UK, BBC, Sketch, BBC1 Sun 10pm, 1986
Starring: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Deborah Norton

Stephen Fry was born in 1957, Hugh Laurie in 1959; they met in the early 1980s when both at Cambridge. Fellow student Emma Thompson recommended Fry when Laurie was looking around for someone to help him write a pantomime. The two discovered a common sense of humour and began to work together regularly. After guest appearances on various programmes, and an instructive time as part of the Alfresco team, they graduated to their own show.

A Bit Of Fry And Laurie was a witty and sophisticated entertainment of consistent high quality, with an old-fashioned revue-type atmosphere and oddly 'British' sketches that rejoiced in literary turns of phrase and elaborate wordplay. The delicate innuendos, coupled with Fry's ability to suggest hidden meanings in everyday phrases, gave the impression that bubbling below the innocent surface were lewd undercurrents threatening to burst through, although they never did. To add to this mix, Hugh Laurie demonstrated his keyboard talents with parodies of musical genres.

The pair have subsequently distinguished themselves as workaholic Renaissance Men with individual successes in many fields including the stage, feature films and literature, with both Fry and Laurie - the former with perhaps the most distinction - enjoying best-selling successes as novelists.

Note. Highlights from the TV series were compiled into a pair of half-hour audio programmes, broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 11 and 18 August 1994.

- Researched and written by Mark Lewisohn.

These photos can be found in various sizes as wallpaper at the BBC Guide to Comedy - the third photo is from the Cambridge Footlights Club. The page also features a few clips from the show.

A Bit of Fry and Laurie screencaps, series 1 A few video clips from series 1 - These do not represent all sketches, only a few. Buy the DVD if you can afford it! Clip 1 Clip 2 Clip 3 Clip 4 Clip 5 Clip 6 Clip 7

Screencaps from Series 2 - Episodes 1-6

Screencaps from Series 4 - Episodes 1-7 Video clips Song about Steffi Graff, Rapping with Stephen, The Sophisticated Song

A few more pictures of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie can be found in the gallery and the Jeeves and Wooster page

amysusanne has donated a ticket to A Bit of Fry and Laurie, with a map to the studio on the back:

Articles - More can be found on the Articles Page

Other Articles about the Sherlock Holmes project:

[Excerpt]

HUGH Laurie has revealed how he and comic partner Stephen Fry agonised over their TV sketch shows. Although such series as A Bit of Fry and Laurie were well received, they themselves never felt totally happy with them.

``We were never really satisfied,'' says Hugh, whose latest comic offering is playing Paul Slippery in ITV's Fortysomething.``We tried our damnedest to get those sketches to work and always felt we never quite made it.''Sketches area young person's thing,'' says Hugh.44.

The playwright Simon Gray once called Stephen Fry "the man who wasn't there", after Fry famously did a bid a bunk from Gray's West End play, Cell Mates, in 1995 - intimating that you could talk to Fry for years and never get to know him. How much, then, for my chances of understanding the great polymath in 50 minutes over a pot of tea at the Groucho Club?

But then celebrity interviews are almost always akin to speed dating - and the best you can usually hope for is to form an impression. It helps that Fry is expansively voluble at "home" in Groucho's (he's a founding member of the London club) - his rich, fruity voice audible from the other end of the bar as I enter. He begins by asking whether my name is pronounced in the French manner (such a Stephen Fry thing to do, that; like an interested society hostess), before launching into an extensive anecdote about how scientists have discovered that human sperm is attracted to the scent of lily of the valley.

He's holding court to promote the new series of QI, the BBC2 comedy quiz show he hosts, and he thinks that sperm's attraction to lily of the valley is typical of QI's function of being both amusing and informative. "Alan Davies, one of our regular panellists, can be surreally funny about the idea of giving sperm flowers to smell, while I make the point that there will be people alive in 20 years because of it," says Fry, quickly finding his stride. "The fact is that people have always wondered what it is that drives the sperm towards the ovum and it was always assumed that there would be a receptor on the sperm..."

Well, yes, great, but we must move on. One journalist compared interviewing Fry to listening to the radio, but that's unfair. It's a bit of a performance, sure. And he could talk the hind legs off an armchair, but only if you let him. He's quite happy to take direction and answer your questions.

QI is from the same school of television as Have I Got News for You, and Alan Davies is (sort of) the Paul Merton to Fry's Ian Hislop. Or as Fry puts it, "I become the sort of querulous schoolmaster and he becomes the naughty monkey who doubts the value of all these facts."

On the subject of Have I Got News for You, is it true that Fry was offered the job as Angus Deayton's successor, and turned it down? As he told one reporter who asked him about Deayton, "He takes coke and has slept with a prostitute - but he's a TV presenter for God's sake."

"There is an old saying amongst players of chemin de fer and baccarat, `Never take over a winning bank'," he says now. "It was a show in a good state and it could only go downhill from there. Also, I thought they dealt with Angus very shoddily. I think if they'd just held on for a couple of weeks the whole thing would have blown over. And I thought Paul [Merton] and Ian [Hislop] were a bit mean to him, and the atmosphere didn't seem very nice to be around.

"I like the fact that there is none of that with us; so far, there haven't been any hissy fits on QI and there's no competitiveness about who's the funniest or who's getting the most airtime."

Fry had originally wanted to be a regular guest on QI, not its host. "Perhaps I have a completely misplaced view of my own acting abilities, but I think the more you become a personality on television, the less likely you are to get acting roles. You know, you don't offer Jonathan Ross parts in movies."

