Simon Fanshawe

You can see why in 1990 Aaron Spelling cast a 21 year old Jason Priestley as a teen idol in the TV soap (sorry, youth-oriented drama series) Beverley Hills 90210. He’s stocky in an athletic kind of way, looks usefully younger than his actual years, is very easy going and not a little handsome and clean cut in a straight forward boy-next-door kind of way. But what marks him out physically are extraordinary and noticeably beautiful eyes that are piercing light blue from a distance yet grey/green close up. He was also not just young, rich cheesecake in the series. He was really rather good, winning a Golden Globe nomination in 1992.

This month he is making his London stage debut in a play called Side Man, co-starring with Edie Falco from The Sopranos, and he is clearly having fun. He certainly laughs a lot, occasionally clicking his fingers with enjoyment or clapping slowly and rocking back in the way that American boys do. Early in the morning in a rehearsal room, the eyes are still sparkling but he looks like he’s suffering a bit from the night before. He was apologetically very late and had that fresh but not smooth enough shave – too much of a rash on the lower neck – that betrayed a good night out with too little sleep. And on being asked about fame and its accompaniments, he went off on an amusing mini-rant about growing up in full view of a nation’s media.

“These gossip columnists call to check what happened if someone saw me changing a tyre on the side of the road, but they don’t call and check when they are going to write that I was abducted by space aliens”. His voice rises in semi-outrage. Which is somewhat understandable, when you’ve spent your twenties playing the concerned one with the pin-up good looks on a worldwide hit TV series that used to make the hearts of teenage girls and gay men tremble before boy bands came along. Priestley has no soft spot for the professional gossipmongers of the American press. “In the 30’s and 40’s they used to be called snitches, stoolies..”, and very deliberately this last in the list, “..rats.”

Once when driving in his car he heard a DJ on the radio interrupt a record and solemnly announce that “Vancouver native Jason Priestley died yesterday in Montreal from a drug overdose.” He had to get out and phone his mum, who had already had several calls from the neighbours. Currently on the Internet the rumours are about cocaine and drunk driving, the latter as a result of a car accident he had in LA in December.

However in London he is well away from the Beverley Hills soap, which he left in 1998, only remaining on the team as an Executive Producer and directing the occasional episode. Side Man, an autobiographical play by Warren Leight, deservingly won the 1999 Tony Award for Best Play on Broadway, where Priestley’s role was played successively by Christian Slater, Andrew McCarthy and Scott Wolf. It is an exegetically American piece about jazz men through the 50’s to the 80’s, as Elvis, pop music and their own personal addictions drove them off the main musical highway into raddled obsolescence.

Priestley plays the central character, Clifford the son of one of them, who narrates the stories of the men, and the tale of his parents’ relationship, through the bars, the smoke, the alcoholism of his mother and the emotional blindness of his trumpet playing father, both of whom he has really looked after since he was ten. “I used to wonder”, he says touchingly at the very end, “how (my father) could sense everything while he was blowing and almost nothing when he wasn’t.”

“I play Clifford at thirty, twenty one and ten years old” says Priestley, “and he has finally got to a part in his life when he can say to his parents ‘Hey guys, I can’t look after you any more. I have to go and do some things for me. I’ve been living for you for the last twenty years.” And with American writing like this you accept that the play is a bigger story than just about the individuals. What in British work is often either didactic or simply grittily prosaic, is rendered richly metaphorical when filtered through say Tenessee William’s Deep South or Arthur Miller’s East Coast. Movies somehow make it easier to treat American stories as a series of bigger myths. Warren Leight tells a story of a generation of Americans who lived, and in these guys’ particular case played, for themselves. Not for fame or money. Or celebrity. It’s about a generational change in America, mostly brought about by television.

So is it too crass to ask Priestley – for so much of his life part of the celebrity food chain – whether moving into a serious piece of acting about a world like this is also a transition for him. Does it have echoes of his own particular journey at the moment? He laughs reassuringly, thinking about it. “No it’s not crass at all. But actually it wasn’t something that entered into my conscious decision making to come to London. I was much more concerned with being here with a bunch of great actors. Acting’s like tennis. It raises your game to be playing with really talented people.”

For a while now Priestley has been on a different tack from what we agree to call ‘TV Zipcode land’. All actors rightly fear typecasting. And soap actors fear it most of all. “Yeah. It can be very scary stepping out of your safety box. Here I don’t now what the London critics will say. I don’t even know if anyone will buy any tickets.” There is a sense of ‘can the soap star actually act?’ And at one stage his nerves get the better of him and he frankly overreacts to one paper that, after paying him a series of compliments on his previous roles, wondered out loud last week whether he will manage ‘not to be totally outclassed by Edie Falco’. “Look, she’s great,” says Priestley with genuine admiration for her but continuing with heavy sarcasm for the writer, “but this lovely individual hadn’t even seen the play. Exactly what did I do, for him not to like me that much?” Nothing, one suspects, except being in a hit global TV series where critics like that think people can’t act. Oh and probably be less good looking.

So Priestley is trying, with some success, to get away from Brandon Walsh the one character he played for eight years in 90210 – “and who didn’t develop that much”. He made his first bound for freedom with a small part (Billy Beckinridge) in Tombstone, Kurt Russell’s version of the Wyatt Earp story in 1993. But he made the bravest dash for the world outside soaps by co-starring with John Hurt in Love and Death on Long Island in 1997, an averagely good script lifted by the chemistry between the two of them. As he reported that he and Hurt had agreed at dinner the night before, “Love and Death does seem to have had an amazing life beyond the cinema. People really remember it and respond to it.” Hurt magnificently reprised his stock- in-trade dignified sadness of the sexual outsider that first dazzled the world when he made Quentin Crisp into the movie star he deserved to be. He played a middle aged British author obsessed with a teen soap star, Ronnie Bostock. It was an unrequited love story told with well-defined poignancy. And Priestley earned audience and critical plaudits by playing the pin-up and “making fun of the situation I had been unwittingly thrust into” he says in a rather odd yet typical description of his 90210 career.

Perhaps because he has been an actor since the age of four when he started in Canada, Priestley is keen to under play his fame. “It took me fifteen years to become an overnight success” he says a little defensively. “I come from a very normal place, you know, where people have normal jobs. I never wanted fame. I’m not from LA!” And then he does the ‘I’m-just-a-working-actor-and-I-just-want-to-do-interesting-work’ speech. But later on talking about the moment when they realised quite what a hit they had on their hands with Beverley Hills he says quite genuinely, in a slightly puzzled voice “I never really travelled the country making appearances in shopping malls. It scared me, made me feel weird inside, almost an out of body experience. It was strange… strange. I can’t really explain it.” And every time one of the other actors from Side Man came into the room to make tea or coffee, he stopped talking about himself or answering questions and chatted to them. He seemed to be deflecting the attention, a little embarrassed by it in front of them.

It’s safe to say that Priestley, despite the matinee status, the professional car racing, the fact that he has spent much of his early life being chased down the street by “mobs, that’s what they become”, he is a pretty regular kind of guy, keen to make it as an actor, rather than continue life constantly being voted one of “The world’s ten sexiest bachelors” or People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People”. And if he can pull it off, Side Man is a pretty good vehicle with which to achieve it. As long as Edie doesn’t act him off the stage, that is.

The Goodies were pretty stupid. So was Monty Python, which preceded them onto the screen by almost exactly a year. It was, as Graham Chapman used to remind us when cutting short Python sketches, “all getting far too silly!” “An agency of three blokes who do anything, anytime” was the Goodies’ pitch to the Head of TV comedy at the BBC. And for a whole decade, through 77 shows from November 1970 the BBC paid them to fool about with animated film, silly tricks, daft songs and a dose of satire all built around three characters, loosely based on themselves. Tim Brooke Taylor was a patriotic coward. Not so much a cowardly lion, I suggest to him now, as a cowardly mouse. “Yes” he says, “I’ve always admired cowards. They want to live.” He wore a union jack waistcoat and for dramatic purposes had to play the right-winger. “It’s not me to be honest. We’re all left of centre. But someone had to do it.”

He is possessed of a soft face, slightly pink skin and a tongue far more barbed than one might imagine. Many years ago I interviewed him with the rest of the I Am Sorry I Haven’t A Clue team late at night in front of a live audience. Someone stood up and asked them to say who was the worst person any of them had ever worked with. Niceties were passed round about people in show business for a minute or two with much faux innocent scratching of the head in the interests of politeness until Brooke-Taylor, having just appeared in a national tour of The Philanthropist with a very famous actor, spat out his name with deeply heart-felt venom. “X is a complete c**t”. The roof lifted of the building as people laughed uncontrollably with shock and delight.

Graeme Garden on the other hand is a quieter, more restrained type. He’s watchful. He’s playing his cards close to his chest. It takes me quite a while to find out, for instance that his son John ‘JJ’ Garden is the keyboards player for the Scissor Sisters. He must feel unbearably hip, I wonder? ”Well” says Garden laconically, “he’s had to go through his life denying I am his father and now I am going through life denying he is my son”. He is softly spoken and rather given to understated gags. Is he as boffinish as his Goodies character? “Well I am scientific, but I am not a loony.” He says with a slight raise of the eyebrow, which suggests that he might be. His character was pretty megalomaniac wasn’t he, a bit of a Dr Strangelove? “I don’t think I ever tried to take over the world. I wasn’t that ruthless or amoral. I was just interested in science.” And then adds,” Which is the same thing, really”.

They are talking to me because the two of them are going to the Edinburgh Fringe with the first live show of the Goodies. They have done it twice now in Australia, first at the Big Laugh Festival in Sydney in 2005 and then on tour. And the first time they were with their third man, Bill Oddie, and the second they weren’t. He won’t be in Edinburgh. He’s too busy with Spring Watch and his BBC nature series. “If he’d been able to say some dates when he would be free, we’d have worked around that. It was fun together in Australia,” says Garden, “we stood there watching Bill just wondering what he might do next. Now we know, we’ve got him on video” So he’s not an angry refusenik about the whole thing, as some gossip has suggested? “Well he’s angry,” says Garden. But clearly that’s just a general judgment, and nothing to do with the tour.

Given the general view of Oddie as the not so funny one, it’s quite surprising to find that the two of them hold him in some awe. There was a gaggle of future comedians at Cambridge. And says Brooke-Taylor, remembering the times at Cambridge when he walked to Law lectures with John Cleese. “None of us would have gone into show business without the confidence we got from other people”. “Except Bill” says Garden, “He had enormous confidence and quite rightly so”. His music made an immediate impact on audiences. Brooke-Taylor remembers writing home to his mother from the footlights tour of New Zealand in 1964 that Bill wasn’t going down quite so well. “But I didn’t mean he wasn’t doing well, I just meant that he wasn’t tearing the place apart quite as much as he had done in London.

