like a terrier at some unfortunate on the phone.

Sir Christopher Lee: ‘I’m softer than people think’

Upstairs at the Bafta building on Piccadilly there is a wall lined with black-and-white stills from David Lean films, mostly from the Forties and Fifties. As he walks past them, Sir Christopher Lee, the 88-year-old screen legend, takes them in with knowing nods and says, almost under his breath: “And here’s Charles and Trevor and John.” (Laughton, Howard and Mills, for the record).

He’s worked with them all; in fact the record books show that Lee has worked with more Hollywood greats and been in more films than any other actor alive, some 350. When people come up to him and say they have seen him in all his films, he likes to say: “No you haven’t.” Even he hasn’t seen all his films.

The game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, indeed, would have worked just as well if it had been called Six Degrees of Christopher Lee (if Lee had rhymed with separation). He gets to Bacon in two, by the way, having starred in the 1977 film Starship Invasions, which also starred Sean McCann, who starred with Bacon in The Air Up There (1994). According to the online Oracle of Bacon, Lee is ranked second only to Rod Steiger as the centre of “the Hollywood galaxy”.

Lee is here at Bafta because his contribution to the film industry is about to be honoured with a Bafta Fellowship. “It means a lot to me,” he says, “because it is a pat on the back from the profession. I shall probably have tears on the night of the ceremony. I’m much softer than people think. I don’t present to the world an emotional face. I’m pretty good at self-control, but I am easily moved.”

He adds that when you have been through five years of war you tend to save tears for reality, rather than the make believe of the cinema. “That is real horror and blood. When the Second World War finished I was 23 and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I’d seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn’t affect me much.”

Golden Gun 1974

Christopher Lee played Scaramanga opposite Roger Moore’s James Bond in The Man with the Golden Gun REX FEATURES

The only time you see tears from a soldier, he reckons, is at a military funeral. “Very difficult to keep them back. So many of my comrades from the war have died lately. And from the acting profession. Susannah York. John Barry. I turn to the Telegraph’s obituaries page with trepidation.” His best friend was the actor Peter Cushing and when he died in 1994, he felt there was no one left to have “remember when?” conversations with.

On the subject of his war record, Lee is like a man wrestling with a secret he longs to tell, metaphorically wincing in order to draw attention to an old war wound, only to say that he doesn’t want to talk about it. He will allude, for example, to his time with the Special Operations Executive, but when you ask him to expand he will look affronted.

“I was attached to the SAS from time to time but we are forbidden – former, present, or future – to discuss any specific operations.” Later he raises the subject again and says: “Let’s just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like.”

When I ask whether his Bafta Fellowship means more to him than his knighthood last year, he raises the cane playfully at me and says that the two honours are very different and that if I say otherwise “I shall unsheathe my sword stick!” Is it really a sword stick? “Wish it was. But I do know how to fight with a sword. I did all my own fight scenes and have the scars to prove it.”

Lee isn’t as tall as he once was, having, he thinks, lost about an inch from his full height of 6ft 5in, but he doesn’t stoop. Today he is wearing cords and a polo neck. He has a long, angular face, still piercing eyes and a white beard. As for his hair, let’s just say it fits.

His voice, meanwhile, is still deep and his recall is excellent. He never hesitates over a name. The keen intellect that enabled him to become multilingual – he is fluent in French, German, Spanish and Italian, and can also get by in Swedish, Greek and Russian – is still, it seems, in evidence.

Even at the grand age of 88 he has no intention of slowing down. He recently had a cameo in a yet-to-be-released sequel to his best film, The Wicker Man. He is also in negotiation to appear in The Hobbit, the prequel to The Lord of the Rings, in which he also starred. That is the thing about Lee: he is the king of the franchise, the only common denominator between the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Star Wars series, the Hammer horrors and the Bond films (he played Scaramanga, Bond’s nemesis in The Man With The Golden Gun).

We shall come to those. For now I ask what he has against retirement. “It’s not for me. I hate being idle. As dear Boris used to say, when I die I want to die with my boots on. Which he did. As did Vincent. And Peter.” (He is referring to Karloff, Price and Cushing, of course.)

As we talk I notice he cannot bring himself to utter the D-word. Although he was very good as Dracula, it did cast a long shadow over his career. And now, for him, mentioning the count is almost a taboo, as mentioning Macbeth is for other actors. The most he will do is allude to him, when pushed. And he recalls with a shudder that when he was knighted last year the tabloids ran punning headlines such as “Fangs for the honour”.

Dracula

Dracula cast a shadow over Christopher Lee’s career

“Pathetic,” he says with a solemn shake of his head. “Pathetic.” He suits his knighthood because he is a man who carries himself with great dignity. And he not only votes Conservative but believes in the sanctity of marriage. He and his wife Gitte, a one-time Chanel model, married in 1961. They have one daughter. “The secret to a long marriage in the film industry? Marry someone wonderful, as I did. And always have her come along on location.”

His knighthood, also suits him and it is in keeping with the gentility of his upbringing. He attended Wellington College, his father was a colonel in the King’s Royal Rifles, his cousin was Ian Fleming, his mother was a Contessa. When he told her he wanted to be an actor she was mortified. “She did a real Bernhardt, saying: ‘The shame of it! Think of the shame you are bringing to the family!’ Then she said something which to this day I cannot argue with. ‘Think of all the frightful people you will meet!’”

The 1958 film Dracula Has Risen From The Grave made him a star. Van Helsing was played by Peter Cushing and it had a huge international impact, in part because colour was still a novelty and there was so much blood in it. It was also partly because Lee brought out the dark, brooding sexuality of Dracula, something that his predecessor Bela Lugosi had never managed.

Three more Dracula films at the end of the Sixties consolidated his success. And all are considered classics of the genre to this day. Was it a problem that he was simply too good as Dracula? “I think there is a lot…” Long pause. “There is a lot of misunderstanding about me in that role. It had never been played properly before that. With me it was all about the power of suggestion to make the unbelievable believable.”

We have come to the other word that makes him shudder, typecasting. “The same happened to Peter and Vincent. They made some wonderful serious movies but are only known for horror. That was why I went to America. I couldn’t see anything happening here except a continuation of what had gone before. A couple of friends, Dick Widmark and Billy Wilder, told me I had to get away from London otherwise I would always be typecast.”

Christopher Lee in The Mummy, 1959 REX FEATURES

His first film upon arriving in Hollywood was Airplane 77 and he came close to actual death in that, having to act dead under water without breathing apparatus. “The stunt men made me an honorary member of their guild after that. I did all sorts of genres in America, some of which I don’t care to remember.”