That Fry did accept the presenter's role says a lot about his thirst for knowledge (or, as he puts it, "my own rather nerdy love of facts"), the sort of thirst that had him, as a child, allegedly learning the whole of The Guinness Book of Records. "I didn't learn the whole thing, that really would be weird," he says, "but I did learn rather large sections of it - particularly things like the longest attacks of hiccups, or sneezing fits. I had a big poster of Daniel Lambert, who was the Fat Man of Stamford... fat leaking out over his shoes. I obviously knew what I was going to become."

The love of facts, he says, stems from his father, the physicist and inventor Alan Fry, and he offers this rather sweet Boys Own picture of life with the Fry family in 1960s Norfolk (he has an older brother, Roger, and a younger sister, Jo). "We might just be talking and a word would be used such as `bivouac' and he'd say `I wonder where that comes from' and he would always go and look it up and we would crowd round the dictionary and say `oh look,' it comes from that'."

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that the next acting role in which we'll see Fry (sometime around Christmas) is that of the great 19th-century educationalist Thomas Arnold in ITV's new version of Tom Brown's Schooldays. What? ITV, the home of Bad Girls and Footballers' Wives, is filming a book by the archetypal muscular Christian about the birth of the modern public school?

"I know what you're getting at", says Fry. "We live in a world where people are constantly using the dreadful word `relevant'. It's as relevant as any story could be - bullying is one of the hot-button issues of our day, and Flashman is the archetypal bully."

Fry says it was his "duty" to research Arnold thoroughly, but when it came to playing the Eminent Victorian ("more of a Hanoverian, really"), he had to wear that knowledge lightly. "You can't play somebody who happens to be simultaneously writing the complete apparatus criticus on Thucydides, penning five sermons a week and who was also Regus Professor of Oxford while being headmaster of Rugby. You can't wear that on your face."

I had asked him about researching Arnold because I was wondering about a fairly common perception of Fry, that he sometimes tends, whether unwittingly or not, to play himself. It's a fear that has certainly been voiced by some Sherlock Holmes scholars on learning of Fry's intention of playing the great detective for TV, with Hugh Laurie as Dr Watson. But first there is a more immediate obstacle to this particular role.

"I've given myself six months to lose 40 stone", he jokes. "I think I ought to. It's very noticeable that words like `lean' and `cadaverous' are used in Holmes but words like `lard arse' are not. Not once does Conan Doyle say, `Holmes wobbled over to his chair and sat down and stuck a pipe into one of his chins', Fry continues, doubling up with laughter. Collapse, as they say, of the stout party.

With Fry playing Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth for ITV, and Rupert Everett donning the deerstalker for the BBC, this is surely the first time we've had two gay Holmeses. "I don't know about the private life of William Gillette, the first movie Holmes, and I can't believe that Basil Rathbone was camp," says Fry, greatly amused by the thought.

Fry himself has been openly gay for ages, although for many years he was famously celibate, claiming disgust at the idea of "rubbing the wet slimy bits" of his body over other people. Now, though, he's been with his partner, Daniel Cohen, for "eight years and two months", and, he says, learning to be "less obsessed with work and achievement".

"There's also this lovely thing, the first person plural, that for 15 years I never really knew. People would ask me, `Have you seen that film?', and I used to say, `Yes, I saw that'. Now it's so nice to say, `Yes, we saw that'. It's a very pleasing, deep human need just to say `we'. `We like that, don't we, dear?', that sort of thing."

Fry and Cohen divide their time between Norfolk and Hampstead, and he has talked of great drinking binges (he claims to have given up drugs) in the capital. "That's true when I've been writing up in Norfolk," he says. "Because I write in chaste purity, and, indeed, almost in physical ecstasy, because I barely eat, I get up very early, and all I really have is coffee and cigarettes. I'll do that for months and months, and when I've finished I'll come down to London and have large, spacious evenings..."

This is a man who socialises with Prince Charles and Peter Mandelson, as well as the usual roster of comedian friends. Who does he go "larging" with in London?

"Hugh Laurie, Ben Elton... But surely you're above wanting to know about my showbiz pals?" Not at all, I assure him, but he's moved on... "I have a particular fondness for restaurateurs. Some of my best friends are cooks and chefs - they know how to have a good evening."

The young, however, he feels have lost the knack of entertaining. "Kids don't seem to have the energy to do anything remarkable or imaginative. In the 1920s, if people had a party, they had an extraordinary theme. You know, the Sitwells would have a `paradox party' where you had to come as a new paradox. But now invitations come covered in banners like a bad website. People can't be bothered to throw a party without getting it sponsored by vodka manufacturers or ghastly luxury goods companies such as Luis Vuitton. It's so squalid and dispiriting."

All of which makes Fry sounds like a grumpy old man, something he denies. "I was asked to be on that Grumpy Old Men programme and I refused because I said, `If I go on, I will be grumpy about grumpy old men.' I think there's nothing more pathetic than people moaning about mobile phones."

In fact, one consistent claim by Fry over the years is his absolute dread of becoming bourgeois. "There's a line in Howards End... Leonard Bast - he's 17 and a clerk in the City - and Helen's looking at him and she uses the damning phrase, `He'd given up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a set of ideas'. I'd hate that. I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way."

I cannot ask what the next transformation might be, for our time is up and he's off, leaving the impression of someone who both genuinely enjoys his intellect and can wield it like a defensive forcefield. Either way, he seems jolly happy, and, to use Fry's own words when describing scientists discovering sperm's attraction to lily of the valley, he is "oddly endearing".