The Goodies came out of radio. After the Footlights, via shows like Not the 1948 Show, they had all ended up in 1965 in a sketch show called I Am Sorry I’ll Read That Again (ISIRTA). By the fourth series it was largely being written by Garden and Oddie. Why didn’t Brooke Taylor write more “Because I was too busty appearing in better shows”, he says and then adds “They write very fast. And they are very different. If Graeme and I tried to write together we just nattered”.

The Goodies to some extent was ISIRTA on TV. Tony Palmer the director had made the first stab at putting radio on telly. The show was “Twice a Fortnight”. It largely failed but Palmer encouraged the use of film inserts and Oddie and Garden took to them. Oddly the transfer of the sound of radio to the visuals of TV came out more like animated cartoons. The Goodies were the heirs of Buster Keaton and Bugs Bunny and they didn’t really have the verbal sophistication of the Pythons.

English is a culture that is, at its core, literary. In France they have an Avenue named after Gerry Lewis. We have the Royal Shakespeare Company. Visual, knock about, slapstick is for kids. It’s not taken seriously. And at one stage, the BBC scheduled The Goodies like that. The third and forth series slipped earlier and earlier, with some programmes eventually going out at 6.45. By 1975 though Monty Python had ended and the fifth series of The Goodies went out at 9pm and finally the audiences jumped from three million to ten. “We can’t say we were ignored” says Garden, but adds Brooke-Taylor “In the history of comedy we don’t come off as well as we might.”

Their comedy was visually highly inventive achieving edited tricks and stunts that no one else had really tried before. “I remember once I shook hands with myself” muses Brooke-Taylor “That was incredibly complicated”. The best one remembers Garden was when they went into a cupboard as the Goodies and came out as mice. But adds Garden with a characteristically Goodies touch. “We had a six foot hypodermic syringe and that had to go through too”

The live show will combine video of the sketches with Oddie telling stories and the rest is built round the conceit that Brooke-Taylor and Garden are answering questions put to them by the audience. “They’re the ones we have the most interesting answers to”. When they talk about the show Garden and Brooke-Taylor are affectionately very complimentary to each other about their own tour de forces. Garden does his audition form the Cambridge Footlights, called Pets Corner, of which Brooke-Taylor says, “I don’t want to embarrass him but it is a little lesson in how to do comedy perfectly.” Garden says later that Brooke-Taylor’s best bit is one they have on tape as he doesn’t do it live. He plays an automated hospital visitor who gets out of sequence. It is also perfect, he says.

Despite their achievements, the Goodies have never been repeated on the BBC. Why? “Don’t get us started” says Brooke-Taylor and skewers the previous controller of BBC2, Jane Root. “Although now she’s gone, thank God. Although that means there’s no-one to blame now.” In the intervening years however the pair they have become fixed in people’s minds as part of the I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue panel on Radio Four. Which, it comes as a surprise certainly to me to discover, Garden invented. Although he is still negotiating the royalty, despite the first show carrying his devising credit. It was awful, they remember now. They tried to improvise the whole thing. After it “Humph and I sat in the pub” says Brooke-Taylor and we said “ Never, ever again” After thirty-four years they still say that, just in case. They had a meeting recently with the Director General about it all and at the end he said “Shame we have never repeated the Goodies. When are we going to do that?” Goodies fans are waiting. Maybe the live show will jog the BBC into action.

Glenn Close has the most beautiful eyes. They’re simple blue-green. But what powers her look is the bright and clear blue line around each, which softens and hardens with the inflections in her speech, underlining what she says. She is 55 and looks fantastic in red alligator skin, elegantly plat formed, toeless high heels, beige denim jacket, jeans and a white rugby shirt. She is lean and compact. It’s such a cliché, but at five foot four or five, she really is far smaller than she appears on screen. It is the characters she plays who occupy the space. The word to describe her is definitely handsome. Her face is fresh and open, rather country girl, so you could also say pretty. But pretty is too girlish. Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction, the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liasons and Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard to chose but three of her signature roles are not girlish. Glenn Close is an actress who plays grown-ups.

So surrounding her London theatre debut there is much anticipation because she has chosen one of the great American roles, a role, she says, “You simply test yourself with – certainly in America”. She will open at the National Theatre in October as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Created by Vivien Leigh on the London stage in 1949 and on film opposite Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski in 1951, Blanche has always seemed to reflect Leigh’s own alcoholism and vulnerability. A diaphanous creature blown to seek refuge in New Orleans by the wind of small hometown disapproval, she is bullied by Stanley and eventually committed to the impersonal care of the madhouse by her regretful sister. Williams introduces her in the stage directions by saying ”her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.”

However, you suspect that Closes’s Blanche will be more of a tiger moth – more colour and more feistiness underlying her terrible vulnerability. “Williams calls her that in one of his essays”, says Close, “ and I think she is quite elemental. It’s very premature to talk about her, but what moves me about Blanche is what moved me about Norma Desmond. They are both delusional but they are both survivors and they have to create those illusions to survive.” Blanche has seen a lot of death in her family but most searingly burnt into her memory is the suicide of her young, and gay, husband. “She could have killed herself. But she carries on. With Stanley it comes down to such a physical confrontation. She is as charismatic as Stanley is and witty and ballsy” says Close. Her Blanche will be no trembling wreck. As Trevor Nunn, who’s directing her, says “To make sense of the play, Blanche has to be a mixture of both intellect and passion”.

Close always wanted to be an actress ever since she was tiny. “From my very, very early childhood, we had the most extraordinary piece of land to run on. We could run all day and not see anyone we weren’t related to. So my childhood was literally playing games that we would imagine – always playing pretend”. ‘We’ was her two sisters and her brother. They grew up on a farm in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her father, a doctor, and her mother – William and Bettina – both came from the kind of smart upper-class Yankee backgrounds that their daughter’s fine face would suggest. Stephen Frears, when he directed Dangerous Liasons, fell completely under its spell. Last week he said “Maybe her family came over on the Mayflower. I mean you can see in her face what a strong women she is. You can sort of see what those people who built America were made of. Incredible strength. Of a benign kind. She’s a class racehorse. You’re not dealing with some yob!“

I don’t really know”, she says now, “how that game playing segued into acting. I think it was just something I thought I could do”. Then when she was seven her parents, to whom it is important to realise she remains very close, made quite a decision. They joined the right-wing Christian group Moral Rearmament and set off for “a quasi-religious commune” in Mt Kisco, New York. They moved again to Switzerland where she completed her eighth and ninth grades and then her father went as a missionary to the Belgian Congo, now Zaire. At that point Close returned to Greenwich for High School. All this was in an interview she gave earlier this year.

So knowing it from the research, I wondered whether this sudden uprooting played a part in her desire and ability to be an actress, her growing up into a woman who longed to earn her living using her imagination? “I don’t want to talk about that”. Oh. It’s fascinating. “It’s too complex. And I am not a psychiatrist. So I am not going to sit here and analyse myself. I find that deeply boring.” She’s pretty annoyed. It’s quite scary. That’s not because she’s suddenly become the grand guignol Cruella de Vil or the damaged revenger Alex Forrest. It’s just ordinary Glenn Close surprisingly vulnerable and demonstrably hurt.

“They’ll drag up all that ancient press about something that happened years ago and I don’t want to talk about it.” Silence. You begin to realise how raw she is. How close to the surface her emotions swiftly rise. How you can almost feel the heat of her upset. “I’m going to end this right now”. She starts to rise from her chair. It’s not a flounce. She has said before that she didn’t want to talk about her private life. I thought she meant men and dating and sex and all that trivia. No. She meant this. Her family. “I feel as if I’ve been mislead. And you know I have moved ON from that.” It’s said quietly but with such force. Then, silence.

In the interview she gave to the American magazine, which she has read and thinks entirely accurate and which she hopes, rather in vain, will be the last of people’s interest in the matter, she defends her parents’ decision. “The thing I love about my parents is that, coming from a level of society where they basically had quite a bit, they never bought into that. I think their humanism, their idealism got taken advantage of.” In his book, A Doctor’s Life, still available, William expresses regret about his choices and the pain they caused his children. Close simply writes in the introduction “What family doesn’t have its quota of pain? The burden of forgiveness is always with the child. The parent is always going to make the mistakes.”

At the very end of our conversation she explains her decision not to talk about it any more in an intense voice that is difficult to hear at times. “You can’t sit down in an interview like this and talk about something like that. It’s a book. I love my family dearly and I don’t feel obligated to keep bringing them up.” She thinks a while before she speaks again and says a little surprised at herself, “I’ve never walked out of an interview.” Another pause, “It’s difficult for my alien kind” – I imagine she means actors – “because I basically trust everybody. Unfortunately I’ve now learned not to trust everybody. They can crucify you and it’s terribly hurtful.” I guess what comes as a surprise is that you don’t think of her as naive. But in some ways she is, notwithstanding her obvious intelligence. Perhaps as she says of Blanche, it’s just that “she is very highly tuned”.

So we move on. Close is well known to be a political liberal. She has been public in her support for the pro-choice lobby and other women’s’ issues. However on one particular occasion her artless outspokenness caused her considerable upset. In 1992 she produced a documentary on the American foster care system called Broken Hearts, Broken Homes. It was the second factual film she’d made, following on from one in 1988 about cowboys in Wyoming whom she had met with her father on his doctor’s rounds. In the course of the filming she went to see a unique prison experiment with mothers and their children in Bedford Correctional Facility in New York State. There she met a woman called Precious Bedell, who was serving twenty years for killing her own child in 1979. By the nineties, Precious had qualified in psychology and was working in the prison nursery. But Close didn’t realise she was still a prisoner.

“I thought she was a social worker. In my ignorance I didn’t realise that if you were wearing a certain kind of trousers in a certain kind of green you were an inmate. I only realised when we left that she wasn’t coming too. It’s only my experience in this one prison, and I can’t and wouldn’t pretend to be an expert, but I have met some of the most enlightened women inside, if they have been there for a long time and have actually faced their crime, gone to the black space, gone to hell and come back.”

Close wrote a letter to the Clemency Board on Bedell’s behalf and was mauled in the New York Press. The Post snarled ‘Glen Close wants tot killer freed’. “I was absolutely savaged,” she says, “But I just thought that Precious would be more use outside than in. But because I was the only high profile person who wrote to the press, it got incredibly distorted. They said I lived behind closed doors and locked gates, which I don’t. I could afford to protect my child. It was just really horrible.” Bedell was eventually released, not as a result of any of the letters as it happens, but because of a technicality relating to her trial. She is now working with an organisation helping to rehabilitate women out of prison.