Is he referring to the soft porn film, or is that an urban myth? “No that was long before, in 1970. But it is true I was in a soft porn film, though I had no idea that was what it was when I agreed to the role. I was told it was about the Marquis de Sade. I flew out to Spain for one day’s work playing the part of a narrator. I had to wear a crimson dinner jacket. There were lots of people behind me. They all had their clothes on. There didn’t seem to be anything peculiar or strange.”

He forgot about the film then one day, well, he tells it better. “A friend said: ‘Do you know you are in a film in Old Compton Street?’ In those days that was where the mackintosh brigade watched their films. ‘Very funny,’ I said. So I crept along there heavily disguised in dark glasses and scarf, and found the cinema and there was my name. I was furious! There was a huge row. When I had left Spain that day everyone behind me had taken their clothes off!”

Lee remained in Hollywood for a decade, playing in many genres including westerns. Anything, in fact, but horror. When he felt it was safe to return to Britain he was invited to appear on Wogan. Much to his chagrin, the producers thought it would be a good idea to open the show with Terry coming out of a coffin wrapped in a cape.

Christopher Lee as Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequel trilogy 2002-2005

Christopher Lee as Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequel trilogy 2002-2005

When I watched that clip on YouTube as part of my research, I did feel sorry for Sir Christopher. The trouble is, combined with the sheer quantity of horror films that Lee made, there is also the inconvenient fact that he is obsessed with the occult in real life. He has a library of 12,000 books on the subject.

“Yes, it’s true,” he says, “ever since I read Aleister Crowley. It was my friend Dennis Wheatley who got me interested in the occult.” Wheatley also wrote the novel upon which one of Christopher Lee’s best films was based, The Devil Rides Out.

But the film of which Lee is most proud is Jinnah, about the founder of Pakistan, where he plays the title role. It was made in 1998 and James Fox plays opposite him as Mountbatten. He also has great affection for the four films he has made with Tim Burton. There is only one great director he would love to work with, and that is Clint Eastwood.

Lee has an old man’s tendency to dismiss whole generations with a sweep. “I’ve never looked on myself as a star,” he says. “Never. To me a star is a giant and where are the giants today? The Tracys, the Coopers, the Flynns?”

Who does he rate today, then? There must be someone. He thinks for a moment. “Leonardo DiCaprio. And my good friend Johnny Depp.”

As we part company, he has only one request. “Please don’t describe me in your article as a ‘horror legend’. I moved on from that.” Fair enough, Sir Christopher. Fair enough.

He would rather trash politicians than watch trashy TV. But how does our greatest living novelist unwind? Not easily…

As well as the hundreds of books on the shelves there are, on various other tables and surfaces in this high-ceilinged drawing room, further neat piles of books. It is as if Ian McEwan, the man who lives here, needs them to be within reach at all times, lifebuoys to a nervous swimmer.

But there are also hints of a life beyond books, a hinterland: the Bridget Riley paintings that frame the fireplace, the electric guitar on a stand and the drinks, a collection of bottles on a lacquered Chinese cabinet. One of them is Johnnie Walker Black Label, the favoured poison of his friend Christopher Hitchens. It is half empty, or half full, depending. “That? Yes, that’s his. No one else drinks it. I hope he will one day come back to finish it.”

The Hitch has cancer, a subject he has written about with great poignancy, wit and grace for Vanity Fair. “He still drinks, but more wine than Scotch. Because he’s so oxlike in his strength I don’t think he knew how to be ill. I’m going over to Washington to see him next week.”

You imagine that Martin Amis will also have a half full bottle of Black Label somewhere in his house, also keeping vigil. There are other members of this gang, such as Salman Rushdie and Richard Dawkins, but McEwan, Amis and the Hitch form the unholy trinity, as reflected in a photograph taken about five years ago in Uruguay. McEwan has a brotherly arm around Hitchens’ shoulder.

There must have been many philosophical discussions among these friends over the years about the nature of mortality, but now that one of them is having to confront his own, does that change the terms of the debate, from the abstract to the concrete?

“Well we’re all getting to that age, late fifties and early sixties, when people get ill. It all begins to feel horribly finite. But I don’t think it becomes harder to talk or write about. If anything it becomes harder to avoid. It becomes an inevitable subject, as it became for Roth and Bellow and Updike.”

At 62, Ian McEwan at least has the consolation of being described as our greatest living novelist, thanks to his having pulled off the unusual feat of writing literary novels that sell like commercial ones, by the million, most notably with Atonement in 2001.

He began as a writer of short stories, having his first collection, First Love, Last Rites, published in his mid twenties. It won the Somerset Maugham award in 1976 and, since then, his books have won just about every award going, including the Whitbread for The Child in Time (1987) and the Booker for Amsterdam (1998). His latest, Solar, is a little about global warming and a lot about a womanising Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.

More typical of his oeuvre is Saturday (2005), a meditation on the post-9/11 world, one that is far from comic. Its protagonist, the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, lives in a large Georgian town house that is based on this one, overlooking the same square in central London. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

McEwan’s is an idiosyncratic literary voice, but if he can be compared to anyone it is the American novelist John Updike. They were friends and Updike’s death two years ago affected McEwan deeply.

“I did feel something really dropped out of my world. It was the death of an irreplaceable consciousness. He was such a great namer of things. From the time I read Rabbit Run at the age of 18, he had always been there. Always more essays, more poetry, more stories. I went to stay with him with my wife in 2008 and had a really nice time and we were making arrangements to go again.”

At least with Updike McEwan has three shelves of his books. “Yes, in that sense he is still a living presence for me. But like this idea of living on in the memories of others, that’s no real life for a fellow, is it?”

So it’s no consolation for him to think he might live on through his work? “Not really.”

What about through his genes, his two sons? “Yes, but you get watered down with each generation. Your grandchildren will have a quarter of your genes and their children an eighth. It’s a fade out.”

McEwan of course, like The Hitch and Dawkins, is an avowed atheist and when we talk about the Christian belief in an afterlife he says: “Do you think they really believe it? I’ve been to funerals where I was pretty sure the majority were atheists and they listened to the vicar say that the deceased had gone to a better place and everyone’s toes curled.

“We can’t prove it’s not so, but the chances that it is are rather meagre. If they did believe you all meet up again in this big theme park in the sky why were they crying? How can you say you believe in the afterlife and weep at the finality of death?”

There may be no immortality through books, but does he ever feel the urge to account for his life in a memoir, as several of his friends have done? “I would love to write a book as good as Experience, or Hitch-22, but I keep drifting into another novel. I’ve got notes.”

Is his “Ian McEwan shelf” an extended memoir, the story of his literary life in several volumes? “It’s a metafiction, I suppose. The row of books an author ends up with. It is not something you could have plotted, one leading to the other. Knowing that it’s finite, knowing that you might be two thirds of the way through, or even that you might be at the end now because you may run out of time and fall ill, or be knocked down by a bus, that’s a strange feeling.”