`QI' returns to BBC2 on Wednesday at 10pm

COPYRIGHT 2004 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd

For Stephen Fry, who identifies with lookalike and favourite character Oscar Wilde, wit is a vital ingredient of life. The British actor and author, who has now fulfilled an ambition to become a movie director, talks to MARGARET AGNEW.

British wit Stephen Fry is one of those mind-bogglingly accomplished people. With countless theatre, TV, and movie performances, seven books, and now his directorial debut, he laughingly agrees: "It's a very stringy bow I've got."

The directorial debut, Bright Young Things, is his adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies.

Fry says: "I always hoped that, before I was tossed out of the basket and my life was over, that I would direct a film.

"Various scripts had been sent to me with a view to me maybe directing it, but I always knew that the thing about film directors -- because I have friends who are film directors and have worked with many -- is that in the time it takes to direct one film, I could be in seven films and two television series and write a novel and have a life left over as well. But directing a film is an absolute commitment of time and passion, and therefore ought to be something where I feel I wouldn't get bored in the end.

"When someone suggested this to me, as a writer originally, `Would I write this adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies?' I did it with great pleasure. It was not an easy task, as adapting books isn't, especially ones like this where the structure's quite hard to get a handle on. Then, when it was put to me: will I direct it, I thought `To hell with it. Why not?' Because in this life you only regret the things you've not done, you never really regret the things you have done. To have said no would have been an act of cowardice in a way."

Stephen Fry says the response to Bright Young Things has generally been very good in England.

"It's had some fantastic reviews. I don't think it's had any stinkers, or at least if it has I haven't been shown them and I really don't want to know about them."

Some have, by Fry's own admission, been completely over the top. "One, in the News of the World, which is our leading tabloid, said `this is the best British period film ever', which I think is a wonderful thing to put on the poster, but to say it's better than Lawrence of Arabia would be going a bit far. But I'm very very touched that they would say that."

As well as a bunch of talented young actors, Fry has gathered an array of famous older ones such as Dan Aykroyd, Jim Broadbent, Peter O'Toole, Stockard Channing, Simon Callow and Richard E. Grant. He's also got veteran British actor Sir John Mills taking class-A drugs. How did he manage to round up such a sterling cast?

"Well, in the case of John Mills, I've had the great privilege for many years of being a friend of his and I was having tea with him one afternoon while in pre-production. And he said, `So, is there a part in the film for me?' and I said `Well, Johnny, there is an old man', and I explained what the old man does and how he borrows what he thinks is snuff from the fellow sitting next to him, and he said, `Oh, goodie! My first first coke movie!'

"As for Peter O'Toole and Dan Aykroyd and so on, well, more or less through the usual channels. I'd known Peter O'Toole a little ... we'd watched cricket matches together in the past. Dan Aykroyd I'd never met, but he knew of me and we had mutual friends, and so when he was approached he was very enthusiastic about doing it, which was a great coup really because he brings exactly the right quality to the character.

"The character Lord Monomark is a Canadian based very specifically on Lord Beaverbrook, who comes not far from where Dan Aykroyd was born and he really understood that and he does the exact
It's safe to say it's not his cameo as a chaffeur in Bright Young Things, "Nor is it the judge in the Spice Girls movie," he says drily. "I would have to say it is all those three (Wilde, Jeeves and Melchitt) in different ways. I mean, the sheer pleasure and joy of playing someone as irredeemably silly ant's not his cameo as a chaffeur in Bright Young Things, "Nor is it the judge in the Spice Girls movie," he says drily. "I would have to say it is all those three (Wilde, Jeeves and Melchitt) in different ways. I mean, the sheer pleasure and joy of playing someone as irredeemably silly and mad -- barking in every sense of the word -- as Melchitt, was fantastically enjoyable. Working with friends in front of an audience and the excitement of those recordings was just marvellous. It was great fun. We didn't quite know how successful it was going to be, and so it's very thrilling that a new generation are discovering it.

"Jeeves -- I was passionate about P. G. Wodehouse from a very early age and collected his books with a mad zest, and wrote to him when I was a schoolboy and got a letter back from him, and when it came time to play one of his most famous characters, Jeeves, it was obviously a great thrill and I loved working with Hugh, it's always a great joy.

"But in sheer terms of a once in a lifetime opportunity, one has to say -- I'm not the kind of actor who's offered the part that Brad Pitt has just turned down, so there's not many leads for people who look like me -- but when one comes along like Oscar Wilde -- where I do fit, you know, that I do look like him -- it is a fantastic thrill to play such a major and extraordinary character.

"To try and bring to a generation that may not have known much more of him than his reputation as a wit, to try and suggest his gravity, his sweetness of nature, his kindness, all the qualities about him that people forget. They think he's just this preening peacock who just throws off bons mots every two seconds -- `Ho ho ho! How witty, Oscar!' They forget the gentleness of the man and the awfulness of what happened to him. So that was in a sense a career high as an actor, no question."

Any plans to work with Hugh Laurie in future?

"Oh, yes! We exchange email on a regular basis. We had to fly off the same day so we had dinner the night before -- he going off to Namibia and me going off to Melbourne -- we were talking about this. We love each other so much. I'm godfather to his children and his wife is one of my very best friends as well. They all spend Christmas at my house in Norfolk. Indeed his oldest child, who's 15, has never had Christmas anywhere else -- none of them has. So we talked about maybe doing something in the sense of us writing something together and directing it together, and seeing what might come of that."