Close was shaken by the experience. “I don’t really see myself as political. I have always spoken from my heart. But sometimes that gives me pause because I think you could study things for twenty fours hours a day for a month and not have it at the end of my fingertips. But then I think what my father said ‘it’s the act of presence, just being there, that counts’. You can have an opinion. You think something’s wrong you can say it. You may not be the spokesman, it doesn’t mean your feelings are invalid if you are inarticulate.” She is a participator. She gets that from her parents. Hal Prince, the legendary director who’s known her since the mid seventies, describes her as “an involved citizen”. She carries that East Coast American upper class sense of civic obligation. “We are the kind of people who feel guilty if we say no” she says. “When my daughter says ‘I don’t care’ I tell her those are the three worst words in the language.”

It seems odd to think of Close as inarticulate. She is one of that breed of classy American actresses who as Frears says, “is clever enough to know how to operate on her emotions. She has the intelligence to operate on that grand level and pull off these very big moments on the screen”. Nunn, Frears and Prince, who directed her in her first play in New York Love For Love, all speak of her in the same way. “Educated”, “smart”, “brave”, they all echo each other. “She knows how to make choices in her career”, says Prince, “that’s what sets her apart.” And they all cite the self-assurance that flows from her background. “Her emotions are close to the surface”, comments Prince, “because she is sure of who she is. And her background has created the kind of person who is simply not bewildered or bedazzled by stardom.”

She herself dismisses any talk of braininess. While on screen she displays a fierce intelligence, she says, “I am certainly not an intellectual.” And as for being brave she meandered around the subject in our conversation and concluded “When I am faced with the challenge of acting, it’s always the same thing. I go through this terrible process of thinking I don’t know where to begin. I was chatting to Trevor the other day and saying that if I was in the same room as Jenny Fields (The World According to Garp), The Marquise, Alex Forrest, although maybe not as much, Blanche and Norma Desmond, I would be incredibly shy.”

What strikes you forcibly though is not that Close seems shy, but that she seems disinterested by the hoopla that surrounds what she does. On screen she is certainly grand. But you should know that every day she travels to work at The National Theatre on the tube. Stephen Frears’s parting shot was that he has seen her “scrubbing floors at other people’s houses. She’s just the sort of person who gets on with it. Like lots of women, she’s just very practical.” Hal Prince makes considerable play of the fact that “her background has created the kind of person who is simply not bewildered or bedazzled by stardom.”

When the part of Norma Desmond came up, Trevor Nunn, who directed her in Sunset Boulevard, recounts with respect, “She came to London to audition. She was just standing there around a piano in Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s house. This very, very famous person. We didn’t know if her voice stylistically or in terms of her range would match the score. In the end we didn’t have to change anything, because she recognised that there was another step her voice needed to go and she worked and worked and it did go that next step. She just puts in the work.” It paid off and the reviews and the unanimous acclaim for her performance lifted her onto an even higher level as a stage actress.

Close has portrayed a dazzling range of women, all with their own particular atmosphere of strength. Then with Cruella de Vil, in which she ended up buried in flour, squirted with icing and baked in a cake, she chose to send up that career. She laughed at herself through two Dalmation movies trying as hard as possible to have as much fun by putting as much real fear into children as she could. She has said she just felt the meaner she was the funnier it became. To anyone who has followed her career, to go from Norma Desmond to Cruella in one move is a sure sign that this is a woman who likes a laugh. “I’m not witty”, she says, but I know people who are and I can hold my own.” All three directors independently used the same phrase. She “hoots with laughter”, they all said.

Of course playing Cruella further showed her versatility. It was a typical move. Prince explodes on the phone “That’s what’s so great about her. I think ‘My God look what Glenn is doing NOW’”. But in the eyes of sloppy writers she has often suffered from a tendency to stereotype her as just the bunny-boiler, Alex, in Fatal Attraction. Even though she made the film in 1978, Close still analyses her. “I researched that part more than any other. Alex Forrest was a textbook example of a woman who had been abused pre-memory. That’s why she throws up when she is spying through the window on Michael Douglas’ character and his family. What would someone have forced me (Alex) to do? Oral sex when you were a child would make you sick. ” She is at pains to understand Alex, not put her down. She feels strongly that despite her efforts in the end the film failed overall to do that. The script finally just flipped her into being a psychopath. That was a betrayal of the character. She was deeply self-destructive. That was the point.”

Her performance not only made her a film star but also won her the part of The Marquise in Dangerous Liasons. Frears just thought she was “simply astounding” in Fatal Attraction. “She was like an athlete prowling around. American actresses can deliver on that grand level. The power they have on the screen is phenomenal”. She started filming just seven weeks after she had given birth to her daughter Annie on April 26th 1988. After two marriages, one when she was very young to a rock guitarist called Cabot Wade and one in the mid-eighties to an investment banker, James Marlas, for whom she seems to have retained little affection and which had ended a year or so earlier, she was at the start of a relationship with a producer called John Starke. “When she arrived” says Frears, “the birth was giving her enormous pleasure not just because of the baby, but because her breast were very large, which excited her a lot. “ Frears found her not just to be sexy and intelligent but “very straight with the audience. She doesn’t conceal things.”

Close stripped the Marquise’s emotions bare in the film, never backing off from showing her power and cunning yet also exposing her vulnerability and at times sheer rage. The Marquise seems to have paid a price for being a powerful woman. “Madame Merteuil observed at a very early age” says Close, talking over my question in a manner almost as controlling as the character, “how men operate, how love and sex became political. And she decided to become just as manipulative as a man might be.” Close chose the role because of the great speech The Marquise makes about it being war between herself and Malkovich. She chooses roles quickly and often because of one such great moment. If there is a theme to her work, and she denies that she is making any kind of comment about women in general, “many of the women I have played are not what they seem to be. But to be honest I don’t have a template. The script just has to have one moment that makes it worth leaving home.” She laughs loudly.

But she is not joking. Leaving home is a wrench. It has taken her two years since A Streetcar Names Desire was announced to feel that she could make a change in her fourteen-year-old daughter’s routine and come to London with her. Annie is clearly very much the centre of her life. When Close was making 102 Dalmatians in Britain a couple of years ago in order to feel happy about leaving she simply asked Starke, and his wife, if they would come and live in her house and “be Annie’s family”. She is clearly giving her daughter a stability she may not have had as a child herself. All Annie’s life they have lived “with one nanny, three dogs and three cats in a large farmhouse an hour outside New York”. Of course you have to ask, any other significant others? Warning pause. “Not that I want to talk about.” And she says later on, describing the piece of land she has bought in Wyoming on which she hopes Annie might mirror the freedom Close had when a child, “I really feel most happy away from people, which is ironic given what I have chosen to do.”

Although the seeds of that choice were laid in early childhood, something happened at College – William & Mary in Williamsburg Virginia – that made her take the plunge. “ I was painting the scenery one evening and watching the TV. It was the Dick Cavett interview with Katherine Hepburn. It was the only one she ever did on TV. And as I watched her something said to me that if acting was what I wanted to do I should just do it.” She apologises for the too-good-to-be-true quality of this story. But the next day she did send off the letter for the audition, on the last day it could be postmarked, did the audition and got the job as understudy to the lead in Peter Shaffer’s adaptation of Congreve’s Love For Love at The New Phoenix Theatre in New York, where Hal Prince was the artistic director.

At which point it becomes even more worryingly fairy tale. “On the opening night the leading lady fell ill,” Prince remembers, although he won’t say who it was, “and two hours before the critics arrived I took Glenn onto the stage with the stage manager and gave her an hour and a half brush up. She hadn’t ever rehearsed, just watched. Glenn had been in Equity two weeks and she went on. And that was it really. Her career just took off.” It was 1974. She played regularly on Broadway and in the main regional theatres until in 1980 she won her first Tony Award for her role in Barnum. She has since won two more for The Real Thing and Sunset Boulevard.

A couple of years ago she performed at a Kennedy Centre Gala honouring Katherine Hepburn and the director George Stevens made her tell her College story afterwards to the elderly star. “Hepburn was wonderful. She was dressed in a black raincoat. Everyone else was wearing black tie and beyond. She had on a black turtleneck and polished black Reeboks. After wards she wrote me a note. It said ‘A great big hug for your sweet contribution. I’m glad I persuaded you, when you were a mere child, to join this terrible profession. This terrifying profession – let’s face it – is a delicious way to spend your life. With affectionate thanks.’ It’s hanging on the wall in my house framed.” She also has the knife from Fatal Attraction. It was a fitting tribute. Crazy women, damaged women, determined women, deluded women; they all have had their place. In Close’s career and have received the kind of respect from her that may well ultimately put her in a league not far from Hepburn.

Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse are married. Not to each other – they both have wives – but they are a couple, comedy boyfriends. And have been for twenty years since University, mucking about writing voices and catchphrases originally roped in by their chum, and Higson’s flatmate, Harry Enfield, “who nicked our lines and made millions” with Stavros the Greek and Loadsamoney, and then later on with their other playmates in The Fast Show, which they invented and which begins its final series this month on the BBC.

Whitehouse is all angles, kind of scrawny in a loose fitting black suit. He changes constantly from bumptious child to old man, from naughty boy to sad git. His face flashes from acne to age spots. He has a huge smile, a dirty laugh and a really loud voice that picks up and drops characters at will. Higson is much quieter and rather precise about what he says. He’s fleshy, soft skinned and if you dragged him up and rouged his cheeks he’d become one of those taffeta dowager duchesses who look like they need ironing. Overall rather Alec Guinness, if he’d been a little bit bullied at school. While you get the impression that Whitehouse is exactly the affable laddish chap he seems, from behind watchful, humorous eyes Higson might well be a serial poisoner. The novels he writes when he’s not co-producing, co-writing and co-starring in The Fast Show dwell on the things that most of us choose to ignore – “violence, torture and brain fluid” as one critic put it. But when Whitehouse is not doing The Fast Show, he passes his time in a studio with Harry Enfield shouting “Oi No!” Or sliming away about “doing a lotta work for charidy”, and other catchphrases, to the delight of the huge numbers of fans of “Harry Enfield and Chums”

The idea for The Fast Show, which seems to have its antecedents in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and Steve Wright in The Afternoon on Radio One, was a bit of an accident. Higson and Whitehouse were both writing for Enfield, with Paul also performing. And the BBC, in the form of Geoff Perkins the current Head of Comedy there, made a highlights tape for the Press launch. “We were surprised,” says Higson, “how well these ten or fifteen second bursts worked and how instant the characters were. We had come up with a number of ideas that hadn’t found a home with Harry. So we thought why not do a whole show that was edited highlights.” Whitehouse: “Do your character, do your catchphrase and f*** off.” Although he acknowledges it’s not quite as straightforward as that. “You can’t ultimately do that, otherwise it would just be a series of monologues. You need the longer stuff like Suits You Sir and Ted and Ralph.”