Like Hitchens and Amis, McEwan has had episodes in his life that have been stranger than fiction. In 2003, he discovered he had a long lost brother.

“Yes, and he wrote a book about it called Complete Surrender which was what the advert in the paper had said when he was put up for adoption. That had my father’s fingerprints all over it. ‘Complete surrender’ being a military term.” (His father, a domineering man, had been an army major who had been commissioned from the ranks.)

But would there also, I ask, be episodes in his life which he found too painful to write about? He is happily married now to the journalist Annalena McAfee, but there was an earlier marriage to Penny Allen which ended acrimoniously. The acrimony indeed made headlines in 1999 when Allen absconded with their youngest son to France, McEwan having been given sole custody of both their sons.

In the ensuing proceedings at the High Court in London, Allen was criticised by the judge for having conducted a “vitriolic campaign” against McEwan, and was barred from speaking publicly about their relationship. McEwan, for his part, was commended as “a model of courtesy and restraint”.

“Yeah well that would have to be dealt with if I were to write a memoir,” he says now. “I don’t think it would be too painful personally, it’s just I feel that since I’m the one who has access to all the channels of communication it would be unbalanced and unfair to use them. Also I don’t like reading people moaning on about their divorces. Funny how you always hear the version of the good person. Yet there are always two sides.”

One event I’d like to read about in his memoir, I say, is the fatwa; when it was issued Salman Rushdie took refuge in McEwan’s cottage in the Cotswolds. “Well it wasn’t my cottage. We were borrowing it from friends. I don’t think I ever admired a man more than him that night because it was so fresh and frightening as it was unfolding. We listened to the news together over breakfast the next morning and he was the lead item. Salman’s writing a memoir of the fatwa now.”

I guess for his generation that was when they were forced to face up to the meaning of Islamofascism. “Yes, that was why we fell out with parts of the Left. Salman’s experience was chapter one and 9/11 was chapter two.

“We had already seen the difficulties of reconciling freedom of expression with inclusivity and pluralism. The Left, or at least the SWP, were aligning themselves with Islamism because they saw them as the shock troops of anti-Americanism.”

Rattling the cage of the unreconstructed Left does seem to have become a hobby of McEwan’s. When I meet him he has just stepped off a plane from Israel where he has been accepting the Jerusalem Prize, much to the annoyance of the pro-Palestinian Left in this country.

As it turned out, he wanted to use the platform to have a go at his hosts, the Israelis. “I’m not a very political person actually. I found myself standing with this speech burning a hole in my pocket, talking to the mayor who I know is quite a tough guy and Shimon Peres. I thought how did I get myself into this? Not looking forward to this at all.”

When you go to a place like Israel though, he adds, it does affect your writing. “There’s only one subject in Israel. It’s a place fatally lacking in small talk, and I mean that as a compliment. I re-read the thing I am working on on the plane last night and it left me cold. Suddenly it didn’t look as interesting.”

Can he say what it’s about? “It’s too fragile to talk about. I might talk it out of existence. But it’s historical. Set in the Seventies.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if, before he gets to work properly on that, he feels the urge to write about the Arab Spring. His fiction, after all, often inhabits the space where public events overlap with private lives. And he is gripped by the rolling news coverage at the moment, not least because part of his childhood was spent in Libya.

“My expertise on Libya is limited by the fact that I haven’t been there since 1960,” he says. “But what a brute. I always thought Gaddafi was a vicious, crazy person. That footage of him making his long, rambling speech as he stands by the ruins left from the American bombing, that’s my old primary school. That’s where I went to school from six to 11 and he’s made it his headquarters.”

It is understandable that he doesn’t like talking about a book that is in its embryonic stages, but what about books that are finished? In his preface to A Move Abroad (1983) he wrote about the sense of betrayal he felt towards his books when he talked about them on publicity tours, becoming “practised at a certain kind of wind storm of words, a self-protecting blather”.

Does he still resent talking about his books? “I don’t resent it at all and for the first few months after publication I am a sincere double glazing salesman. I’m engaged, but inevitably repetition dulls that. On the positive side it does let you let go of a book, somewhere among all those explanations lies a useful death.”

In the film A Ploughman’s Lunch, written by McEwan, there is a scene in which two characters at a poetry reading mock a member of the audience for asking the poet where he gets his ideas. I tell McEwan I remember him giving a reading in 1986 and the first question afterwards was… where do you get your ideas? He answered politely on that occasion, but does he feel vague contempt for such questions?

“No, I feel very protective of anyone who asks a stupid question. I can’t bear it when other people laugh at them. We were in Dublin about five years ago and a girl stood up and said ‘What’s it like to be you?’ Everyone laughed at her and she blushed. I said it’s a very good question for a novelist because what it’s like to be someone is at the heart of what we do. Actually I don’t remember this happening, but Annalena does and now the memory has been planted as if it is my own.”

He says that when you agree to do a book tour you enter an agreement. “You have to give yourself to it and it is a self-selected group. You are animated by the good will. The people who loathe you aren’t there.”

Speaking of which, there was a rather bitchy piece about him in the Evening Standard last year, about there being a McEwan backlash. “Yes I saw that.”

Was it motivated by jealousy, does he suppose? “I think they were getting people to say what were the books of the decade. So inevitably someone said the worst book was Atonement and then they found some other examples of people saying that online and ran them all together, very kindly. An example of the road rage you get on the internet. Do you ever read the comment threads under your articles on the web?”

“God no! Never go below.”

Zadie Smith, among others, has referred to a certain writing style as being McEwanesque. What does he take that to mean? “I suppose it once would have meant weird, psychotic violence and the macabre. What do you think it means?”

An accumulation of detail. A certain realism. A belief that anything has the potential to become interesting if you examine it closely enough.

And there’s often a random event that acts as a pivotal moment for the characters, and they have to live with its consequences.

“But doesn’t all fiction have that? If you inhabit your own mind you feel free to do anything. We know what we mean by Pinteresque and Kafkaesque but I don’t really know what McEwanesque means. Perhaps it just means I have a name ending in an open vowel sound.”

He heads off to make us both mugs of tea and when he comes back he is holding something he has just opened in the post. It is a card with a black-and-white photograph on it of a child pushing a pram. Beside the child is a man in African dress. “Your starter for 10. Who’s that?”

I examine it. “You? As a child in Libya?”

“Richard Dawkins. It’s him as a child in Kenya. It’s an invitation to his 70th birthday party. Such a strange picture.”

It occurs to me that the term McEwanesque might apply to his life as much as to his work. He seems to regard the world with a mixture of wry amusement and bird-like curiosity. He also seems to be a methodical man, deliberate and unhurried. Indeed he tells me, rather surprisingly, that he is a slow reader, 30 pages an hour.