Comedy's often described as the hardest form of theatre to do well, but Fry has never found this to be the case. "I have never separated comedy from any other kind of acting.

"For me, life is full of laughter, and seriousness, all happening at the same time, continuously and around about each other. And sometimes I watch some sort of soap opera or serious drama, and 10 minutes will pass with groups of people in a pub or shouting at each other and having rows and there's no laughter. And I'll think, `I've never been to this planet'. And yet nobody ever questions this. Humour is part of what life is. In terms of wit and using one's tongue savagely or charmingly or seductively, using wit to do those things, that to me is -- it's part of the reality of life, I suppose. But it's certainly true that farce and slapstick and comedy as pure comedy is hard because no-one will agree, while you're rehearsing, when you're planning, exactly what is funny."

While Fry's sense of wit is not in dispute, his perceived image sometimes is, and by the actor himself. He was once described as being "made of tweed".

"One's friends have some sense of who one is sometimes, and one's family and one's loved ones. But there is this other you that people perceive, who've not met you, or haven't spent much time with you -- that sort of strange hyper-Englishness or something, and a sort of old- fashionedness. I love computers, I love gadgets, there's much about me that's untweedy. I mean, I'm not particularly fond of modern pop music and never listen to it. It sort of washes over me.

"I'm not a total old fogey. Nonetheless, I can see why people might think that. A lot of members of my generation are a lot hipper than I am, a lot cooler, and a lot less measured in their language, perhaps. Or whatever it is that people spot in me. But I think it's very dangerous to assume it or play up to it. One just lets people think what they like."

It probably doesn't help that Fry has been playing much older characters for such a long time. It sometimes surprises people to discover he is only 45.

"Hugh Laurie says that when he met me at university, I was 50 and I've been getting a bit younger ever since."

There are many things that people don't know about Fry, such as he's Jewish, likes bowls, and is a great fan of Peru's spectacled bear.

Other things his fans may be surprised to learn: "I suppose the way that I'm quite a lad, in a way. I like hanging out with straight male friends who play snooker and poker and talk about football. I'm a very sliced-up sort of person. The next night I might go with some friends to watch some ballet or look at an art exhibition, and screech around camply. I don't know. I seem to be all things to all people sometimes and I wonder if I have a self."

Fry was brought up an atheist and -- perhaps in that search for self -- later removed the "a". He studied theology and famously spent 16 years celibate.

Spiritually, he says that nowadays he is "sort of hanging around in the distance. I'm not a great admirer of any of the established churches that exist in the Christian communion, certainly. But I'm very interested in theology. I think it's a very interesting way of looking at the world, and I have a passionate hatred of what you might call evangelism -- the belief that truth resides in a book which is revealed to you as truth.

"I don't think we should suspend our intelligence and what we actually know about the world now to pretend that these bibles or korans or whatever were somehow given to man. They are part of the mythological journey that man has made in writing down things and telling stories and a lot of them are made up and ridiculous, and some of them contain laws and prescriptions that may once have been appropriate in the desert but certainly aren't now. Like eating kosher food and so on, and tribal taboos which still exist in some cultures and don't in others, about sleeping with people of your own gender, or not sleeping with them. But I'm damned if I'm going to have my life controlled by people who tell me that such things are `the ultimate truth'. I find that deeply, deeply personal and upsetting.

"And it's threatening the world, because there are people being blown up, and God knows what else, all on the basis of people who choose to insist upon their interpretation of a book."

Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's interpretation of Evelyn Waugh's book Vile Bodies, opened in New Zealand on Boxing Day. Review, D5.

Stephen Fry is a well-known British actor and comedian, who has also written several books, saved the lives of several of Peru's spectacled bears, and has recently directed his first feature film, Bright Young Things.

His perfect Friday night involves good friends, extremely expensive, extremely good wine, and dinner in London.

"Perfect Friday Night? The perfect Friday night starts about 5.30pm. I run a bath with a particularly good and expensive bath oil, and I love running the bath with music on.

"It's probably going to be something like the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde or the Liszt B minor sonata, or something like that -- some good bath music. Then I wrap myself up in a big fluffy bath towel, and I slowly lay out the clothes I'm going to wear for a dinner party.

"The dinner party will be in one of my favourite restaurants in London, which may be Le Caprice or The Ivy. It's going to have Hugh Laurie there and Jools Holland and a few other friends of mine that I love. We're going to go and drink fantastic wine. This time we're going to have the La Tache and we're going to have the Montrachet Chateau Yquem (I might try to put a New Zealand wine in there to please you). And the food is just going to be fabulous.

"Then we're going to go on to a club and by that I don't mean a nightclub, I mean a gentlemen's club, a London sort of club, where we're going to play snooker, and drink brandy, and smoke cigars. Then I'll go home and I'll drift off slowly and drunkenly and bibulously to sleep. That'll do me."

Margaret Agnew

Stephen Fry's directorial debut, Bright Young Things, is scheduled to be released in New Zealand cinemas on New Year's Day.

STEPHEN FRY, former celibate and Britain's favourite neurotic comic genius, is only too pleased to tell anyone who enquires that his life has been transformed by a live-in lover.

Indeed, Fry, 44, frequently lavishes praise on the man he proudly calls his 'boyfriend' and who shares his [pound]1million home in Hampstead, North London.