Ah yes “Ted and Ralph”. If anything outlasts the Fast Show it will be this desperately awkward relationship full of excruciating pathos and unspoken love between Higson’s Ralph, the landowner, and Whitehouse’s Ted, his loyal retainer. The sketches, unusually for The Fast Show, go for up to two minutes or so. In the last series they were finally reduced to their absolute essence when Ralph stood behind Ted and tried to say something to him for over a minute, failed and departed.

“It’s a love that crosses every boundary,” says Higson. So have they ever, um…? “No. Neither of them really understands the situation.” “Maybe I do a little more than him”, Whitehouse adds. “But”, says Higson, “Ted’s embarrassment is almost more the master servant thing. That his master is crossing the line of familiarity. In fact he probably wouldn’t mind him buggering him as long as he didn’t call him Ralph.” There may yet be a chance as there is a vague plan at the back of Higson and Whitehouse’s mind to produce a Ted & Ralph Christmas Special next year.

If there is a theme to The Fast Show, it is social embarrassment. “Well those are the funniest stories aren’t they? Situations which in retrospect are really funny, but which at the time you wish you could just die”, Higson suggests. And so on the show there is a man who makes social gaffes and has to “get his coat”; the toe curling office wag, who presumably has a sign on his desk saying “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps”; the dreadful Reenie, played by Caroline Aherne, whose final emasculation of her little husband is to get him to repeat everything she says in front of his mother – “what did I say Roy?” the tragic alcoholic Rowley Birkin QC – “I blare sin lard member of the malt whisky society when era roof lovely long legs..”; the TV guest who can’t tell his story in front of the camera; the sad, toe-caringly chirpy teenager “Brilliant” and many more.

The new series has about 40% new characters including, an invention of Caroline Aherne’s, a till girl with no sense whatsoever of how tactless she’s being to customers – “oh salad, that’s poof’s food”. And from Arabella Weir there’s “No Offence”, a South African make-up saleswoman with bad skin who is the complete opposite of her name. “She’s based….” says Higson, “…on someone Arabella knows”, interrupts Whitehouse. “…Her mother in law” continues Higson. “You can’t say that. Just say someone she knows.” In fact it’s not her mother-in-law, it’s her friend’s mother-in-law. But this sudden display of discretion from Whitehouse made me wonder if he ever gets embarrassed. Higson looks like he might easily blush, but Whitehouse never. He blusters for second and says, “I suppose I get embarrassed. What do I get embarrassed about, Charlie?” “Usually things that I do.” “I’m trying to think what I get embarrassed about. …. I’m occasionally a bit arrogant” Surely not, I say sweetly. “Oh don’t look so surprised.” And he laughs a dirty self-deprecating laugh.

The ultimate in inappropriate rudeness in the show are the masters of lurid single entendre and lecherous prurience, the two gentlemen’s outfitters known now simply by their catchphrase “Suit You”, immortalized by The Daily Sport on the day after Versace’s murder in the headline “Shoots You”. There is a squealish delight in hearing what they say to their victims, like seeing a ventriloquist’s dummy being breathtakingly offensive to someone in the audience. ‘Did they really say that?’ “My mum hates them,” says Whitehouse, “she thinks there very one dimensional and crude.” Well she’d be spot on, then. Except they’re incredibly funny too.

Despite it’s roots in English social inhibition and in British archetypes, the show has sold to an odd selection of countries: Norway, Brazil, Thailand, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand. But not to America. “We know Americans who love it. John Hughes who produced the Home Alone film has said to us if we have any ideas for movies to send them to him. But so far we haven’t had any.” You’d think they’d jump at the money but they both feel very uneasy about getting trapped in something they don’t enjoy from which there is no escape. So for the moment, instead of Hollywood, it’s going to be the Hammersmith Apollo for a residency next year where, with Vic and Bob’s Shooting Stars – on which Hinson was the original advisor -in the first half, they will do a live version of The Fast Show. And if you don’t make it there then you can buy the video or the audiotape or the spin-off books later in the year. Higson and Whitehouse meanwhile will be taking stock after creating more national catchphrases than 40’s Radio over the last ten years since Loadsamoney. “I would have thought that after twenty years, and particularly after this last year, we would probably hate each other by now. But we don’t.” says Higson. “Well there was one point on this series where I nearly hit him, “ says Whitehouse, “But I can’t remember why.” Aaah. True comedy marriage. Look out for more comedy children.

Emma Thompson opens her door, extends her arms and with her infinitely complicated smile greets me soothingly. “Fanshawe…..” Only in England can a surname be a sign of real warmth. And Thompson is a very English woman. Her formality offers intimacy. It’s what she does so well on screen, what made her portrayal of romance so perfect in Sense & Sensibility. Her restraint as Jane Austen’s heroine, Elinor Dashwood, suggested engagement rather than coolness. The height of her reserve was the strength of her passion. Her detachment spoke more eloquently than any emotional outpouring of the sheer depth of her love. Not for me, you understand, but for Hugh Grant’s Edward Ferris.

It’s a while since we have seen each other and an even longer time since we first met doing shows back to back on the Edinburgh Fringe, almost 16 years ago to the day, in between her Footlights success and her now legendarily panned eponymous TV comedy series. But Thompson is a girl who returns phone calls. She discards no one from the height of her fame, mainly because she really doesn’t believe in the trappings of her career. There may be two Oscars in the downstairs loo, making her the only person to have won for both writing – Sense & Sensibility – and performing – Howard’s End – but, a little surprised, she rejects any suggestion that she might now be a “player” in Hollywood, or even want to be one. “ It’s easy to abdicate from all that. You just say no to things. If I wanted to do that I’d have a company and a four-picture deal with a studio. But I don’t. I don’t want to be a player. I just want to write scripts and do a bit of acting.” Later she says, “I shall probably never move from this house.”

She lives on the other side of the same street where she was born in West Hampstead. Also in the road live her mother, the actress Phyllida Law, and the third thesp in the family, her sister Sophie, with both of whom she was bound into eternal comradeship by the premature death of her father Eric in her early twenties. The only new additions are a husband and baby for her sister and the actor Greg Wise, who was the first man to scoop Kate Winslet out of the rain in Sense & Sensibility, for herself. He is decidedly a bit of crumpet, over whom few women or gay men would readily step to get their bedroom slippers. “Everybody fancies Greg,” she says looking a little triumphant but also what I take to be slightly weary about it being pointed out. But it is shyness not weariness in her voice and, more than that, in her eyes you can see an unbearable anticipation that she is going to be asked to talk about her “private life”, which she explicitly says she doesn’t want to. For all her exuberance and vivacity she finds it genuinely uncomfortable to talk about herself rather than her work. Her face clouds over at the prospect. What she does want to talk about is Chile, the screenplay she is writing about its most famous folk singer, Victor Jara, who was murdered by the Pinochet regime, and the concert in London on September 6th to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the right-wing military coup that toppled President Allende in 1973.

And it’s this kind of thing that gets her into trouble with the hacks in Britain. She’s an actress so they require her to be gushing, insincere and self-promoting like the rest. But she will insist on remaining independent of their view of her. She will continue to express her political opinions when she thinks it matters, no matter how foolish they then try to make her look. Despite the fact that she really does care about such things, when she brings them up the papers will continue to screech “luvvie” the minute she mentions Chile or the Gulf War. If she cries, as she freely does about things that move her – it is after all her job as an actress to feel and then filter emotions – they refuse to believe her sincerity. If they saw tears come to her eyes, as they did when we talked about the atrocity in Omagh, they would insist that it’s self-indulgence. Yet when an entire nation took to weeping for a Princess they’d never met, these same writers talked of a new age of caring and sharing. When she married Ken Branagh, the press was utterly determined that their life would be a constant fur-lined Jacuzzi of celebrity despite the more mundane truth that they fell in love and just liked working together. So the press invented “Ken and Em”, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, the His and Hers of Tinseltown, Mr and Mrs Star Turn. And in the end did their marriage fall apart partly because they were being pushed into something they weren’t? “Yes, inevitably that was part of it.” There’s a long pause. “That’s what they wanted us to be.” And then she tries to steer the conversation back to work.

The point about Thompson and her fame is that everyone, except those who actually know her, apparently refuses to accept that she really could be who she seems to be, which is a fairly conventional North London girl with a great family and a bucket load of talent. For instance she has no car and often uses the tube. “I just wouldn’t like to lose my anonymity, which makes it very easy to turn down a big movie. The way to guard your independence is to be quite strict about what you chose to do. And not to need the money….or want the money”. But how can this be? This is the movie star equivalent of not playing the Lottery, not indulging in the habit of perpetual greed and dissatisfaction-with-life fomented every day by the tabloids. When the media spends all its energy dangling the glories of fame, celebrity and double page sun-tanned, leatherette spreads in Hello and OK! In front of a permanently thwarted and depressed population, who the hell does an Oscar winning actress who could have it all, but just won’t collude, think she is?

She’s not daft about all this. “I know that what I appear to be saying is that I’m just an ordinary person. And people get resentful about that because it would be disingenuous not to recognise that I can go to places where I get paid an awful lot of attention. But I just don’t want to live like that. I couldn’t bear to live behind walls with bodyguards. I don’t want to be rude about America, but LA is lovely as long as you know you can leave”. And she says later. “Anyway, if you live in the same place as you grew up like I do, you can’t start putting on airs and graces, people just won’t stand for it.”

All this makes her an emancipated woman in a rather old fashioned kind of way. “I think the thing that my mother and sister and I are probably most proud of is that we have always earned our own living, which is the most important thing for any woman.” As Jane Austen says through Elinor to Edward “you will inherit your fortune, we cannot even earn ours.” This self-reliance is what gave Thompson the confidence to write. “I was apparently always fearless as a little girl. You just do things and see. You can’t worry about what happens if you fail”. What about criticism? Before the Oscar for screenwriting came the terrible condemnation for the TV series. “Well criticism can be bracing ”, she says a little bravely. “But actually I wouldn’t have been asked to write Sense & Sensibility if at three o’clock in the morning in LA Lindsay Doran, the producer, hadn’t seen a sketch I’d written for the series about a Victorian woman and thought I’d be able to do Jane Austen” And you get a definite feeling that Sense & Sensibility was where her whole life had been heading up to that point. And that now she is in something of a new phase. She responds by saying that she just has lots of confidence now and “I just feel older and wiser”. Bathed in the approbation of her peers she is doing the writing thing again.