One imagines he’s not much given to frivolity. In fact, I say, I have an image of him gliding from one Hampstead dinner party to another, all fine wine and cerebral conversation.

Does he ever slum it intellectually? Watch My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding on telly while eating a Big Mac? “Er, I don’t eat Big Macs. Where do I let my hair down? Walking in the country with friends is where I feel completely free. I’ve never had a great taste, as Martin and Hitch have, for seeking out low culture. Violent films and so on.”

Or trying out a brothel in the name of research? “Yes, but they did that a long time ago. I occasionally watch a football match on television, but I cannot bear the commercials. I watch The Wire but I suppose that is considered high culture. I can never knuckle down to reading all the way through The Sun, as Martin can. That for me would be such an effort.”

He stares unseeingly out of the window. “I like the picture you paint of my life of cerebral conversation and fine wine but it’s not quite like that. I do like to go to a bar and listen to bands play the blues. That is an intense pleasure for me. I like to be 12 feet from the band, not in a seat, near the bar, beer in hand.”

So that’s what the electric guitar is for, the one in the corner of this room? “Actually it was a 50th birthday present from my wife. I had every intention of learning how to play it but I never seem to have had the time.”

Ah yes, time. In his early novels, it was often presented as something elusive and protean, a McEwanesque conceit. As he gets older he seems to be more accepting of the idea that time is also linear, that it can “wind polish” your life, and that, for your friends as well as for yourself, it can, and must, run out.

The greatness of the Foo Fighters and the runaway success of astronomy with a Northern accent – it’s all part of a bigger picture, says Nigel Farndale

The man from Barnes has a lot to answer for. According to Home Office files, declassified last week, he fell asleep one night and woke up to find that, due to a rip in the fabric of the time-space continuum, he had lost an hour. The only explanation, he reckoned, was that he had been abducted by aliens. When the man from Barnes reported this to the MoD, they wrote back to explain that the clocks had gone forward that night. That was in 1998, though most of the newly declassified UFO “sightings” were in the 1970s – a busy time for intergalactic travel, it seems.

The shame of it is that the emotionally fragile people who make these claims give a bad name to those of us who are open to the possibility that, with an estimated 100 billion Earth-like planets in the universe, there may be other life out there. Ours cannot be the only “Goldilocks” planet with conditions that are “just right”.

The difference between us and them — the loons — is that we know that the likelihood of any aliens ever making contact with us is pretty much zero, thanks to the distances between galaxies being so unimaginably vast.

Besides, we have Prof Brian Cox on our side. With his telegenic looks, soft Northern vowels, and gift for making cosmology accessible to non-physicists, Cox is the man of the moment. His image is on mugs and T-shirts. And thanks to him, applications to study physics at university have soared in the past year, as have sales of telescopes (I bought one myself). His new series, Wonders of the Universe, starts on BBC Two tonight. I’ve seen a preview of it and it is beautiful and thought-provoking.

But it isn’t really his new series that’s preoccupying me, or his belief in aliens. It’s his age. Though he doesn’t look it, Brian Cox is 42. And the other night, as I was watching the Foo Fighters in concert at Wembley, I realised with surprise that the youthful-looking Dave Grohl, the band’s very cool, very talented and very hairy lead singer and guitarist, is also 42.

Though he started out as the drummer of Nirvana years ago, Grohl has only now, at 42, reached the peak of his powers. Only now has he become a true stadium-filling rock god. And his star can only wane from here. This time next year he will be 43, and over-familiarity with his music will be breeding contempt. The same will be true of Brian Cox. Not him again, we will think. Isn’t that smiley bloke ever off our screens?

So what is it about the age of 42? Well, as a number, it has great potency, and not only in fiction (according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything). In biology, geography, theology, history and, oh, everything else, it is all about 42. Mathematicians at Princeton believe that 42 provides the connection between prime numbers and quantum physics. Astronomers at Cambridge have found that 42 is the value of an essential scientific constant – one which determines the age of the universe. And guess what the ideal age for an astronaut is, according to Nasa?

But I suppose there might be a two- or three-year margin of error. When I interviewed Ian McEwan for today’s edition of Seven, he told me that his mother, in her old age, used to say that she wished she was 45 again, that being her prime. Things had gone downhill for her after that.

“And how old are you?” he asked me.

He produced the biggest album ever, befriending movie stars as well as presidents. At 77, Quincy Jones is in no danger of running out of stories.

After a few minutes in Quincy Jones’s engaging company I begin to see why his PR people are so jittery. The man has an easy charm and is a natural raconteur. But he is also a loose cannon. Over the next hour or so, I find myself nodding and laughing as he tells me of his passion for Nazi cinema, how he lost his virginity at 12 and how he experimented with every drug going.

In a career that spans six decades, Quincy Jones has worked with Michael Jackson, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Dizzie Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, and P Diddy, to name but a few. Most notably, he was the producer of choice for Frank Sinatra for years. Indeed, it was his arrangement of Fly Me to the Moon that became the first music played in space (Buzz Aldrin took a recording of it with him for the first moon landing).

At the age of 77, Q, as he is known to his friends, is still considered one of the leading producers in the world, with a record 79 Grammy nominations and 27 Grammy awards to his name. And he is still writing film scores, still conducting, still arranging. And still making records, his latest Q: Soul Bossa Nostra is released this month.

It features contemporary versions of songs from Jones’s extensive catalogue, with singers such as LL Cool J, Mary J Blige, Usher, Snoop Dogg and Amy Winehouse ‘paying tribute’ to the producer. ‘Each artist picked a song that resonated with them for different reasons,’ Jones says. ‘They all made them their own and knocked them out of the park.’

He can also still claim, 28 years after Jackson’s Thriller first went on sale, to have produced the most successful album of all time. Not only that, but the most successful single, too, with We Are the World. On that occasion he pinned up a notice in the studio that the assembled stars could not miss: ‘Check your egos at the door.’

Today, as he sits in a suite at the Dorchester, he’s not in bad shape for his age. A bit of a paunch maybe, but he dresses with the brio of a younger man, like an extra from a Seventies television show: safari suit, colourful scarf, orange shirt, dog tags, earrings. He has a thin ’tache shading his top lip and although he talks in a jazz musician patois, he is articulate and his recall is excellent.

Next to him is a box with one of the expensive Quincy Jones signature brand AKG headphones in it, strategically placed there by the PR from the manufacturers, Harman International Industries (who has insisted on sitting in on the interview, at the other end of the room and we won’t even know he’s there, honestly). You can understand why they would want his name associated with their product.

Jones tells me that he does actually use this brand in the studio, and has done so for years. But, amusingly, he also mentions a rival brand to me by mistake, and when he does I sense the PR on the other side of the room burying his head in his hands.