According to Fry, his partner is an excellent cook who escorts him to discreet dinner parties at the homes of celebrity friends such as Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie. He has, in short, inspired the star back to work and sanity.

But in the six years since they were introduced through a mutual friend, Fry has never once uttered his partner's name in public and goes to great lengths to keep his identity a secret.

And yet the young man concerned has a background at least as fascinating as Fry's - who, as a card-carrying celebrity, feels entitled to talk fulsomely about his own loneliness, mental state and attitudes to sex, love and life.

Indeed, he is remarkably frank about his sex life. In an interview in 1999 he said: 'Yes, it is good. Of course it is. Splendid. After 15 years without it.'

Now, for the first time, we can reveal the extraordinary story of the 33-year-old dyed blond whose devotion 'saved' Fry - and who has not only experienced rather mixed fortunes himself but has a bizarre European family which claims to have aristocratic lineage.

Fry's love is Daniel Cohen, a former makeup and vitamin salesman who, until he moved in with the star, lived in a council flat.

According to friends, Cohen was frequently out of work and suffered from depression.

His mother is the improbablynamed Gertrude, Baroness Von Posch, a flamboyant 60-year-old who owns a porcelain shop in Jermyn Street where she counts Princess Michael of Kent as one of her regular customers.

Throughout his 20s, Daniel worked at his mother's shop and is still listed as a director of the company. He has introduced her to Fry who is said to delight in hearing Gertrude, (or Gerda, as she is known among friends and family) recount the latest gossip about the Royals.

In an interview last February, Fry gleefully boasted that his partner's family were lifelong friends of the Queen Mother's stewards, 'so we get inside dirt on Clarence House'.

Despite his dislike of publicity, friends say Daniel loves socialising. He and Fry have a wide circle of showbusiness friends and are known to have dined at The Ivy restaurant, a celebrity haunt, and attended film screenings.

Daniel also spends much of his time cooking and likes to entertain at the elegant home which Stephen bought three years ago and which they have decorated together.

They also retreat to the star's rambling Victorian farmhouse near Swaffham, Norfolk, and are occasional guests in the directors' box at Norwich City with Delia Smith.

A friend said: 'Daniel has had his problems and his family are rather unconventional but, perhaps because of that, he has been very good for Stephen. He is highly intelligent and a real homemaker. He makes Stephen feel good about himself for the first time in his life.'

In many ways, they have much in common. Both are, to use Fry's phrase, 'half-Jewish' - in Fry's case through his mother, a Hungarian, and in Daniel's by his father, computer analyst Meyer Cohen. Like Stephen, Daniel suffered the debilitating effects of depression.

Although on the surface they would appear to come from hugely different backgrounds - Fry is from solidly middleclass Norfolk and went to public school before Cambridge - the star is said to be fascinated by Gerda and her contacts.

A flamboyant character, Gerda is as far removed from Fry's repressively English upbringing as it is possible to be. But it is her bizarre aristocratic heritage which is likely to have intrigued Fry the most. As he said: 'To some extent I am a snob . . . in that I am capable of being amused by people whose lives are slightly different because they are from a long line of dukes or because they control 700 companies.'

Gerda certainly appears to fit the bill. She inherited her love of Herend, the delicate porcelain in which her shop, Von Posch, specialises, from her Hungarian mother. 'I could not live without it,' she said last week.

She claims that her father was an Austrian diplomat called Baron Otto Von Posch, but on her marriage certificate plain Otto Posch is listed as a retired architect. Otto fled German occupation of Austria with his wife and three daughters and settled in Switzerland, where Gerda attended a boarding school.

In 1960, at her father's behest, she came to England to 'learn to speak properly'.

After finishing her schooling, she took a job in Liberty's and later worked at Fortnum & Mason as a buyer. After marrying Meyer Cohen in 1964, they set up home in Stanmore, Middlesex.

'We were married for 14 years but it didn't work out,' she said. 'I had met him at a ball but my father wasn't pleased at all because I was supposed to marry this baron.' As Gerda admits, not only is her title meaningless in her home country of Austria - all titles were abolished in 1919 after it became a republic - but using it is an offence.

'I am not allowed to use my title in Austria,' she said. 'But I can use it in Britain. I went back to my maiden name after I got divorced. When I inherited the title I had to sign a document which said I could not use it legally. It is not on my birth certificate or passport.'

Mysteriously, when The Mail on Sunday looked into Gerda's claims last week, we could find no trace of a Baron Von Posch.
Gerda, however, is not the kind of woman who entertains much selfdoubt and she is already said to be looking to safeguard the future of the family name.

'Gerda is very keen for Daniel to take her name so he too can be a Von Posch,' says a friend.

When asked about her son, all she would say was: 'Daniel is in public relations. I am very proud of him.' A view echoed, in his inimitably eccentric way, by Stephen Fry.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Solo Syndication Limited

SOME things in life are unaccountable and the whos and whys of Peter Mandelson's true friendships are among them. That, on St Valentine's Day, I am in a hotel in Covent Garden listening to Stephen Fry praise the "niceness" of Peter Mandelson is particularly perplexing, for Fry is the model of affability and candour and, well, Mandelson is not. I can only think, I tell him, that Mandelson speaks to that part of Stephen Fry that no longer exists.

In his 1997 autobiography, Moab is My Washpot, Fry lacerates the malevolence of his childhood and adolescence, years, as he puts it, of "lonely lies and public exposures". He was Sly Fry, a thief, a cheat and a liar, and he hated himself. Perhaps, I wonder aloud, Fry shows the empathy and pity of a reformed professional manipulator for a rank amateur.
He agrees. In fact, he once profiled Mandelson in the Big Issue and concluded he was "dangerously naive" - although Mandelson might have persuaded him to remove the "dangerously".