This time it’s not an adaptation but a script based on the biography of Victor Jara by his widow, Joan. At the moment it’s uncommissioned. “I’m doing it for us”, says Thompson, “because it’s important that Joan has the chance to say. ‘I can’t bear this, don’t make a film’”. Although it may already be too late for that. The re-issue of the book, first published in 1983, already carries the inducement on the back that “ ‘Victor – An Unfinished Song’ is to be a feature film starring and with a screen play by Emma Thompson”.

It is the story of a love affair between an English dancer who went to Chile and one of the country’s great folk heroes. Theirs was a romance that lasted for fifteen years and was only ended by the barbarity of a regime that, apparently offended by poetry and music, tortured and then killed Jara. “I want to tell not a slushy romance, but a story about the reality of love rather than its infantile stage. It’s about two people from different backgrounds, classes if you want to use that word, and cultures who lived in the Chile of the 60’s which was a place of extraordinary genius and creativity”. She wants the film to reflect the fact that the suffering and torment that people experienced in Chile is not foreign, somehow “other”, but that “it could happen here” perhaps not literally but “in a way that makes people realise that we can’t separate ourselves from it”. “And I’d love to write a film that started in English and ended in Chilean, without people really noticing the subtitles. I’d like to do it without the audience thinking they were watching a foreign language film.” Which is strange because that’s one of the few Oscars she hasn’t won yet. “I’m going for make-up next time.”

Of course it may be uncommissioned at the moment but there are producers waiting in the wings and moneymen salivating. It’s not blockbuster material but you have to have more confidence than Thompson herself who says without anxiety “I’m not box office in America. I’m just a popular Brit”. Although she may be right. Primary Colours, her latest movie in which she co-stars with John Travolta and the one whose rumoured two million dollar fee enabled her to choose to take time off for a year to write, has not been a money spinner in America. An elegantly written political morality tale, in which the staff of a State Governor who aspires to President, Jack Stanton, have to defend their man’s sexual misbehaviour because they believe in his politics, it may have proved just a little dark for the Americans. “It’s not a satire. When we made it no one had really heard of Monica Lewinsky. It’s a warts and all story of a political journey.” And it may have been rejected by the American public because in the same way the Brits cling to honest Bobbies and faith in British Justice despite multiple proof of the opposite, Americans, cheered on by Hollywood, have an almost fairy tale belief in the goodness of their political system. After all ‘Mr Smith’ went to Washington long before Bill Clinton.

Thompson is very good in Primary Colours. She produces an uncannily authentic American accent and she slaps Travolta with such satisfying ferocity at one point that you feel she’s administering the belt that everyone wants to give Clinton for jeopardising his Presidency by failing to control his zipper. The palm of her hand packs a moral punch. The steadfast Susan Stanton has much of Thompson’s backbone and straightforwardness. When the movie comes out in Britain in October Thompson will still be immersed in writing her Chilean love story. The Premiere will probably benefit the young homeless charity Alone in London of which she is patron.

Acting, writing and demonstrating an almost Victorian sense of social responsibility, all at the same time, she is a woman of whom her heroine Jane Austen would have heartily approved. “When you’re older you just stop whining about how you’re perceived. There’s always going to be somebody who thinks you’re a prat. But I don’t believe any of it any more… good or bad. It’s just great being free and independent.”

Elaine Stritch left Detroit for New York when she was seventeen determined to be a star. So wrapped up was she in achieving it, she says, she was a virgin till she was 30. Finally last year, when she was 77, her one-woman show ‘Elaine Stritch At Liberty’ crowned her as the queen of Broadway. For sixty years, to those who have seen her dazzle audiences with an extraordinary range from musical comedy to American drama, in Coward, Gershwin and Albee, she has always been a star. But she has been a theatre goers actress, an insider’s leading lady. Now, thanks to the show, the rest of the world might discover her.

In Britain only If you were watching TV in the mid seventies might you remember her co-starring with Donald Sinden in the BBC sit com “Two’s Company”. Or if you’re a musicals addict you will undoubtedly remember her singing “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Sondheim’s Company, live in the West End and on video. Giving the number class, desperation and alcohol she created a heartbreaking expression of grief for a woman’s life beached in an arid middle age. Then there’s the voice. If you’ve heard it you won’t have forgotten it. It is like gravel in a machine gun. Speaking or singing, she could sand your kitchen floor, just as the detonation of comic attack in her delivery could shoot a bird out of a tree. She has mastered the pause like no one else in show business.

She has waited a long while to be so feted. As she says in the show, “There’s good news and bad news. The good: I have a sensational acceptance speech for a Tony. The bad: I’ve had it for forty five years.” After four nominations, the first in 1956, she finally gave the speech on June 2nd this year. And wouldn’t you know it, CBS cut it short in the live broadcast. Her response was typical. When asked if they’d called to apologise. She said “In your dreams”. And if they do? “They can go f*** themselves.” Elaine Stritch is a straight talking broad. In her show she literally “opens up the veins of her life and bleeds” as one critic put it. To high comic effect. Through the triumph of truth over self -indulgence she has turned the one-woman show into an art form.

She co-wrote it with John Lahr, the New Yorker writer married to Connie Booth but best known in Britain for his revival of Jo Orton through biography and film. The credits in the programme actually say the show was “constructed by John Lahr, reconstructed by Elaine Stritch”. They talked together, or rather she talked and Lahr listened and wrote it down, over several months in the house she has just sold in Sag Harbour in The Hamptons. “I’m a good writer”, she says, “I write a story as I tell it. But John structured it. He made associations between the material. He directed me writing it.”

The show is organised autobiographically. It is conventional in form; the narrative linked by songs form the shows she has been in. It is extremely funny. But what sets it apart is the compulsion with which she performs and the undecorated truth, which that exposes. “I have discovered myself through this show”, she says without indulgence. Performing is her lifeblood. She finds it impossible not to do it. Sitting in the drawing room of the Savoy, across from two men who clearly have read nothing of their newspapers for the last hour, she says, “I used to sing for my supper almost every place I went. I turn into an entertainer when I enter a room. I can’t help it. I don’t mean to. I don’t plan it. I’d kill to shut up. I’d love to be quiet. But then if I do shut up socially someone, nine times out of ten, will come over and say ‘Are you alright?’”. Is she just seeking approval? “What anyone thinks of me is none of my business, but boy do I care. But I don’ t want to show off. I want to be understood.”

Hal Prince, her director in Company, says, “Elaine is a lot of trouble. But she’s worth it.” “That gives me goose bumps,” she says, “But of course, I go home with the first part on my mind.” She is trouble. Delightfully so. She tries to marry me off to the waiter within two minutes of meeting and her parting shot to her assistant Rick is “I am sorry about all those things that I said this afternoon.” The pause. “I meant every word of it.”. To get the full force of that, you have to really swoop onto ‘every’. Later she admits, “I do cause a lot of trouble. “ Then she contradicts herself, which is typical, “It’s not trouble I make. I bring change to a place. My way the high way, you know. It’s why people’s eyes go to you on the stage.”

She has spent most of her life terrified. And angry. Both emotions she used to deal with through drink. “I felt lonely when I drank. I used to think it was the other way round. The real truth is that I felt lonely and frightened so I drank and then it made me feel lonely and frightened. That’s not even catch 22 that’s just no win. There are a few moments after two martinis that I’d like to bottle. But you always think it’s going to be three or four.” I don’t blame anything on the booze but that wasn’t me, it was the person I had to become to get the courage to do anything in my life. ” On September 24th, or 25th she’s not quite sure, she will have been sober for fifteen years.

She started drinking young, at around twelve or thirteen. But she doesn’t blame her parents at all. She adored them. “My mother was hilarious. I was in Sail Away with Noel Coward. That Christmas Noel sent her a card, which she always accidentally had in her handbag when she went to the Country Club. The next season Noel was in a show called “The Girl Who Came To Supper” with Florence Henderson. It was el bombo! Christmas came around again but mother didn’t get a card from Noel. So she sent him a telegram. He framed it and put it on his wall. It just said “I guess you have to be Florence Henderson’s mother to get a card this year.”

While her older sisters left home and married at seventeen, Stritch really was a virgin till she was thirty. “You couldn’t make something like that up. If I ever thought for one minute of fooling an audience, I’d die.” So who was the lucky man? “Gig Young. He was so handsome. He drank though. To get up, go out, answer the phone, have sex. He also got involved with LSD. Cary Grant got him onto that. You know what happened to him in the end? He shot his wife and then himself. I think that was the LSD.”

After Young she lived with Ben Gazzara, whom she left because she fell in love with Rock Hudson. The pause comes out again. “And we all know what a bum call that was.” Eventually in the mid seventies, she met and married an actor called John Bay. In a deeply moving but never sentimental section of the show she talks about him and his death from a brain tumour after barely ten years together. Because she exudes such a palpable sense of solitude in her crazy sociability and hunger for contact, you feel compelled to ask whether he was the only person who stopped her feeling lonely? “He gave me warmth and security that I experienced but didn’t really fully have knowledge of. I just experienced it. I had him with me. We were together. I am not together with anyone now, except the audience. I don’t feel alone now though. “ Neither in person nor in the show is any of this maudlin. It’s just straightforward. What makes her performance so singular is the honesty with which the show vents her emotions. “ I am trying to get rid of a lot of feelings, a lot of energy, a lot of sadness, and a lot of joy. All those headline emotions. I want to get rid of them. I got to get them out of me by the time I go to bed at night. Otherwise I’ll get into fights in Trafalgar Square.” It’s more than worth the ticket price to watch her do it.

In those very rich east coast New England houses there are very rich east coast New England women, who unlike their Californian equivalent have no truck with therapies, fashions and self-development. Instead they are concerned with manners, order and social propriety. They plan weekly menus. Other people shop for them. They wear cardigans draped over their shoulders so any kind of work is impossible. And they are clever.

Agnes, in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, is a classic of the type. As Eileen Atkins says of her “she has a furious politeness and she is so lacking in fun”. But even though she’s Katherine Hepburn curdled, in Atkins’ hands, you can’t help but admire her. Albee’s loathing for this kind of woman, stemming apparently from his stepmother whom he so vehemently trashed in his last West End showing, “Three Tall Women”, which also starred Maggie Smith, is almost overwhelming. But through the cruelty of the writing, Atkins paints a portrait of a woman holding together members of a family who are spinelessly failing to get to grips with their personal worlds. She has a matrimonially incontinent daughter, a playfully witty and occasionally wise drunk for a sister and a successful wimp for a husband. Without Agnes they would have no framework, no way of surviving together. Their moorings would loosen and their balloon would go adrift, to use Albee’s metaphor. Agnes is the one whose demand for order maintains the delicate balance in their lives and fends off the ultimate fear.