Before coming to London to launch the headphones, Jones has been in Paris and Berlin. Sounds like they’re working him hard, I say. ‘Yeah, but as long as there are hot ladies around I don’t mind. I was married for 36 years but now I’m free. I’ve done my duty. Seven children, six grandchildren, five mothers, three wives. My oldest grandson is 36. I might be a great grandfather soon.’

Blimey. What must Christmas be like? ‘The most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, man. One of my children just came over.’ He shows me a photograph of a young woman sitting on his knee. ‘Her mother is Nastassja Kinski. She’s 17. So sweet now. Smart, too.’

In a documentary a few years ago Jones’s children talked about how their father neglected them when they were younger. They also said they felt like surrogates to the famous performers in their father’s life. According to Jolie Jones, the eldest of his seven children: ‘Everything else was second, which wasn’t so right for us. But that’s how it was.’ When I remind him of this quote he says: ‘That might have been true one time, yeah, but not now, man. Like this little thing.’ He holds up the photograph again. ‘We’re friends. We tell each other bad jokes. She rubs my back for me.’

He had lunch yesterday with Stella McCartney and she reminded him of this daughter. ‘Stella has had a crush on me since she was little. So sweet!’ It has been a busy trip socially because he also met up with his old friend Sir Michael Caine. ‘I’ve known Michael since I did the music for The Italian Job. We’re exactly the same age, born the same hour. He said to me: “Q, God’s bowling in our alley.” We have a lot of friends in common, you see. And a lot of them have died recently. I’ve lost 174 friends in five years. That’s a lot of people, man.’

But is the death of a friend who is in old age easier to accept than that of someone middle-aged, like Michael Jackson? ‘No, not really. I’ve lost two brothers as well, from cancer. It’s never easier to accept just because they are older. I was in London when Michael died, which was hard for me. Not that I wanted to go to the funeral. I don’t go to them any more because I find them too depressing.’

The last one he went to, he says, was Marlon Brando’s in 2004. ‘I’d known Marlon since 1951. He gave my son acting lessons. Funniest s— you’ve ever heard. He was paying me back for getting his son a job with Michael Jackson. He gave my son advice on how to creep in the house when you are late back at 4am. You turn off the engine and push your car into the garage, then you take off your shoes so as your wife don’t hear you.’

He met most of his film-star friends while working on film scores. His approach to writing them, he says, was sometimes more calculating than instinctive. ‘Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release. Star Wars was all victorious consonance, what Spielberg and I called emotion lotion. With The Color Purple the music invades your soul. It was the first film I produced.’

And that was the film in which Oprah Winfrey, another of his old friends, got her first break. He was quite hands-on for that one, insisting that Spielberg be the director. He even managed to persuade Spielberg to recreate a scene from German cinema in which the rain symbolises tears.

‘I was a fan of Leni Riefenstahl, you see, one of the greatest black-and-white film-makers who ever lived. I had lunch with her before she died. She was Goebbels’s girlfriend, you know. Looked like Hedy Lamarr. Very beautiful. She told me she had 211 cameras for Triumph of the Will. I asked her why so many and she said: “Do you think I am going to say to Adolf, ‘Lets do another take’?”’

Riefenstahl also told him that the Third Reich was gathering pace at the same time Freud was doing his research into cocaine as anaesthesia, looking at how it shuts off the emotions and encourages you to be violent. ‘And she told me the whole Third Reich was on cocaine. That makes so much sense.’

Was he ever drawn into that world? ‘Damn right I was. Drugs in the world of the bebop musician? Are you kidding? Ray Charles was taking heroin in front of me when I was 13. I got tired of being left out so I would have a sniff, then two months later you are shooting up. That’s how you start. The body needs more and more. Ray was on heroin for 30 years. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis they were all stoned.

‘Marijuana was part of the culture. And a little toke now and then never hurt anyone. It enhances the senses. But as Bird himself said, if you can’t play it’s not going to help you.’ Does he still have a toke? ‘Sure man. Course.’ Any other drugs? ‘Back then I did, Benzedrine, and what are those things you pop?’

‘Amyl nitrate?’ He punches fists with me. ‘Yeah that’s it. You bin there, man. But I always had the will power to say that’s enough.’ After five days without sleep in the studio, presumably? ‘Tell me about it. For Thriller, you mean? But that was just smoking, man.’ And presumably Michael Jackson didn’t partake? ‘No way.’

When he was deprived of sleep like that for a week, how did he manage to think straight? Didn’t he feel he was going mad? ‘Yeah, but that’s where the creative stuff comes in, the unconscious mind. You do it because you have a deadline. You have to go five days and nights without sleep. The engineers who didn’t smoke couldn’t take it. They were being carried out on stretchers. It’s not the drugs that get the results though.’

When Jackson asked Jones to recommend a producer for his first solo album, Jones told him he would like to take a shot at it himself. The record company was ‘scared to death’ because ‘they said I was too jazzy’ but Off the Wall became a huge hit. They did Thriller after that, in two months. But the 1987 follow up, Bad, took 14 months too long in Jones’s view and the pair never worked on an album together again after that.

‘We did Thriller quickly and when you take too long, as we did with the next Michael Jackson album, you lose spontaneity. But I will always do one more take until you get it in the pocket, which is the right key and right tempo, the tempo God wants it in. That’s when you don’t notice anything standing out because everything is exactly where it should be in the arrangement, not too dense, not too airy. I learnt that from Basie when I was very young. It can be quite subjective though. I hear it in my head.’

If he was like Beethoven and went deaf could he still hear it? ‘Yes, because it’s all inside. Absolutely. If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture. You can almost see it; you don’t necessarily need to hear it to work out the orchestration. You’re hearing it inside.’

We talk about how Paul McCartney, another friend, composed Yesterday. He woke up with the tune fully formed in his head. ‘Tunes sometimes come to me like that, too, like Soul Bossa Nova [the 1962 track best known these days as the theme tune for Austin Powers]. Music is the only thing that engages the left and right brain simultaneously, it means the intellect is always tied to the emotion; the words are second to the melody, that is where the power of a song lies. Think of some of the great lyrics, they don’t mean s—: “Waiting round the bend, my Huckleberry friend”.

‘I’m a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from. Get out of the way of yourself. The conscious mind is so full of s—. You have to use the subconscious mind. Don’t become a victim of paralysis by analysis. I like to hit it, and just go with the gut. Do something that gives you goose bumps.’

Bet there were plenty of those with Sinatra. ‘There sure were.’ What was he like to work with? Intimidating? ‘It takes a lot of guts to tell Sinatra what to do, man. You better have your s— together because he takes no prisoners and if you ask him to jump without a net you better have got it right. There is so much trust involved. He would love you, or roll over you with a truck and then reverse.’