"But he is very naive. I've always felt that about Peter. I remember showing him the first website he'd ever seen. It wasn't that long before the election and I was showing him the Tory website and the Labour web-site and he said, 'Oh, so how does that work?', and I was saying, 'Look, the Tories have got John Major talking, saying, "Hello, welcome to our website"' - which was quite wacky back then - 'and here's a list of all the Labour MPs that have got email addresses', and there were about four of them."

And part of Mandelson's naivety was, surely, thinking he could conceal his homosexuality from public view?

"And why should he want to? It hasn't affected Chris Smith or, you know, what's his name, the farming chap. Nobody gives a toss, do they? I'm in a different world but, even so, if I had not been so obviously and manifestly who I was, people would have been far more interested. A pretty good defence mechanism is to be open. But also, I think, without being too priggish and sanctimonious about it, it's a kind of responsibility if you're in public life. If you don't feel ashamed and you don't feel anybody should feel ashamed of things like that, then you help other people by being open."

A few years ago, Fry suggested that a Stonewall event should feature a wardrobe on stage from which a succession of closet gay actors would come "out". When his friend John Sessions pleaded that he had not told his octogenarian, Presbyterian parents about his sexuality, Fry abandoned the plan, accepting that although they might in their hearts know, they did not necessarily want to be told.

Nevertheless, he had told his own parents when he was 19, after a year at Cambridge.

"I don't think I needed to in the sense that it was imparting information that they were already pretty much sure of. My mother knew because I was so fond of her and I don't think my father was particularly surprised either."

But although he was openly gay by the time he embarked on his career in TV comedy and films, Fry was soon better known for his sexual abstinence. He went almost entirely without sex for 16 years, a marathon born of a lack of confidence - he was, he said, the last person he would fancy at a party - and sustained by throwing insults at the squelchy indignity of the act itself. It was not until May 1996 that he struck up with a proper boyfriend. Fry has never announced who this man who shares his homes in West Hampstead and Norfolk actually is, but he is obviously enthusiastic about him. There has already today been a "very romantic breakfast" and "splendidly romantic" exchange of valentine gifts.

It is a slightly comic vision, for Fry is a big, masculine man, this afternoon dressed in the heavy, double-breasted chalk-stripe suit of a banker. Like all the best British character actors - Robert Morley, Alastair Sim, Peter Ustinov - he has grown into his public persona. The old-fashioned virtues he now so solidly represents at the age of 43 include wit, geniality, intellect (a prep school IQ test concluded he was "approaching genius") and moral probity. He absorbs the essence of the roles he takes: the pedantry of his Cambridge professor Donald Trefusis, the dependability of Jeeves and, of course, the tortured brilliance of Oscar Wilde, the part he was born to play and eventually did, in a slightly disappointing film three years ago. When he hosts the Bafta Film Awards on Sunday he will add authority to what was once a redundant coda to the Oscars and is now part of the pre-statuette tension.

As he chatters - his conversation takes him from Browning to Wellington, from spell-checks to leprosy and, eventually, back to himself - I reflect that his respectability is paradoxical too. The Marquess of Queensberry would have called Fry a substance-abusing, homosexual ex-convict (as unathletic and unmusical as Wilde, his son's lover, too). And, unlike Oscar, he is a bolter.

Twice when things have got too hot, Fry has simply disappeared, leaving friends, family and, the second time, Britain, hugely alarmed.

Admittedly, these flights did each follow bouts of suicidal despair. At 17 he swallowed a bathroom cabinet's worth of pills and awoke in Norfolk and Norwich Hospital where his stomach was being pumped out. In his brilliant, claustrophobic memoir of his early life, Moab is My Washpot, Fry says he was filled with self-loathing and world-loathing. What had specifically thrown him over the edge, however, was the realisation that he would never possess the slightly younger schoolboy he had been in love with at boarding school.

Many pages of the deepest purple are devoted to this Matthew Osborne, "the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life". I ask if the pseudonymous Matthew, with whom he eventually achieved some form of splendour in the long grass, had been in touch since the book came out in 1997. He had.

How did he take it? "Very well. He is very happily married with children.

A wonderful chap and hugely successful as it happens," Fry chuckles, incredulous. "I think his wife knows because she is extremely friendly to me in a way that suggests to me she knows all about it and is very happy with it. I see him a couple of times a year, I suppose."

Shortly after the suicide attempt, Fry departed for a madcap tour of the Home Counties powered by stolen credit cards and the upswing of his manic-depressive cycle. In a four-star hotel in Swindon he was arrested, jailed on remand and eventually released on probation, from which state of grace he buckled down to A-levels and earned a scholarship to Cambridge.

There he met his future collaborator, Hugh Laurie, and began a short ride to fame.

"The slyness was a horrible moral and personal version of spots, and I think I just grew out of it in a strange way."

He seems very open now. "I think I am more or less, though, of course, a lot of people who know me say they don't know me. And it's a very common thing to read from a journalist."

They think he hides behind words.

"Well, that's it, exactly. But what can one do? Become incoherent?"

