Fry hits the good time

Here is a story about Stephen Fry: some years ago, on a dark, wintry night, a friend of mine invented a game with Stephen Fry. They were both involved in the television dramatisation of Cold Comfort Farm and, to keep themselves amused, they decided to do a music quiz. "It was incredible," says my piano-playing friend. "I'd only played one chord from the Dance of the Adolescents from The Rite of Spring and Fry got it. I then tried something harder, some Webern. Again, he got it immediately. The man was astounding. His knowledge is amazing. And he gave me the best line of coke I've ever had."

Well, that's Stephen Fry for you. The man's an archetypal polymath. He's an actor, a writer, a comic - he has just turned down Angus Deayton's old job on Have I Got News For You - a soon-to-be director, a neurotic, a self-confessed (former) drug user (he says he only ever used it "recreationally" and hasn't indulged for a while), a celibate for years (now living happily with his male partner), and an obsessive internet user.

When he walked out of his (former) friend Simon Gray's play Cell Mates in 1999, thus reducing the audience numbers to nearly nothing and forcing the production to close, he claims to have been saved by his computer.

Apparently he received so many messages of concern and good will that he decided to contact his father, Alan, an electronic inventor, and come back home from Bruges, where he was holing out.

"People seemed genuinely worried about me," he says, looking surprised (which has to be a put-on. Of course, people were worried about him. He walked out of a show and ended up in Belgium). But what about the disgruntled Simon Gray? Are they still friends?

"There was a writ involved somewhere," says Fry, rather vaguely. Apparently, the producer, Duncan Weldon, lodged a £500,000 writ against him. "And I haven't seen Simon since. But you never know." He looks rather sanguine for a minute.

"I think that may be why one needs to put the word 'former' against things sometimes. You never know how things will go. You never know about anything really, do you?" he says. "I mean, Annette Bening called me up a while back ..." The thought of Annette Bening calling up Stephen Fry is almost beyond comprehension.

"Goodness. Did I say Annette Bening? No. You have misheard. Alan Bennett. It was Alan Bennett who called me and said [here he puts on a masterful Bennett accent], 'I've just come across something most unusual, Stephen.' And I say to Alan [Fry is now all round-faced and actorly] 'What have you heard, Alan?' 'I've heard that before JFK Jr went to Hyannis Port he asked someone what he should take for holiday reading and that person recommended a book by you!' 'No, really? [round-faced innocence again]. 'Exactly right, Stephen my man. Apparently in that doomed plane was JFK Jr, his wife, sister-in-law and your book!'

Stephen Fry pauses for effect and leans forward. "It took me a while to see it but then it came to me: my book is lying under the sea with the remains of JFK Jr. Isn't that unbelievable? Isn't that historic?" And Stephen Fry looks terribly pleased and really rather happy.

What would Stephen Fry go down in history as being? He's had such a chequered past, it's almost impossible to know what defines him - the tortured-soul part of his life when he felt, as he says in his autobiography Moab is My Washpot, "that he should be someone else but wasn't", or the litany of work he has been involved in - Jeeves, Wilde, Fry and Laurie, Blackadder, all so entertaining?

"Yes, well that's the conundrum, isn't it?" says Fry with delight, while slurping down the froth of a particularly stiff cappuccino. He was, he says, an absolutely hopeless adolescent.

"Maybe not hopeless," he adds after a short pause, "maybe more rebellious. Brilliant yet destructive. I get bored very easily with myself. I do bad and naughty things when I get bored, but that doesn't happen now because I'm in a relationship and I am happy there."

Ah, the relationship. For a while, no one thought Stephen Fry could be in love with anybody, particularly himself. "No, I never thought I'd be there," he says. "I really couldn't deal with any of it. But here I am, aged 45, quite happily incarcerated with another."

The "another" is Daniel Cohen, 33, and they have been together for more than six years. Fry doesn't like to talk about Cohen by name. He refers to him, with some bemusement, as "my partner", as in, "my partner's an excellent cook" and "I have to go soon as I am meeting my partner for lunch." When pushed he says, "I am very happy in a way I did not expect. I thought relationships were for other people, but not for me."

Here are a few examples of "those things" he used to do when he "got bored": he continually ran away from school and stole credit cards. He was expelled from three schools. His father and family doctor put him in a psychiatric ward, where he was diagnosed as a manic depressive, a diagnosis he says he "hated for its inaccuracy".

He was an obsessive thief and ended up in jail for a short spell for fraud. When he was 16 he tried to commit suicide. He was described as a "kleptomaniac" and "a liar" (now the title of one of his books, The Liar).

His tutor at Cambridge said he was a show-off, but didn't know whether this was through conceit or insecurity. He has always been described as prodigiously bright. It is what he is known for, and perhaps it is this, his obvious genius, that lets him get away with things and be forgiven by those him who indulge him.