He holds his hand and taps one of the rings on it. ‘This ring he gave me 40 years ago and I’ve never taken it off. It’s his family crest from Sicily. We would do all sorts of crazy s— in Hawaii. He used to love to fight, though he couldn’t fight for s—.’ He acted fighting well enough in his films. ‘Couldn’t for real though. His spirit was willing but…’ He shrugs.

What did they fight over? ‘Anything. You might say the wrong thing. Didn’t take much. Depended on the mood he was in.’ Presumably he treated someone as robust as Sinatra differently to someone more fragile, such as Michael Jackson? ‘Yeah, Michael was a baby. One way in which I did treat the two the same was that I realised early on you don’t tell a superstar in public they are getting it wrong. You have that conversation one-to-one, in private. If you push them up against the wall in front of other people they will want to defend their reputation. As they should. They work for their success. They know what they are doing, most of the time.’

Like Michael Jackson, Jones was a child prodigy. Does he feel he missed out on a childhood? ‘I didn’t have a mother so I was out there from the age of 11 working, running a clothes-cleaning service. Working for a pimp.’ Sounds like he had to grow up quickly. How old was he when he lost his virginity? ‘I must have been 12. When I was 15 I was with a 35-year-old girl. She was accused of rape but I said that ain’t no goddam rape, 35 is when a woman reaches her sexual peak. Men reach it much younger.’

At this point the PR from Harman International Industries interrupts and asks Jones if he would like to reconsider his answers to the questions about drugs and losing his virginity. To his credit, Jones just laughs and says: ‘Oh, we just doing free-form here, man. Don’t worry about all that.’

It takes a lot to make Quincy Jones worried, it seems, a perspective that perhaps comes from the hardships of his formative years. His mother was a multilingual Boston University graduate who became a bank executive before succumbing to schizophrenia. ‘She was a brilliant lady, but back then when a black woman had a mental illness they didn’t give a s—. Now they could cure what she had with vitamin B. Back then they just took her away in a straitjacket. I was seven years old. It was pretty traumatic. My stepmother beat the s— out of me and my brother, so when I was 12 I fought back and knocked the hell out of her. But you can’t sit and whine about that s—.

‘The statute of limitation has expired on all childhood traumas. Get it fixed and get on with your life. Some people waste a lifetime blaming all their woes on their childhood.’

His father was a carpenter to the two most notorious gangsters in black history, the Jones boys. ‘Capone ran them out of town when he found how much money they were making from the numbers racket. Seeing dead bodies and machine guns, that is what I remember most from my childhood in the South Side of Chicago. Drive-by shootings. It was the biggest black ghetto in the worst depression. There was nothing but gangsters around us and I wanted to be one, too.’

So what happened? ‘Then I came across a piano when I was 10. We had broken into an armoury and I saw it sitting there in the dark. When I touched the keys every cell of my body said: “This is what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.” That day I stopped wanting to be a gangster and started wanting to be a musician. That’s why I can identify with all those rappers I’ve worked with.

‘One of my daughters was engaged to Tupac, you know. He died in her arms. She almost got murdered, too. I became very close to Tupac, after a few confrontations when we first met. Him and Snoop Dog. The trouble with a lot of the rap fans today is they sacrifice their intellect to be cool. Dumb is not cool. Smart is sexy.’

Jones moved from the piano to the tuba, then the saxophone and finally the trumpet. At 14, he formed a band with the 16-year-old Ray Charles, playing throughout Washington state. ‘Ray and I were friends until the day he died. We held each other in our arms when he was in the hospital.’ Then, at 15, Jones won a scholarship to a music college in Boston, and later in the Fifties he played and studied in Paris (where he met Picasso, whose studio was across the street).

His trumpet playing came to an end in 1974 when he suffered two brain aneurysms and was close to death. Did that experience change him? He points to two long scars on his forehead, the result of surgery. ‘This scar is from my operation. I’ve got a metal plate in my head. I was paralysed on my left side for a while and had to stop playing the trumpet. It changed my personality to the extent that it opened me up a lot, because before that I used to hold things in. I’m more on the surface emotionally now.’

After giving up the trumpet he concentrated on his conducting and arranging and became the first black man to be a senior record executive at a major label. ‘In the America I grew up in there was apartheid, but I went to Paris and it taught me there could be a balance between black and white. When Ray Charles and I were kids in Seattle we didn’t have the black role models that young black people have today, like P Diddy and Oprah and Barack.’

Did he ever imagine back then in Seattle that it would be possible for a black man to become president of the United States in his lifetime? ‘No, never. I remember sitting at home in my kitchen in March 2005 with Oprah and Michelle and Barack and even then we couldn’t imagine it ever happening. I told Michelle I was going with Hilary because I thought she had a real chance. I wanted to remain loyal to Hilary and Bill, who is a big music fan, but my heart was with Barack. At the Iowa primary when Barack won the nomination, he came to see me in my suite and we hugged.’

Not only a friend to the stars but to presidents too, and a role model to black Americans everywhere, though you’d never guess it from his unassuming manner. It is time for Jones to end his ‘free-form’ and fly back to his home in LA. And I am happy to report that when he says goodbye it is with another gentle fist punch rather than a handshake.