THE last time I interviewed him, in 1994, he was particularly articulate about what, quoting the poet Frances Cornford, he called the tedium of "the long lit-tleness" of life. A millionaire from writing a new book for Me and My Girl in his twenties, he was working ceaselessly but finding his career less and less rewarding. I thought I detected a low-level depression. I was not prepared for his spectacular breakdown a year later when, after some mediocre reviews for his role in Simon Gray's play Cell Mates, he vanished again, this time on the ferry to Zeebrugge. This was Plan B. Plan A had been to kill himself. Poor Stephen got as far as trailing a hose from the exhaust pipe into the car and blocking up the doors and windows.

"I had my hand on the key. I didn't turn it. So strange. The only metaphor I can think of is that once in my youth I went out for a long walk and there was so much snow and it got so cold and dark so quickly that I got lost. I was only about a mile from my own house and all the familiar roads were covered over. I couldn't see a light. It was bitterly cold. I panicked and, although it would be ridiculous to die of exposure in Norfolk,

I could have done if I had not kept my wits about me.

"I can remember that happening but I cannot make myself feel that cold again. One's sense memory is not that good. And that is what that sort of depression or despair is like. It's like a storm. You can say a storm is bad but you cannot rethink yourself into it."

Eventually, Fry was spotted in Bruges and his father, Alan, an inventor with whom he had had a tortuous relationship, picked him up in Amsterdam. He publicly apologised for his "cowardice", spent a few days in a mental hospital, departed for America and began to work out, figuring that if his mind was beyond reach, he could at least transform his body (he is back to 17 stone now).

Shortly afterwards he met his mystery man, who is the first good reason, he thinks, he is less likely to succumb to a third suicidal episode.
I

n Moab is My Washpot, Fry places "pissing my life away" high in a list of things which "merit sincere apology and outright contrition". A second list of vices one need not feel guilt about includes "to ingest legal or illegal drugs". This seemed to me not only unnecessarily self-forgiving for

a sometime cocaine user, but also contradictory. Aren't drink and drugs a subdivision of pissing away your life?

"I am with Oscar Wilde," Fry says.

"You should try the fruit of every tree of every garden in the world. But 'try' is the word. Some fruits will be rotten, some will be poisonous, and some will be so seductive you eat nothing else and become malnu-treated, if there is such a word."

HE says he was in no danger of being seduced partly because cocaine is psychologically rather than physically addictive and partly because he would not allow himself to be enslaved by anything. What he is really addicted to, in any case, is work. He is currently shooting Robert

Altman's new movie, in the mansion where Peter's Friends, in which he starred, was also filmed.

Later he will direct a film adaptation of Waugh's Vile Bodies and then embark on a documentary about South American bears. He will probably begin a fourth novel in 2002. Yet he seems to accrue no personal moral capital from working so hard, seeing it almost in the way Malcolm Mug-geridge did, as a form of wasted time.

I guess this might be connected with regret for the 16 years he devoted to his career while ignoring his personal life.

"I regret the possibility that my life might have been fuller in some ways.

I suppose that is right," he concedes.

"On the other hand, you can only really talk about where you are. If you are happy now, it is supremely arrogant to suppose that any point along that journey is irrelevant to getting you there. So if happiness is London and you have come all the way from Swindon it may well be that there was a nasty tunnel and a horrible compartment you had to be in for a while. But if you had not gone that way you might have ended up in Birmingham. It might have been the pretty way to Hell."

You can see why people think Fry uses words as a smoke screen.

Halfway through our conversation he pulls from his nylon satchel two boxes of micro-circuitry, one of which he miraculously origamies into a full-length computer keyboard.

Mandelson would be amazed. But Fry's theories, anecdotes, literary quotations, gobbets of history and Virgilian similes can have a similarly gimmicky feel about them. Happily, they serve a greater purpose.

Stephen Fry remains on probation for the crime of finding the human condition boring. The toys and the words keep a great spirit out of trouble.
P The Orange British Academy Film Awards, hosted by Stephen Fry, are broadcast live on Sky One at 6.45pm this Sunday.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Solo Syndication Limited

Stephen Fry is a man of many words.

Fortunately, they're impeccably and eloquently chosen. The 40-year-old ((age)), hawk-nosed (he broke it at age 4) Englishman has a reputation as a ``Renaissance man,'' a title that causes him to respond with an uncharacteristically short riposte.

``I don't wear tights,'' he says.

Still, it's a valid epithet. After all, he's published four novels - most notably, his J.D. Salinger-esque ``The Liar'' - and a volume of autobiography, adapted ``Me and My Girl'' for the stage, and appeared in such movies as ``Peter's Friends,'' ``I.Q.'' and ``Cold Comfort Farm.''

He's also created a legion of fans from his TV appearances alongside his regular comedy partner, Hugh Laurie, on the British comedy programs ``A Little Bit of Fry and Laurie'' and ``Jeeves and Wooster,'' as well as guesting on Rowan Atkinson's acclaimed ``Blackadder'' series.

Oh yes, he's also part of a tightly knit English acting community - an association that began at Cambridge University's Footlights Drama Club - that includes Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery and Laurie.

But the man has other fish to, well, fry, as he chain-smokes through an interview at the Plaza Park Suites in Seattle. He's here at the invitation of the Seattle International Film Festival to talk about his first starring role, in Brian Gilbert's opulent and emotional film, ``Wilde.'' Fry's portrayal of Oscar Wilde won him the best actor award at the Seattle festival.

The movie, based on Richard Ellman's definitive biography of the late-19th-century bohemian writer and wit, opens tomorrow at the Egyptian.