“I spent three weeks loathing her”, says Atkins. “Anthony (the director) keeps on saying things like she’s a control freak. One night he said ‘you were rather good tonight. You were rather like Mrs Thatcher’ “. Atkins groaned, “Oh thanks a lot.” But Agnes is the moral centre of the play. “Yes, and she’s the engine room too. She drives it. And I’ve grown to like her by myself. I think you have to like the people you play in the end.” And also be like them? “When you play anybody you always think there’s loads of you in the part. Although I was never anything like St Joan.”

Atkins has played women of all kinds from the first Childie opposite Beryl Reid in The Killing of Sister George to Elizabeth I in Vivat Vivat Regina. She has won Olivier awards for her roles in Cymbeline at The National and Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language. She has played in Shaw, Bolt, Ibsen, Duras, Eliot. Schaffer and Shakespeare and her own adaptations of Virginia Woolf. She even invented the TV series Upstairs Downstairs and House of Elliot with her old mate Jean Marsh. And all of her women carry within them the same sense of strength you see in her face

Most people think that Atkins’ look is famously gloomy. But you’d be wrong to think that it indicate earnestness, a lack of humour or an elevated sense of martyrdom. It doesn’t. She is a really good laugh. And while she “likes a bit of order” herself, says she’s very bossy – even though she can’t stop her husband chain smoking, “It’s his choice” – and doesn’t like living in chaos, this comes out not as prissy restrictiveness or social restraint but as a strong sense of self discipline. She tells me how in New York in 1995 she co-starred for six months with Vanessa Redgrave in her own adaptation of the letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West, (big smile), overlapped that with rehearsing and playing for five months in Indiscretions, known in London as Les Parents Terribles, with Kathleen Turner (serious grimace) and writing a screen play adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway” (a look of tremendous delight). “It’s just been at the Toronto Film Festival and one review said it was a ‘crowd pleaser’, which isn’t bad for an art house movie.” Buoyed up by that success she has written a screen adaptation of the Vita & Virginia letters stage show, which will also be produced by her husband Bill Shepherd, and directed next year by Stanley Donen.”

She only told me all this because I brought up the subject of ‘sorrow’ of which she is a mistress on stage, usually hidden deep within. There followed a funny and join-the-dots path of connections from the breast cancer she discovered she had during this burst of transatlantic activity, a fax from Judi Dench telling her about recent developments in The Archers, the breast operation and the six months of chemo she had in New York and then at The Marsden in London, and ending up with two ladies in Bath, where A Delicate Balance was previewing, who said they had enjoyed the play “tremendously” but they didn’t understand the “terror”. “What was the play about?” They were referring to Agnes and Tobias’ two friends in their sixties who in Act One turn up uninvited to stay because they have simply “got frightened” in their own home.

“I said to Bill on the phone that night, ‘I am beginning to feel very strange because I couldn’t turn round to them and say “Have you never been terrified of death, the end, nothingness? Aren’t you ever frightened and want a great big nurse, a comfy person to say ‘there, there’ don’t worry’?” “Hasn’t everybody felt that?”, I said. And Bill said ‘No’.” “I cannot conceive the rest of the world is not like me and I have thought about death since I was five.”

However she is not naturally sad. “I feel very lucky, so I don’t know why I invest people with such misery”. She has done very well in her career – Awards, raves, money and a CBE – and she has what sounds like a pretty successful marriage. “Maybe I look miserable. Somebody’s probably looking at me and thinking, “Poor cow, I wonder what kind of life she leads.” Big laugh.

The sadness of her own childhood has been over dramatised by journalists. And she says now “Look you can’t be 63 and still moaning about your childhood, that’s boring, and I’ve upset my sister and brother by saying some things. But there’s a lot of codswallop talked about the nobility of the working classes. Growing up on a council estate is hard.” Her mother was a very tough woman and thankfully believed in the power of education. “ I see myself in her a lot. And I don’t like it all the time. My mother was very strong. But the words you use – domineering, forceful, bossy – depend on whether you like the person.” A bit like Agnes in A Delicate Balance.

When Denise van Outen worked on a kid’s show called Scratchy & Co, she co-hosted with an ex-Just 17 model called Malcolm Jeffries. Where is he now? “I don’t know,” she says sweetly. And none of the rest of us does either. When she was the weather girl on The Big Breakfast, the then presenter Sharon Davies took a holiday and Denise stood in for a week. Sharon never came back. Denise co-hosted the show for a while with a guy called Rick Adams. Then, you guessed it, Rick took a holiday, and Denise suggested Johnny Vaughan. And Rick never came back. He’s on Challenge TV now. What TV? Exactly. When she was briefly a pop hopeful in a duo called in a-what-it-says-on-the-tin-kind-of-way “Those Two Girls”, she was teamed up with a “fantastic singer” called Cathy Warwick. Cathy’s given it all up now. “She wanted to be a singer and I guess when it doesn’t happen you just don’t want to do anything else.” Not when you’re van Outen. The wannabes graveyard must be full of little Denise dolls stuck with pins. Because she has survived where so many of them just haven’t. Although I bet they don’t resent her for it. Because, as everyone tells you, Denise is terribly sweet.

And she is. Two hours over dinner proves that. But sweet is not the point. She didn’t end any of these careers, but underneath her ordinary Essex girl exterior she is a very determined woman. When she drove her own prospects into a cul-de-sac with Channel Four’s Something For The Weekend, a show so tacky it makes the worst excesses of Boys & Girls look like the public service remit of the BBC, she took about 30 seconds to think about it and promptly launched herself on a trajectory that is now making her a West End and Broadway musical star. As she says rather plainly “If something goes wrong, I will try and find another way of making it work.” She has. She has followed her surprising triumph with the critics- although with the public an unsurprising one – in the stage musical Chicago, by starring in a new version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance. Stripped of the dance it is a ninety minute no-interval solo show entirely of songs, renamed Tell Me On A Sunday. Although she claims that when she signed up for it, she didn’t realise that it was a one-woman show. “I kept on thinking ‘where’s the duet?’”

She’s not silly though. And she doesn’t seem to play games when she’d being interviewed. She appears to be exactly what you see. Which is confusing, because wrapped in a woolly scarf, full of cold, sitting in a distinctly untrendy Italian cafe two streets away from her flat in Islington, and wearing £2.99 earrings form Top Shop which keep on falling off because she’s fiddling with them, she does seem frankly girl-next-door rather than name-in-lights. Even though all the young men in the restaurant are eating less than they are staring.

“Yeah I am both people”, she says, “People are always surprised, they expect me to be larger than life, but my friends can be a bit taken aback because I am quite a deep thinker really. I can be really quiet. But that’s what I like about this part. Roxie in Chicago was really big and everybody knows that she is there. But this character is not like that. She’s very vulnerable and naive as well.”

The character in Tell Me On A Sunday doesn’t have a name. When Marti Webb first sang it she was called Emma. Now she is nameless “so that all women can relate to her”. She is a girl form Essex, natch, who breaks her heart and flees to Manhattan where she dates men and eventually… “Well I can’t tell you what happens at the end. Let’s just say that she does find some peace of mind – although I wanted it to be real and so it’s not just got a happy ending.”

At which point, after she’s also said that she had quite some input into the creative side of updating the show from1979 when it was originated, you can’t resist asking exactly how much it’s about her. “Well she’s quite like me. I couldn’t have done this part a year ago because I hadn’t had my heart broken. I hadn’t had that kind of devastation.” She’s talking about her much-publicised affair and break up with Jay Kay of Jamiroquai about which, unlike many a celebrity, she is very straightforward. “As soon as I finished the Big Breakfast, I decided to take a year out to spend time with Jay. And of course then when I did spend time with him I realised that we didn’t get on.” She laughs. “We got on much better when I was busy working. It was like getting on really well with a friend who you see at the weekend and then you go on holiday with them and they drive you round the bend”.

She though was driven to take stock. “I didn’t want to do any more presenting”. Why? “Because I had been slated.” Lots of laughter. “And the programmes that I wanted to do wouldn’t consider me any more. After Something For The Weekend they just wouldn’t ask me to do prime time TV, which they had done when I was doing the Big Breakfast. Only then I just hadn’t t felt ready. Now I did, they didn’t want me.” And then the Chicago audition came up.

“To be honest I went to the audition with the eye of the tiger because I was really angry that my relationship had ended. And part of me thought that if I get this I’ve got something to occupy my mind for six months. It was sort of supposed to be my therapy.” In fact it was her making. And although it was a surprise to many, it was going back to where she had begun. “I always wanted to do musical theatre but I got sidetracked into presenting. I started dancing as early as I can remember. I went to a class every night of the week. I was in Les Mis when I was eleven. And then I auditioned for Sandy in Grease in the West End. They really liked me and I got loads of recalls, but I didn’t get the job. I was told that I wasn’t well known enough to get bums on seats. I was so upset. I really wanted the part. So I thought ‘how do I get round this one if they want me to get bums on seats? Maybe I’ll have a go at presenting.’”

She can’t locate this drive and determination. And certainly not in her childhood in Basildon at all. “My mum works with kids as a carer, which she’s really good at, and my dad was a docker when he was young but he’s been a security guard for thirty years. My sister has had the same secretarial job since she left school and my brother is a hairdresser. My parents still live in the same bungalow. No-one in our family really pushes themselves to move onto something else.” Her mum encouraged her when she was young. “She knew I was serious and that my dedication was there form a really young age. And she’s still got a tape of me interviewing her when I was about six and she was doing the ironing. I used to go out on my bicycle and pretend to pick people up and then interview them on the back. I thought I was Des O’Connor. ”

But she turned into a much better interviewer. Lloyd-Webber, who is always full of excitement and praise for his newest discovery, says that when he has told people in the US that she is doing his show it’s surprising how many of them remember her from the Big Breakfast. “Joel Schumacher, who is directing the film of Phantom of the Opera just said ‘she’s very smart that girl’. And she is. She is highly motivated. And also when you meet her she’s not the persona you remember from the Big Breakfast. She has a wonderful endearing comedic sense and a deal of vulnerability.”