There is something about Alfred Molina’s body language today which suggests sheepishness. But what? The defensive way he draws in his shoulders, perhaps. Or the way he folds his arms as he grins. He’s a solidly built 6ft 3in, so these may be examples of a big man’s natural self-consciousness. And it might be that his look of slight vulnerability is more to do with his eyes, which are soft and dark, like those of a cow. Or his clothes. He is wearing white socks with jeans and what looks like one of those shirts you go bowling in. Perhaps this sartorial geekiness is what makes him look a little awkward.
On the other hand, if he is not entirely comfortable with the idea that he is here in London to plug The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an all-action family movie in which he co-stars with Nicolas Cage, that would be understandable. It is meant to be the blockbuster of the summer, not least because it cost $150 million to make and is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the most commercially successful filmmaker in Hollywood history. From Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop to the Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure (one of six previous collaborations with Cage) Bruckheimer has had the Midas touch, prompting the Washington Post to call him ‘the man with the golden gut’.
But The Sorcerer’s Apprentice opened in the States a few weeks ago to a ‘disappointing’ box office. And this follows another Bruckheimer ‘disappointment’, Prince of Persia, also starring Molina. So, I ask the 57-year-old actor, how does it feel to be part of Bruckheimer’s first losing streak? He’s given this one some thought. ‘The weekend The Sorcerer’s Apprentice opened in America it was number 3 at the box office,’ he says, leaning forward in his chair. ‘And Disney executives were quoted as saying they were “disappointed”. I thought, how can that be disappointing? It made 17 million dollars in its first weekend. It will carry on making money and by the end of the year the film will have paid for itself several times over. The whole accounting ethic is very confused.’
Fair enough. What about working with Nicolas Cage, then? As much a loon as his reputation allows? ‘I am aware of his reputation for eccentricity, but I don’t quite know where it comes from.’
Saying things like he won’t eat animals that don’t have ‘dignified sex’, perhaps? ‘I don’t know about that, but he did tell me he had a gluten allergy so he doesn’t eat wheat. He goes to great lengths to find bread made from corn or rice. He has a strict diet.’ Molina leans back in his chair now, hands behind his head, the awkward questions apparently out of the way. ‘I liked him. The Nicolas Cage I met and worked with was incredibly polite and very serious about the work. Very collaborative. He loves stories such as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Fascinated by Arthurian legend. A Merlinian buff. He was the engine of enthusiasm for the film. But yes, I’ve heard all the stories, too.’
Molina seems to be a tactful man generally. He is currently in Roger And Val Have Just Got In, a BBC2 sitcom in which he co-stars with Dawn French. It is shot without an audience, in real time, with each episode being the first 30 minutes of the evening, when the couple come home from their jobs — he is a botanist, she a domestic science teacher. During the filming French was in the middle of her separation from Lenny Henry, not that Molina noticed. ‘I had no idea about the split, that must have all been going on at the time but she didn’t bring it along. I read it in the papers along with everyone else. The series was great fun to work on. Just the two of us.’
Although television has always been something of a sideline for Molina, it wasn’t for his wife Jill Gascoine, who made her name with the 1980s series The Gentle Touch. They met in 1982 when they were working together at the Donmar in the musical Destry Rides Again and they married four years later. Though she is 72 now, 16 years older than him, the age gap has never been an issue for either of them, he says, though he can understand why people might be intrigued by it. They’re very happy together and their marriage has survived some tough times — Gascoigne has suffered severe depression, on and off, and kidney cancer (from which she made a full recovery). The couple have three children between them, she has two sons from an earlier marriage and he has a daughter from an earlier relationship. Tellingly, when I ask Molina why he hasn’t always excerised quality control in his choice of film roles, signing up for lowbrow blockbusters instead of the highbrow arthouse film with which he made his name, it is the children he makes reference to. ‘It’s put two of my kids through college.’
Could this be the real reason why Molina is looking sheepish? Here, after all, is a man who trained at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, began his career at the Royal Shakespeare Company and has been in some of the best arthouse movies ever made, from Stephen Frears’s 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears, in which he portrayed a menacing Kenneth Halliwell (Joe Orton’s lover and killer), to An Education in which he played the buttoned up father of Lynn Barber, whose memoir inspired the film. Barber has written that she found Molina’s Oscar-nominated performance ‘positively heart-rending’, which is quite an accolade, coming from her. On stage, meanwhile, Molina has won acclaim (as well as various Tony and Bafta nominations) for his performances in intelligent, powerful plays such as Red, about the life of the abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko. With his dark, beetling eyebrows, Molina does fierce intensity well. He can be a thoughtful and subtle actor. So what, apart from the children, is he doing it slumming it in all these blockbusters? Are they worthy of his talents? Does he find them artistically rewarding?
‘Well, Michael Caine once said that in order to sustain a high standard of living you have to be in a low standard of film. But actually the acting pleasure is the same in the two types of film. Different parts make different demands on you. A completely fictitious character gives you freedom to use your imagination, but when you are playing a character from recent history, then you have to be more careful about accuracy.’
His method, he explains, is to absorb as much information as he can about a subject then to throw it away ‘because the last thing the audience want is for you to show off your homework. Acting isn’t an intellectual exercise. It’s visceral.’
His portrayal of Rothko was a case in point. He became fascinated by the subject, learned how to prepare convases and even found himself empathising with the artist. ’His life was very well documented. There were loads of photographs of him because for a man who claimed to hate the commercialisation of art, he always posed for photographs. He was very aware of his image. He was, in a sense, always performing. Even his suicide was a sort of performance.’ But the thing Molina wanted to convey most was that Rothko always felt an outsider in New York. He was an immigrant from Russia. ‘His nose was up against the glass.’
Not unlike the young Alfred, or Alfredo as he was growing up the eldest child of immigrants in North West London. He was multilingual, because his father was a waiter from Spain, his mother a cleaner from Italy. His parents met in London while working at the same hotel. ‘My father arrived in England just before the outbreak of war,’ Molina says. ‘And he worked very hard to assimilate. He became a naturalised Britain after serving in the Pioneer Corps. Though both my parents left school at 15 they spoke four languages: English, Italian, Spanish and French. They spoke French when they wanted to be private, so I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. I’ve always considered French a romantic and mysterious language for that reason.’
But as hard as they tried to assimilate, his parents always felt like outsiders here. ‘I remember getting into an argument with my father,’ Molina says. ‘I said to him in quite a condescending way: “I was born here. I’m English. I feel English.” And he looked at me and laughed and said: “It doesn’t matter how English you feel, an Englishman will always remind you are not.” He was right. The English have the subtlest ways of reminding you you are not English.’ He adopts an upper class voice. ‘“Alfredo? That’s European isn’t it? How nice.” My father once cooked a meal for the friends of his boss. Traditional paella. And someone said to him: “So do you have this every day in your country? No wonder you chaps are always playing your castanets and looking happy.” Casual racial stereotypes…’ He shakes his head. ‘You know, I based the father in An Education, Lynn Barber’s father, on all the twats my father worked for.’
Alfred Molina dropped the ‘o’ from Alfredo soon after graduating and because he wasn’t ‘lens fodder’, as he puts it, he became a character actor, as oppose to a leading man, and has remained one ever since. ‘My agent told me to change Alfredo to Alfred, otherwise “You’ll be playing Greek waiters all your career.” He didn’t even bother to get my nationality right.’
