The con man and Ferry's ex

The official announcement from Lucy Helmore was "we have drifted apart" when she and her pop star husband of 20 years, Bryan Ferry, separated in August last year. A nanosecond or two later, Ferry, 57, had floated into the arms of a 21-year-old dancer and it was all as plain as a toot from a tugboat what was really going on.

Except it wasn't. The couple's divorce came through last week on the grounds of her adultery, and while Ferry has been seeking solace in youth, Lucy, a 42-year-old former model, has been hanging out with the louche. And they don't get more louche than Duncan Roy.

Having recently been linked to Robin Birley, the Old Etonian son of Annabel's owner Mark Birley, Helmore popped up at a Tatler magazine drinks party last week arm in arm with Roy, who said they had been seeing each other for several weeks but that it was all early days.

Roy has been called many things in his life, and not all of them flattering. On the positive side, he is an awardwinning film director, writer and producer, the plaudits, including a Bafta nomination earlier this year, coming for his autobiographical AKA.

If it stopped there, he would be delighted. But it doesn't. You have to add in imposter, criminal, cocaine addict, alcoholic, jailbird and, strangest of all given his new relationship, homosexual, just to get a flavour of what he has been up to in the 42 years of life to date.

He is loath to talk about Lucy and says he is flabbergasted by the amount of interest their friendship has caused. But speaking exclusively to the Standard yesterday he said: "Obviously I am incredibly fond of her, she is an extraordinary woman, but how can she expect to have a relationship with anybody if this is the kind of palaver that anybody who gets involved with her goes through?" Although he claims to be dating her, there are certainly grounds for thinking this might not go all the way to the altar.

The palaver is as much about who Duncan Roy is as who Lucy Helmore may be dating. Roy has been described in print as "a snob, a bully, psychotic, psychopathic, dangerous, a liar, tenacious, paranoid and isolated" as well as "disruptive", "amoral", "a bully" and "a ratbag".

Occasionally the word "talented" seeps in. Talking to him, he seems insecure, open and charming and, when it comes to the writer of some of those adjectives, extremely hostile.

His life hasn't been ordinary. His mother was a cleaner, housekeeper to Lord Brocket, he says, and was never married to his father. Brought up by his mother and his stepfather in Whitstable, Kent, Roy left his school at the age of 16 and headed for London.

He obtained a job at Yves St Laurent's London franchise on Bond Street, run by an eccentric aristocrat called Lady Rendlesham. He didn't last long - Lady Rendlesham sacked him after he had been sick at a party - but he lasted long enough to know what he wanted.

He says: "You come from nothing, a two-bedroom house in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly you are at Eaton Square and there are hugely expensive and beautiful things around you and you think, 'God almighty, I wouldn't mind a bit of this.' But you know no matter how hard you work, you won't get it, you are never going to live in Chatsworth, so you may as well inveigle your way in and take the trappings because that's the nearest you are going to get to it."

Sacked from Yves St Laurent, Roy headed for Paris and promptly reinvented himself. Gone was the cleaner's son from Whitstable and in his place, as if scripted by a modernday Oscar Wilde, was Lord Anthony, Lady Rendlesham's tall, dark-haired, handsome, illegitimate and gay son, who effortlessly entered the upper echelons of London society abroad, mixing with the likes of Sabrina Guinness and Georgiana Boothby.

Anyone who knew the Rendleshams would have known that Lady Rendlesham had only one son, the Hon Charles Thellusson, and that a title such as "Lord Anthony" was obviously completely bogus.

Even so, he got a job as a Vogue stylist and became the lover of Fred Hughes, a friend of Andy Warhol, and hung out with the late John Jermyn, the gay, cocaineloving Marquess of Bristol.

Roy has said: "As Anthony Rendlesham, I didn't have to clutter my head with all the stories of my family, the terrible times. I could be clean, simple, grand. I was everything I wanted to be. Don't you see how gorgeous it was? It was so much better than the life I'd had before."

He has also said it was one of the worst times of his life. There is very little that is straightforward about Roy.

Ahead of exposure in Paris he returned to London, still before his 20th birthday, and in an extraordinary role reversal people refused to believe he was Duncan Roy. Some thought he was Anthony Rendlesham pretending to be Duncan Roy, and in the captions for his 21st birthday party Harpers & Queen wrote: "Duncan Roy aka Anthony Rendlesham."

Roy's sham life ended in 1983. He had been running up debts on credit cards, £10,000 in all, and was arrested on charges of criminal deception and sent to prison. He regards himself as a victim of the Establishment. He says: "Quite frankly the reason I went to prison, the reason I went to court rather than just having to pay back the money, was that I was made an example of.

"Had I not been so young, I would have fought it. I got this posh barrister, assigned to me by the legal aid people, who just said: 'Plead guilty and you'll probably get off.' Actually I was given 15 months inside. How fair is that? This was not about me running up a huge bill on my credit card, it was about me being on a holiday with Georgiana Boothby and her parents, Sir John and Lady Russell, who were great friends of the Prince of Wales."

Later on in our conversation, which has much of the language of the recovering addict, he says he must not blame anyone but himself.

He served four months in Brixton Prison and six in Wormwood Scrubs. It is not something he wishes to dine out on. He says: "How the hell do you get on [with your life]? I know I made extraordinarily bad choices when I was 16, but I mean I didn't kill anyone - I just pretended to be a lord. I am really sick of flagellating myself over something I did 20 years ago."

He went from prison to playwright, via a council flat in Woolwich which he says was the "bottom of the rung", and into film school, thanks to a rich, male benefactor who Roy says paid the bills but was not a lover.

It seems, though, that the benefactor was an alcoholic and Roy became one, too, adding, he says, "a nasty little cocaine habit" along the way.

"I don't know if you know anything about coke psychosis," he says. "But I was getting madder and madder, and more and more isolated, and more and more unhappy, and I really thought if I didn't die of a heart attack I would end up killing myself."

Roy says he has been clean now for five-and-a-half years and is inclined in his friendships towards fellow addicts. In 1993, Lucy Helmore spent nine weeks in the Priory being treated for drink and drug addiction. What is puzzling about their relationship is that, from all knowledge of his past, Roy seems clearly to be homosexual. He addresses the subject at length, the gist of which is that most sexuality is ambiguous.

He adds: "I am not actually very sexual at all. I get involved with people. I have a strange relationship with sexuality and labelling. From the very beginning I found men attractive but I have also had quite a long relationship with a woman.

"We don't have words to describe people who are more fluid about their sexuality. It is a lot easier to be in a relationship with a woman, and people have got to accept the fact that no matter where I might have laid my hat in the past I am certainly investigating other things."

His next film work will be in America, banished he insists by an unforgiving British attitude. He says: "People are still quite suspicious of me here whereas in America reinvention is part of the culture. They are just quite eager to capitalise on my talent as they see it. You can't build yourself up here at all in any kind of way without being perceived as an arrogant wanker."

He accepts that if his relationship with Helmore proceeds, his past will be remembered and brought up and dissected. He says it is just something he has to live with: "Yes I did lie, yes I did steal and yes I did do terrible things but, you know what, today I am going to try and be a better person and do the right thing. And I might fail but I am going to f***ing well try."