Lloyd-Webber stumbled on the idea of re-working Song & Dance around her when the Royal Variety Show, decided in 2001, nothing to do with him, to ask a series of singers, amongst them Donny Osmond and Charlotte Church, to do a set of his songs. Van Outen sang Take That Look Off Your Face. “Afterwards I asked all of them back to the house and she was great fun. We got on very well. I just thought she was a real girl of today and I asked her if she’d ever be interested in doing the show. I was thinking more of TV really.” So then, according to van Outen, “Andrew said would I come over and have a little warble round the piano.” Lloyd-Webber says her voice was a revelation. “She really does have a very listenable voice, it’s a lovely musical instrument and has considerable power.” Van Outen merely says that she has never had a singing lesson in her life.

She is taking a considerable risk with Tell It On A Sunday. She did try it out at Lloyd-Webber’s private summer festival at Sydmonton last year in front of a pretty tough audience of most of the West End producers, not a group of critical easy pushovers at all. And the feedback was promising. And on the verge of starting rehearsals she doesn’t seem in the least fazed or daunted by the prospect of full solo exposure in London. In fact she’s determined to enjoy it. But it’s all down to her.

Whatever happens, after Chicago she won’t get get reviews that are tinged with surprise that she can actually sing or dance. And if she succeeds she will have put her early twenties completely behind her and re-invented herself. “I did my growing up in public. It was a bit of a roller coaster, the presenting”, she says. “After the Big Breakfast, if I am really honest about it I had a mortgage to pay. TV’s really good money and I had people around me saying it would all be great for me. I just thought it would be a laugh. But with Something For The weekend I just never thought that it would have the effect it did and that people would hate it so much.”

Tell Me On A Sunday finally gives her the chance to put the ladette to bed. Even though she says “I never was that. I am the most girly girl you can imagine. I’ve got a shoe collection you wouldn’t believe, thousands of handbags. I paint my nails. I’ve never touched lager in my life. And I hate football. I’m a white wine spritzer girl. An Essex girl tottering around on her high heels with a tiara.” But wow does she scrub up well. Not just as a beauty but as a real live musical star. See her on stage and she has the talent. Just that talking over dinner she simply doesn’t sound like it, which is very sweet. Maybe that is the point.

Smoking in public in America is a sin. The Pope hasn’t pronounced on it yet but you might as well kick cats or steal from children for the disapproval it brings. But Boy George is happily dragging on a fag in a New York hotel lobby and worse, flicking ash onto the marble floor. It’s lunchtime. We’re almost on the tour bus off to Philadelphia and he’s pouting and puffing away. He’s in a terrible mood. He didn’t sleep well and he’s mislaid his credit card. And you can see he doesn’t just want to sulk he wants a fight. But no one, particularly the hotel staff, will play ball. All that’s left is to tease him. It’s a risk but it with no difficulty it provokes a smirk. His grin makes him look 37 going on 6. He knows very well that he’s being a stroppy little chap with his Silk Cut, and that he shouldn’t. But he wants to. He’s being Boy, not George.

He is an extremely mercurial character, simultaneously sophisticated and down-to-earth, man and woman, adult and child. It’s extraordinary now to realise that he even managed to keep the world guessing about his sexuality. But his ambiguity gave him an extraordinary appeal across all ages. From 1982 he had the entertainment world at his feet. He was the Queen of chat shows, as easily coy as he was frank, as charming as he was disarming. Both cuddly and bitchy after hours in make-up he was the love child of Joan Crawford and Rupert Bear. He appeared on the cover of Newsweek once, Rolling Stone three times and on a Diana-challenging string of others. He had a rain forest of newsprint charting his every waking moment, millions of record sales across the globe and three top ten American hits from his band’s debut album – an achievement only equalled by the Beatles. Frankly after all that attention it’s a real surprise that he’s not a total brat. Others do spring to mind.

But from the peak of fame he nosedived almost fatally into heroin. After two years, with two friends dead from overdoses, one in his house in Hampstead, he was arrested and convicted of possession in 1986. With considerable resolve he hauled himself through recovery. Now he feels older and wiser. The eighties icon has moved on to the cleaned up, regularly therapised, emotionally in-touch Nineties. Laughing at himself he knows that it’s true when he says, “Once you stop creating drama, you just change the atmosphere. People have the idea that I’m going to be a nightmare, which can work to my advantage because then I turn out to be much nicer than they think. But the last five years have been so much more enjoyable.” Why? “Because,” he says in his kind of camp throaty gurgle “I’ve stopped being a w***ker.”

Culture Club were huge. And then four years later they died. Their first album in 1983 was called Kissing to be Clever, their last in 1986 prophetically “From Luxury to Heartache”. Their multiple hits were lilting pop tunes whose beguiling melodies glided over the wrought emotions of the lyrics. “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?”, “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya”, “Karma Chameleon”, “Church of the Poisoned Mind” charted worldwide. “Colour By Numbers”, their second album sold six million, but their last just under one, which in industry terms was the death knell.

The four band members were an eclectic bunch drawn from the laundry basket of pop in the eighties. Jon Moss, despite his North London public school background and a Jewish father in retail, had drummed for the manic punk outfits “The Damned” and “The Clash”. Roy Hay with his ridiculous long hair but neat guitar style came from a New Romantic band and Mikey Craig the bass player was, according to George’s autobiography, “black and that was a start”. More importantly for the sound of the band, he was into reggae. They called themselves “Culture Club” because they were a black, a Jew, an Anglo-Saxon and an Irish Queen.

In itself it was a creative rather than explosive combination. But the band that started as ‘Culture Club’ became ‘Boy George and Culture Club’ and finally when George appeared on the cover of Newsweek it was with Annie Lennox rather than with the others in the band. While the three of them were sidelined by the Press and put under enormous pressure by George’s drugs habit, what in the end blew the band apart was the break up of George and Jon Moss’ relationship. Far from “preferring a cup of tea to sex”, George and he had been lovers since the start but now could barely stand the sight of each other. Which makes it all the more surprising that a decade later Culture Club has reformed and is back on tour again and that I’m eating a hideous pork chop with mahi-mahi and zucchini flanked by both of them in the canteen backstage at The Mann Music Centre in Philadelphia.

“I want to tour”, says Moss. “It’s nice that we made up.”
“Made up??” pouts George, his tone sarcasm and affection in equal measure. But later on stage when he introduces each of the band he reserves Jon for last and of course gets him the biggest cheer.

“The Big Re-Wind Tour’ is an Eighties revival, which dramatically foreshortens the meaning of nostalgia. But it’s pulling a healthy 8000 punters a night. What has kick-started this resurgence in The States for Culture Club was a recorded gig in front of a studio audience and a documentary about their bust-up on the adult pop channel VH-1. The support acts are a dated if charming Howard Jones in sandals, whose 10 year old son Osheen videos most of supper, and The Human League who, despite ”Mirror Man” and plenty of other hits, still appear not to have spent any of the money on some singing lessons for the two women in the band. “Don’t be bitchy” says George; “they’re just quirky”. But George is just being generous.

Culture Club are by far and away the stars of the show. Not just on stage but off as well. We travel in two huge tour buses with black frilly borders on the windows, beds, a shower and little Olympic torches as lights. They’re like the kind of bungalows people who wear white stilettos live in. It’s the bus company’s attempt stop the phrase ‘luxury coach travel’ being a contradiction in terms. Touring with Culture Club is like being with The Waltons if it was directed by David Lynch. Everything’s going on between them but no one ever talks about it to each other. Perhaps Mikey is right when he says, “Things don’t need to be said. We’re family.” Yes they are. A dysfunctional family that is somehow highly functional. This is how it works.

George travels in one bus, with his assistant Kevan – surprisingly a Christian and, although dead camp, not gay – and the band’s big Diva singer for the tour, Zee Cowling. The lads – the rest of the band and the three backing musicians – go in another one. But Roy says “Sure I’ll get on his bus now without thinking about it. In the old days I’d never have done that. I really didn’t want to be with him. For this tour he said he wanted his own bus. But then when the three of us fly he says ‘why aren’t you on the bus?’ and when we’re on the bus he says ‘why aren’t you flying?’ ”. George is an emotional pushmipullyu and the two buses are locker room versus powder room. The boys play backgammon and shout a lot. And George does endless, splendidly camp phone interviews with radio stations, leaving donkeys hind-legless all over America. He still gives very good interview. He knows how to push the limits and still stay within bounds. “George Michael? Of course he’s gay, he’s always been gay. He’s Greek, they invented it.” “What makes me happy? Scaffolders smiling at me…” And the day before, on the Letterman show, he completely outflanked his host to the delight of the audience by saying when asked about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky “Well if he asked me to sleep with him, I would. Just to see the Oval Office.” And the audience carried on cheering when he added, accurately playing the current mood of young America, “None of these women were sixteen. They could have said ‘No’”.

The band’s relationships are more complicated than Fleetwood Mac’s. George is still in some kind of love with Jon. Later, in the privacy of the back of the bus Mikey says that George watches Jon the whole time, secretly. But Jon is on the New York leg of the tour with his new love. “The only other person apart from George that I’ve ever felt the bells go off for”, he says. He is talking about Babs. And Babs is a woman and they have a child. This makes George feel simultaneously sweet and awkward. Roy has also got a touch of the ex-es. He’s just been visited by his current girlfriend of three years, 25-year-old Casey, but at the same time by his ex-wife Alison. George and he have bonded a bit over this.

He tells me when he’s on his own “I’m not interested in that bitchy, flamboyant side of George anymore. But I do enjoy him when he’s a regular guy hanging out, when the make-up’s off, you’re having breakfast and laughing about your relationships…. … if he wasn’t gay, George would be a proper South London thug.” Alison and George used to be sworn enemies. Now they’re best of friends, which Roy clearly found pretty difficult. “Alison was making demands and George got right in the middle and loved it,” says Roy a little agitated, “and he started telling me that I’m not treating her right…” At this point I feel I should be charging family therapy fees. But the thought occurs that actually they don’t need it. As a band they have extraordinary chemistry and work together with an ease that only comes from this kind of family dynamic. And years of tearing each other apart.

George is continually rude about Jon even to his face. At one point he says, “Jon’s a good person…” and then adds lethally “.potentially.” It’s as if he can’t help himself. And he endlessly accuses Jon of denying their relationship, which has a certain irony because George was in the closet till almost the end of Culture Club’s first phase, a contradiction he cheerily admits. The fans didn’t know it but all the songs were written about their affair. Jon says in the dressing room “Of course I was in love with George. When I met him he looked so beautiful. In fact it was his fault for looking so great that I fell for him. The relationship was built on love not just sex.” Pause. “Why are you looking at me like that?” To see if your eyes are telling the truth. They were.