Blimey. But I suppose this was the 1970s, the heyday, if that’s the right word, of racial stereotyping. I mean, he must have loved Fawlty Towers. ‘Yeah, I remember being called Manuel. That was the last great stereotype.’
But isn’t he now trading in stereotypes himself? He does an American accent very well, which is not surprising given that he has lived in Los Angeles for 12 years and has become a US citizen (because, as he puts it, over there they accept that everyone comes from somewhere else). But in this new movie he plays the English villain, a staple of Hollywood casting. And he has form in this, having played among others Dr Otto Octavius, the half-man, half-octopus villain in Spiderman 2. (That movie, by the way, cost $ 200m and grossed more than that in its first eight days of US release, breaking all records, so Molina knows the world of the blockbuster from both sides.)
So. Hollywood and English villains. What’s that all about? ‘It’s an honourable tradition and long may it continue. It even goes back to the silent era. So that couldn’t have been about the accent. But they were often English in the 50s. And when Alan Rickman went to Hollywood to do Die Hard I did think the standard had been passed on.’
Has he noticed an English backlash lately? ‘With Obama you mean? I haven’t been aware of it. Though I have noticed Americans emphasising the British in BP… Perhaps there is a future role for me as Tony Hayward.’
Well, a villain is a villain, is a villain. Molina might be a bit on the tall side though. And that reminds me of something I wanted to ask him. What’s it like being tall in Hollywood? I mean Tom Cruise is a more typical size for a film star, isn’t he? ‘Well, there’s Clint Eastwood and Tim Robbins and actually there is a younger generation of Hollywood actors who are all big strapping lads. I was doing some work with some students recently and I was average height among them. When I was a kid at school I was always the tallest. When I was 12 I was 5ft 10in, tall enough to be a policeman.’
Big feet? ‘Oh yeah, size 13. And by the time I was 17 I’d reached my height of 6ft 3in.’
How did being tall affect his personality, does he suppose? Did it make him placid? Did it mean he avoided fights because everyone backed off? ‘No, because I was a fat kid and I was physically uncoordinated. I was the kid who bumped into things, so I was a prime target at school. I couldn’t handle myself at all. I got picked on a lot, but now I get my revenge.’
How? ‘Because I live well. All the bullies have now disappeared in to obscurity. So fuck ‘em.’
It is an uncharacteristically aggressive comment for Molina, who seems mild mannered in person, and it makes me wonder whether he was an angry child. ‘Yes I was. Well, frustrated. Because I never stood up to them. I was a coward. It’s almost impossible to stand up to bullies unless you are prepared to be a bully yourself. It must have turned into anger somewhere and the anger must have got directed into acting. I know as an actor I’m good at rage.’
He sure is. His suppressed anger in Prick Up Your Ears was chilling, mainly because it was combined with a savage wit. ‘Yes I always get the feeling that whatever that period in my teenage years produced psychologically, I’m glad I was able to turn it into something positive through acting, so that it didn’t become a festering bitterness. It wasn’t some kind of impotence.’
One of the jibes at school, he now recalls, was that the Italians had been cowardly during the war, and he was half Italian. That stung, because he felt like a coward not standing up to them. He knew very early on that drama was his therapy and salvation. ‘I joined the drama club at 14 and very quickly I found I was living there emotionally.’
Yet he says he was clumsy and self-conscious because of his height; how did he square that with putting himself up on a stage to be stared at? ‘I think it’s why it happened. I was drawn to the idea of escaping by inhabiting other people. It was also a matter of getting the first punch in. If you are prepared to mock yourself first, it deflates the capacity of others to mock you. I knew I could do comedy and make people laugh. And I looked funny.’
In what way? ‘This is my natural nose.’ He points at it with his index finger, his thumb cocked ironically, like a pistol. ‘It’s never been broken. It was this way when I was born. And I knew I was funny and was a good mimic. I had lots of material because my parents were immigrants and they had strong accents. I could imitate them. I had ways of being funny and comic. And I knew what I was doing, I didn’t know quite what, but I knew drama and comedy deflated any bullying. I remember someone saying “You’re mad you are!” and I thought “Yeah but I’m going to make a living from this, from being mad. I knew I was going to turn it in to something worthwhile.’
Did his parents know he was having a hard time with the bullies? ‘I think they must have known because they got divorced when I was 12 and their situation was part of it. It wasn’t their fault but they must have been aware of it.’
I get a sense that he wishes his father had been more protective of him. When I ask whether he was also a big strapping man, Molina shakes his head. ‘My father was also tall, but thin, having had a duodenum ulcer that was cut out — he had a tiny stomach so he couldn’t eat a full meal.’ His mother died at 56 but his father lived to 81, so he saw some of his son’s success. ‘He saw Prick Up Your Ears,’ Molina says. ‘He was a bit confused by that one. I asked him if it was weird seeing me kiss a man on screen and he said: “You do what you have to do.” It was chosen as the opening film of the Barcelona Festival and because Barcelona had a vibrant gay community they came out on mass. Afterwards, at the party, two very camp gentleman from a gay magazine interviewed my father, who was back living in Barcelona at the time. He came over to me later that night and said: “Alfredo, I just been talking to this man and he say to me he think you are fabulous. What does that mean? This word ‘fabulous’?”
The accent is funny. He’s still doing it. Still making people laugh with his range of comedy voices, this time to charm an interviewer rather than a school bully. His other motivations for becoming an actor are intriguing. They are partly frivolous — he says that this way of life beats holding down a real job ‘any day of the week’ and that he would ‘rather be an unemployed actor than an employed anything else’. And they are partly serious. He reckons that people don’t become actors because they have something extra to offer but because they’ve ‘got something missing’. Hmm. And the whole notion of pretending to be someone else, he notes, has a great deal in common with the immigrant experience.
But there is also a materialistic side. He was raised in relative poverty. Now he is thought to earn around three million dollars a movie. What is it like being the star of a Hollywood blockbuster, I ask. How is he treated over there? Is it all stretch limos, sycophancy and chilled champagne? ‘It’s actually not like that, the big stars get treated incredibly well because there is such a huge investment in them, but most of the time on a big movie like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice the acting is only a small, eight-week chunk of a two-year project.’
A lot of the energy goes on the marketing strategies these days, he reckons. They are incredibly sophisticated now because there is so much money involved. ‘You have to make it something the adults will enjoy as well as the children. It’s a very interesting formula that Jerry Bruckheimer has developed because there has to be action and adventure in his movies, but also comedy. He really understands how family entertainment works. He also really understands television. I mean look at CSI. That’s a huge worldwide franchise. You get CSI Shanghai. CSI Deli. CSI Bournemouth, probably.’
And in this connection it should perhaps be added that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice isn’t all that bad. I took my children to the preview and they loved it: laughed in all the right places; sat on the edges of their seats. But I suppose the problem is that the success of a film such as this is measured purely in revenue terms rather than artistic. ‘Yes,’ Molina says, nodding earnestly. ‘That’s an odd thing with the reviews. The critics are almost superfluous to the result of the film and how it works with the audience. These films are almost critic proof, or at least the critics don’t have the same impact. It is not like an arthouse movie.’
They’re working him hard for this movie, I note. Is it all hands to the pump? ‘It’s all in the contract these days — interviews, international premieres, because there’s so much riding on it. When I started out in this business, the publicity side of things was always discretionary. You’d get a casual call asking if you fancy doing a couple of interviews on Wednesday.’ He grins. ‘But hey, I’m not complaining. This is a great life.’
And acting did mean he got to meet the love of his life. Apart from his wife, the other loves of his life are his daughter Rachel (from an early relationship) and her two young children, his grandchildren. One of them is named Alfred, ‘but he’s Alfie and I’m Fred, to avoid confusion’. Pointedly, he is not Alfredo. That ship has sailed.