Stephen Fry

Do you prefer writing or performing? You do both so well.

I sort of prefer the one I'm not doing. That's not as arched as it might sound really. It's that when you're writing you do envy actors the fact that they're bossed about … Then when you're acting you envy writers the freedom.

What happens when your fans accuse you of spreading yourself too thin? What do you say?

No, I mean one is obviously sorry if people think that, but in the end really the only thing one can do is do what one believes in. … I have no sense of future at all. I know what I'm going to do next week, let alone in two years' time.

Has all that talking and writing about your life in a revelatory way made you feel better?

Gosh, it's so hard to tell, isn't it? Because I can't have a parallel life in which I haven't spoken to compare it with. But it seems to be that I have this desire to bring out all the source, as you put it. I can't understand it. I think it may have started as a fear of being found out. So I thought I might as well be open about everything to do with myself so that no one could discover it. And if you're in the public eye and you have certain problems or certain issues, I think it's important to try and share and help, if that isn't too holier than thou. I I've always had this. image of myself when I'm about fourteen or fifteen as a rather miserable, lonely figure. And I I think I still write to that character. Um and I want to tell them that it's going to be okay. And maybe it's guilt at my own luck.

You have many passions including cars, darts, Norwich Football Club and cricket. What's the common theme?

Well, kind of theatre. With cars, it was actually a particular passion in the eighties when I'd written the book, as it's called, of a musical, rewritten it, Me and My Girl. And it it was a hit. It was a hit in the West End, it was a hit on Broadway and around the world, and I suddenly found myself in possession of a rather large amount of cash. And I think having, as you mentioned in your introduction, been to prison for credit card fraud, I suddenly realised that now I was a real legitimate person and could spend my own money, and I overdid it. It was just sort of nuts.

You've written that you were always in trouble, never stable, never settled or secure. But you had a very loving mother – why do you think that was?

Um in my earlyish teenage I um I was sent to a psychiatrist, and he was a little bit frustrated that my parents weren't in the diplomatic corps or in the army, because uh Everything that I did and all my troubles s seemed to fit in a syndrome of someone who had absent parents or moved a lot and didn't have a settled and secure nest. But I did. But it was in the country, deep, deep in the country, as Sidney Smith, the great Sidney Smith said, simply miles from the nearest Lemmon. And it was a bit of a blow for me because I had I was a sort of male Madame Bovary. I had fantastic dreams of myself being a huge success, both sort of romantically and striking a figure in the world. And you can't do that in the middle of the lanes of Norfolk.

Why do you so often denigrate your own intellectual capacity?

Well, I there's a part of me that feels a bit like Salieri, you know, in the um Amadeus, the Peter Schaffer play, that that I have just enough talent to recognise real talent in others, but I don't have quite what they have. I'm not a real intellectual. I'm not, you know, I'm not like some of the academic friends I have, and I'm not an artist, and I really respect artists. I can remember when I used to go to the Groucho Club a lot, and in the very early days this figure from Leeds would appear and we'd fall into conversations, and I was absolutely fascinated by his self-confidence, his absolute certainty about everything. And it was Damien Hurst. And I thought he just has some strange gift in his head that allows him to look at one thing and one thing only and decide upon it and think about it hard and not get distracted by what people think. And I care so much about what people think about me. You still do? I think I do. I think less, perhaps, than I used to. But you can't be an artist if you care about what people think. But you can be an entertainer. And I think that's probably what I was put on this earth to be, to entertain, to please, if you like.

Is there a personal cost to you in putting all these truths about your mental health out there?

I think there is, and I hadn't realized that there was. For a start, I'm obviously not a doctor or a sort of therapist or any kind of professional, but I can become a sort of professional in terms of a go-to person and and I actually find that a bit destructive to myself because it means I'm I'm never free of thinking about my mental health or other people's mental health.

If you had the choice to live without your bipolar condition, what choice would you make?

Interesting. I wouldn't want anyone to underestimate the seriousness of a condition like that. It can shorten lives, sometimes traumatically and terribly. It can be a terrible effect on families and people around you. But it's so hard to separate it from oneself. W. H. Orden, the poet, perhaps put it best. He said, Don't get rid of my devils, because my angels will go too.