There is little point in trying to get to the bottom of him. Many have tried. Most have failed. Stephen Fry is not interested in people getting to the bottom of him and, anyway, he is surrounded by people who feel fiercely protective of him. His sister, Jo Cracknell, has been his agent ever since Fry went from being a bit-part star of the Cambridge footlights with the Branagh/Thompson set at university to his shows with long-term friend and collaborator Hugh Laurie.

"Nothing has been happening in Stephen's life recently," Fry's sister tells me when I telephone her to get a fuller picture of the man. "Honestly he's very, very happy. There's not much more to say."

His Cambridge friends - Laurie, Thompson et al - obviously love him deeply and rarely talk about him, let alone say anything remotely contentious. Even Rik Mayall, his co-star in Cell Mates who went on to try and salvage the show single-handedly but failed, has performed with Fry since. He seems to have forgiven him. "Don't try to analyse him," his sister warns. "It annoys him." Interestingly, Deborah Orr from The Independent once did an interview where she admitted how attractive she found Fry even though she knew he was gay. Apparently, Fry loved this interview. "He did," his sister tells me, "he really liked it." Stephen Fry as a sex object. Who'd have thought it?

Yet somehow this idea becomes less odd when you spend some time in Fry's company, for he is a gentle giant of a man. He is so huge that he seems to take up the entire room. In his big olive sweater and cords and lovely suede grandfather shoes he seems remarkably safe and reassuring.

He smells of comforting things like sandalwood and autumn leaves and comes across as being protective, avuncular and wise. And because of his weighty 6ft 5in frame, you assume he is one of those fat and happy sorts who like to drink port and sit by evening fires and beam at people.

So it is a surprise, even though aware of his frailer side, when he comes out with such things as, "I never thought I'd be someone who would advocate therapy, but I went to one once and I feel it rather worked."

I imagine that it would be him perhaps, with his all-knowing air, who would end up being the confessor, but no. "I don't think people necessarily confide in me," he says. "People protect me. Many people try to protect me, probably for my own good, probably in the past because I've been so mentally frail, but I don't believe I need that protection now; I find it touching but unnecessary."

He loves writing, he says. He'd like to be thought of as a writer almost more than an actor. He likes to get up early to work. "I start at around 5am or 6am and I write a lot very fast, thousands of words, and when it's all in flow I get up earlier and earlier - I might get up at 1am or 2am. I like it. Nobody else is around and I see the dawn and the animals and the night is not quiet at all really. Lots of things go on and I find it a rather creative time."

He writes in his country house in Norfolk but lives in London. Despite the country-gent air and a burgeoning friendship with Prince Charles (they first met when he was asked to perform for Charles's 50th birthday party), he is actually pretty urban.

He used to have an apartment in New York. "I loved being in New York," he says. "I used to find it very stimulating, so I bought an apartment in this amazing building. People like Madonna get turned down for these places because no one wants the publicity. It was [author] Jay McInerney's place."

Of course, Fry does know everyone, even in New York. "And he said to me: 'Don't tell them you're on television. Tell them you're a writer.' So we had a meeting and I spent all this time trying to be patrician and quiet and authorial and then they told me that, yes, they approved and as it finished one of the men turned to me and said, 'I've got all your back videos of Jeeves and Wooster.' Oh well. 'I'm exposed as a liar,' I thought."

He isn't a liar really, though. He's just secretive and so he tells stories because they are lovely and funny and cleverly unrevealing. He loves wine and once split £860 on a 1955 Petrus with Julian Barnes. He drives a London taxi. He says no to some things and yes to others, seemingly on a whim.

He doesn't get involved with a tremendous amounts of charity work (generally he raises money for the Terrence Higgins Trust) but this year, for the second time around, he will be one of the public faces of a charity called StreetSmart. Someone he knew, William Sieghart, asked him to do it. It involves diners voluntarily adding an extra pound on their bill which then goes to help the homeless.

He's supposed to talk about it to everyone, he says, but he keeps forgetting. Yet he also says he often gets "swept up in things - feelings, emotions. I used to get such strong feelings that they were almost uncontrollable. I don't now."

There has always, however, been the implication that the Cell Mates thing was because Fry hates failure and the reviews were not good. "I do hate facing failure," he says, "but it wasn't that. You know when I said the computer saved me? It did, really. I love computers. They have revolutionised my life. I get a new one every month or so."

And he's really putting his head on the block now. He's directing a film of Waugh's Vile Bodies. "It's not going to be called that," he says, "because the Americans won't go for that title. It's called Bright Young Things at the moment. Very different. No hint of that scary vileness." He's written the screen adaptation and is waiting for everything to fall into place after the demise of Channel Four Films, which was to have funded it.

"I've never directed anything before," he says, "but this will be good." What if he freaks again and can't cope? "Oh no, that won't happen. I'm a former freaker-out-er you see? But never say never."

StreetSmart will be running throughout this month and next. To find out more, visit www.streetsmart.org.uk