The film focuses on Wilde's marriage, his fatherhood, his success as a playwright in the ever-changing morality of the Edwardian Age, and his eventual recognition that he was gay - which tragically altered his life in an England where homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment and hard labor. Wilde's passionate love affair with Lord Alfred ``Bosie'' Douglas landed him in court opposite Bosie's disapproving father.

Fry believes Wilde has a universal and everlasting appeal for the young, citing the Irish writer's current resurgence. In addition to the movie, David Hare's play, ``The Judas Kiss,'' starring Liam Neeson as Wilde, is playing on Broadway, and Moises Kaufman's Off-Broadway hit, ``Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,'' is having in its West Coast premiere at Seattle's Intiman Theatre.

``We can only speculate as to why,'' says Fry, ``but we all respond to zeitgeists, and zeitgeists tend to be created by the young as a rule. Up until the '60s and '70s, there was something for the young to invest in, some point of view to believe in, whether it be political or religious, to save the world.

``Now,'' notes Fry sadly, ``the real cheat of this time is kids are not pressed to reform or cut their hair by their parents, but by the dire necessity of the competition in the labor market and the fact that there aren't communes to drop out into. So how do you find your individuality and that sense of wonder?

``In our college days, there were yogis and maharishis and Che Guevara postered on the dormitory wall as a symbol of rebellion and hope for the future. Since the downing of the Berlin Wall, a lot of young people sense that if there is a saving grace, it's in art and the intellect over God and ideology, and I'm with them on this. I think Oscar Wilde stands for that. The two most potent T-shirt images most likely to be seen in a university are of Albert Einstein and Oscar Wilde.

``Einstein is more than a nerdy techno-head; he has a kind human face that speaks of internationalism. And Wilde stands as the crown prince of bohemia and the supremacy of art, and, above all things, the individual. In that, there's still a sense of his downfall and society's revenge on that individuality.''

Fry says he can relate because he, too, is gay. ``I did as much research as I could on Wilde's life. I read the biographies and those of his circle, but the thing that most drove his tragedy home for me was being on a set with two little children (who played the writers' sons). Wilde loved his family,'' he insists, despite his `passion' for Bosie.''

``There are always two extremes,'' says Fry. ``Wilde's case was a tragedy and by that I don't mean sad. The tragedy is not that he went to prison and suffered humiliation and had his body and spirit broken. The tragedy is that he never saw his children again and his relationship with Bosie was ruined.''

Still, insists Fry, ``It was right of him to recognize his nature as a gay man. He believed in that very Greek, Socratic philosophy - to realize one's nature, to be what we should be. But it was terrible because it destroyed his marriage and possibly the future of his children.

``Wilde was more the master of his fate and captain of his soul than we give him credit for. He had flaws, but he more or less knew what he was doing. Other versions of his life always painted him as a gay martyr, a tragic figure compounded by vanity, hysteria and blistering defiance. Ellman's book showed he had real courage.''

Wilde, the actor recalls, is ``one of the few role models'' he had growing up gay in the '60s. ``There were no magazines or Web sites. The only magazines were seedy pornography that was purchased by men in raincoats in Soho.'' He laughs. ``There was no community at all - only the secret world of literature.''

For Fry, the theater and his crowd became his freedom. Yet he has no idea why they have enjoyed such huge success. ``The obvious answer,'' he believes, ``is if you get, perhaps, three people at a university at the same time who just happen to meet and spark off each other, they might just make a fire. There might just be the right energy, the right excitement.

``We get lots of letters from students saying, `Yours is a career path I'd like to follow. How do I do it?' One is tempted to answer, `Be lucky,' because I don't know. We never set out to do it. If anyone did, it was Emma (Thompson), who felt she might be an actor because both her parents were actors. But Hugh and I had no heritage. We just sort of fell into it.''

While he loves acting, he feels the same way about writing and feels ``terribly lucky to do both.''

As an actor, does he prefer the stage or the screen?

Fry laughs. ``I much prefer the cinema, though I know it's terribly un-English of me to say so. We're supposed to say, `My roots are in theater' and `Theater is my first love,' but the fact is I get pleasure in theater but it's not in doing plays. There's no pleasure in repetition. I had a nasty time with a play a few years ago.''

Fry is alluding to an infamous moment when he walked offstage in the middle of a show, got in a car and drove away. There was a week of speculation as to whether he was alive, dead or had a nervous breakdown. Fry laughs at the memory. ``It wasn't rational or logical and the end result was a kind of re-evaluation. But at the time, it was a crisis.''

``Breakdown sounds hysterical and it wasn't quite that. I was deeply miserable and I just felt I could not appear onstage again. I had a crisis of confidence, so I just drove to the continent. I toured through Belgium and Holland and Germany and then I saw an English newspaper with pictures of the police swarming over my roof at home, looking for dead bodies. I called my parents and my friends and said I was fine. They said, `Come home and see a doctor and get sorted out, otherwise you'll get sued for a million pounds.' ''

``It was awful,'' he says. ``I knew it was wrong to do the play but I kidded myself it would be OK.

``What I love about film is it's different every day. The things people find terrible about it, I love. There's a slow rhythm and a holding of energy. I'm so twitchy and hyperactive that filmmaking makes me slow down. It's good for me. It's technical.''

And he laughs again. ``That,'' he notes, ``is a quandary, because I think art should be slightly mysterious. Filmmaking is a little mystical but supremely banal and contrary. In a way, it's really quite magical that the whole thing can ever come together.''
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COPYRIGHT 1998 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the Dialog Corporation by Gale Group.