This argument ping pongs all the time I’m there. Jon says he loved George. George accuses him of recanting it. George says Jon can never communicate about their affair. And George never stops. When Jon is with the lads, in their dressing room or their bus, he jumps up and down like the playful ten-year-old man in his thirties that he is and jokes about the’ rogue gene’. When he’s with George it’s like he can’t quite make contact with the deep affection he must have once felt. And all the bruises are recorded in George’s frank autobiography “Take It Like A Man”, Moss’ public reaction to which in a magazine interview caused them not to speak for three years until they agreed to reform the band.

Philadelphia was “totty night” according to Jon after the gig. Despite the inevitable presence, when Middle America gets out its glad rags, of a catalogue of women in inappropriate shorts and appliqué, this audience surprised the band by being so young. After the show Roy says of one young man in the crowd that everybody agrees was gorgeous “I thought I was gay until I saw the blonde standing next to him.” George almost drags me back on stage with him for the encore to point out another man in the third row who took off his tee shirt to dance. The Mann Centre is on the schedule for all the major tours. The graffiti in the backstage loos has evidence of Kenny Loggins, The Allman Brothers, Tammy Wynette and all the others who drive their entertainment truck down the middle of the road. So in some ways it’s a surprise to find Culture Club there. But in some ways, maybe not. The crowd is a mix. Suburbia runs riot with young queens and men with pink tattoos. The tee shirts tell of holiday destinations and TV Specials. “Vermont’s Finest” – although finest what it doesn’t specify. “Poltergeist Legacy – Showtime TV”, “The Hard Rock Cafe”, “Puerto Vallenta – Mexico”.

The sign at the gate says “No re-entry”, and then adds in brackets, by way of explanation for those further down the food chain, “If you leave you cannot come back in”. The need for this elucidation becomes clear when it says at the bottom of the list of instructions: “No weapons”. Who on earth would bring a weapon to a Culture Club gig in 1998? Lipstick perhaps, but a gun? Someone might have done in the old days when George made his famous boo- boo at the1983 Grammy Awards. “Thanks America,” he said after they’d won Best New Artist, “you have taste, style and you know a good drag queen when you see one”. Uh-oh. The penny finally dropped for the hard of thinking in unhip USA that he must be a fag. So they burnt the records and stopped giving the band airplay. Perhaps those people would have brought weapons. But now as George says with no regret “I’m not at all shocking any more”. And every one I asked said the same things about him from a vast truck driver whose trousers were so large he looked like he’d shoplifted a duvet and who’d been a fan since the start in 1982 to a stick thin 16 year old improbably dressed in platform shoes, a drape frock, necklace and diving goggles. “Why do I like him? He dared to be himself”. “It’s just that he is so honest”. And the gig wasn’t bad either.

After the show Mikey was cock-a-hoop. He travelled back to New York on George’s bus. There had been sound problems, admirably coped with by Botty, the stage sound engineer who looked like something out of The Hobbit with his dreadlocks, shorts, beard and paunch and with whom George had had mime conversations all through the gig. The band had overcome the difficulties and Mikey felt that they had “really gone for it”.

The show is 13 of the hits straight through, then another two, Victims and Karma Chameleon, for the industry standard First Encore and then Bowie’s Starman to finish. It felt a lot more than a trip down memory lane. Any initial doubts were dispelled by the fact that they were always a good live band. As Roy said, having been away from playing live and instead buried in making film scores in LA for amongst other things Fitz the US version of Cracker “there is a real chemistry in the band”. Why? “Because George doesn’t play an instrument.” On stage the balance is reasserted. Together Roy and George were the main songwriters and what they produced was never based on technology. “There are no tricks. What you see is what we play.” says Roy “It doesn’t feel electric. The production technique is classic so it doesn’t sound dated.”

Mikey is still energised by the gig. “I could see that in Crying Game George was having such problems that he wanted to stop. But he didn’t.” “I don’t believe in stopping,” says George posturing a tiny bit and the conversation turns to his book. “He such a liar,” says Mikey to his face, “it makes me out to be a real stud. And I wasn’t….. really”. Talk meanders around the history of the band and Mikey says, “Jon and George were so powerful, I couldn’t fight it. So I retreated. But I don’t regret the course the band took. George and Jon were the core.”

The following day, worried that he might have felt inhibited, I ask him to talk on his own. He says nothing different than the night before. “I really do like George a lot.” Did he run the band? “No he was the focal point and he did know how to use it. But I see him as someone who is very vulnerable and all the make-up was a way to gain strength and overcome his vulnerability. It’s because he was vulnerable that I felt attracted to him as a person.”

Mikey was the one who had pushed most consistently for the band to reform, along with Roy. He had pumped money into a record label, which he had eventually sold and after bad tax advice when the band split, was faced with a bill for tax on Culture Club royalties of over £1m. “I just hope it went on welfare and not bombs,” he says wistfully. We were also in a terrible contract for the years of the band. We must have earned Virgin at least £60m but we didn’t get more than £2m to £3m each. Although I’m not complaining.” He is cautiously optimistic about the band coming back together. “You’re only as good as your last record, but when we got into the first rehearsal I just knew it was going to work. Of course we all rehearsed for weeks but George wasn’t there until the end. I think it probably frightens him.”

It’s a characteristically generous remark. As Roy says “Mikey is all heart”. And he does something very sweet as we draw our first conversation to an end. With a gentle boyish smile he says, like a pupil proudly announcing their project, “Before we stop I’d like to say a little about my wife”. He then goes on to sing the praises of Lilliana, a much younger Italian whom he met in a club 7 years ago. Mikey’s contribution to the unconventionality of the band’s various relationships is that he had two children when he was very young by the daughter of the Women’s Aid campaigner Erin Pizzey. But the two were taken away by their grandmother who decided he was a bad influence, and he barely saw them for a number of years. However Amber, his stunning daughter, has joined him in New York. And he says of Lilliana, clearly talking about his children as much as about previous girlfriends, “I was very lazy in relationships and she’s taught me how to work at them. She’s a real inspiration to me.” It’s properly touching.

On the second day in the no smoking lobby Jon Moss is chipper. “Morning boy chick, give us a kiss”. It’s more Lionel Blair than serious, but I do get a proper smacker on the cheek. He flirts for the world. They are all leaving New York so he is saying goodbye to Babs and his son and Mikey is leaving Amber. The tour manager is arguing about the bill, unaware that he is standing next to Jason Alexander from Seinfeld who has been at his co-star’s Opening Night on Broadway. As Alexander passes I say, “You’re a very funny man”. He says “Thank you” George waits until he’s out of earshot and says tartly “That show never makes me laugh”. And I’m not sure if it’s jealousy. So I ask him and he says “No. I just don’t think it’s funny”.

The bill takes an hour and a half to settle but they save $5,500. Finally we are on our way to Wallingford, two hours from Boston but a million miles from the Ivy League. The Oakdale Centre is a modern entertainment complex with an eight thousand seater indoor theatre. In rural Massachusetts, it looks like a machine that you put the cows in one end and steaks come out the other. As we drive in, starting on another comedy riff, Jon says in a pig sticking country American accent “Tonight the fat queer and his funny friends….” Inside the atmosphere is like a huge hotel lobby. Crowds mingle drinking the “champagne demi-splits” for $4.95. One of the sponsors has parked a brand new car in the middle of the foyer. Someone is trying to buy it. At the back of the auditorium where The Circle would be in real life, are the Platinum Club Private Suites. They look like airline Executive Lounges. And they are a weird thing to find at a live gig. You can sit on a sofa next to an occasional table and watch the show from behind glass and thus give yourself the simultaneous feeling of being on a night out and a night in.

George introduces the band by saying “it’s so great to come back to America and not kill each other…” They are playing even better than the previous night. “How many queens are there?” At least 40% of the audience hollers and puts up their hands, including one obviously married man and woman. “I don’t care what you’re into”, George responds to the huge cheer, “as long as you’re a lovely person”. Again they lift the roof.

Why do they so take to him? It may be because, oddly enough, he’s not in the least mysterious. What he does is expose possibilities as much for eccentricity as for sexuality. He is a wonderful fusion of opposites and is exotic without being out of reach. He expresses his contradictions unequivocally, and he shows his insecurities with absolute confidence. And the four of them in the band are so much more together than alone. They are that rare thing – the coincidence of individual talents with just the right moment. Never mind how much they bitch about one another they are glad to be back together. It’s a kind of home.

The gig ends with a typically George moment. Some pencil thin little queen who has been desperate to get near his hero has finally managed to climb on stage. He is such a sliver that a pensioner with a Zimmer frame would bowl him over. But the goons at the front of the stage decide he’s a major security risk. They first throw him off the stage and when he climbs back, despite George’s pleas, throw him out of the auditorium. George lets loose at the guards, throws a wobbler and won’t come back for an encore. Hay is stomping around in the dressing room wagging his finger in mock anger “Tell The Boy, we’re not happy with him”. And they aren’t, because they were having such a good time they wanted to do the encore. George however has already got over his temper. And backstage the two camps are doing characteristically different things. George is talking to a woman he knows from England who is a macrobiotic cook and who is at a conference close by. Amid much chat about purification and tofu, she agrees to come and cook for him for a week in London. Meanwhile the others are covering a different conversational terrain. “I burped all through your song tonight” says one of them to Dee. “Well I farted through your solo”, she replies. And I’m thinking just how really different they are from George, when one of them says to me “You don’t want to be on stage when George farts. He does really violent ones right by you and then just moves away.” As George says, “underneath all this make-up I’m just an Irish labourer with a hairy chest.”

Whether the band succeeds in reuniting will depend as much as anything on whether they can re-invent their fan base and appeal beyond the sentimental historians who remember the Eighties. As one senior A&R man says, “George has a whiff of the Danny La Rue about him. But he can appeal to the blue rinse brigade and at the same time be quite current. In fact what’s saved him has been his career as a DJ. Being in demand to do something creative has put him on the cutting edge.” He straddles the market. This month he has continued to DJ at the hippest of clubs and also recorded one of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s songs, ‘Try not to be afraid’, for an album of the Songs from Whistle Down the Wind, which also includes Tom Jones, Meatloaf and Boyzone. The others in the band are separately confident that Culture Club has a new future. There is a single out in October “I Just Wanna Be Loved”, another piece of soft sounding seductive reggae masking psychological trauma, and the inevitable Greatest Hits album. And the signs are good because George and Roy have already had a fight about the video for the single which is full of drag queens preening to the camera and could happily be re-named ‘I just wanna be filmed. “Roy rang his ex-wife and said it was ‘a f***ing freak show’. And I thought ‘Roy hates it, oh my God, we’re back’ ”. And if America is anything to go by, they might just be.