Celebrity Profiles

Stephen Fry

Actor Stephen Fry is to play Oscar Wilde in a film. Why has he been Fry’s hero since childhood? And almost a year after Fry’s highly publicized nervous breakdown, how likely is he to crack up again?         

‘Oscar Wilde teaches one to take the serious things in life trivially and the trivial things seriously. That’s ultimately my attitude’ says Stephen Fry.

A lifelong depressive, Fry has had good reason to want to distance himself from, and lighten up, his true feelings. Adopting Wilde’s frivolity creates a buffer against a nagging, massive, irrational self hatred.

‘My achievements have been driven by a fear of inadequacy and unpopularity’ he says. ‘As an adolescent I was shy and awkward. I had an appalling body image, thought of myself as a quite revolting specimen and still do to some extent - I think most people or a lot of people do’. Do they?

His view of his sexual eligibility drips with self loathing. ‘I don’t think of myself as an oil painting - oil slick would be closer. The fact that I don’t inflict myself on women is the greatest favour I can do them.’

The principal cause of Fry’s low self esteem was his father. Fry was ‘90% gay’ before he became celibate in the mid Eighties (as he famously told me in a television interview in 1988). Like about half of gay men, he had a very bad relationship with his father and was close to his mother.

A scientist and businessman, Alan Fry had a brilliant mind and used it to find fault with everything his son did. ‘I always found myself implacably opposed to him’ says Stephen of his father.

‘There was a lot of tension and rivalry. He knew I was bright and therefore he was very irritated. He scared the living daylights out of me until I was 20’. His father was hypercritical. ‘He frowned at anything I did with any degree of competence’.

This attitude was still detectable in comments Alan made about his son in 1991.
‘I sometimes feel like saying to him "stop doing this pappy and ephemeral stuff on the box and get down to some serious writing". Stephen spends a lot of energy doing things that aren’t worthy of him’.

Given that Stephen was subjected to this negativity throughout childhood, it is hardly suprising he has such a low opinion of himself.

But crucially, Stephen has consistently refused to blame his father and instead blames his genes for his problems. The aggression he feels towards his dad ends up being directed back against himself - becomes depression.

‘I’m sure if I were attacked he’d be a tiger unleashed in my defence’ says his father. Stephen maintains that the fact that his brother has had none of his problems - despite having the same parents - proves that genes rather than upbringing are responsible.

But the latest scientific studies show this is wrong. The reason siblings are so different is the way parents react to them, not genes.

But Fry cannot allow himself to hate as well as love his dad. The resultant hostility to received authority - ‘I do associate all authority with my father’ - is another reason he admires Oscar Wilde.

‘He challenged received wisdoms and used words to subvert the status quo. Reversals like ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes’ and ‘Nature imitates art’.’
Fry adores Wilde’s artifice and pretence and uses it to help him cope. For in Fry’s own real life, like his idol, he constantly engages in impostures.

He rarely if ever stops assuming personae which may be why his greatest fear is: ‘being found out - most men live in fear of a nameless ‘being found out’.’ (Do they?)

Paradoxically, he feels most real when pretending to be someone else. ‘A fiction is the best way to be true’ he says.

Perhaps pretending to be someone else is a good way of escaping a highly critical father - if you pretend to be someone else then you cannot be attacked for being you.

It is to be hoped that Fry’s insistence on protecting his father has been tackled by a psychoanalyst since his breakdown - his friend John Cleese is married to one and shipped him out to California for therapy.

Fry would be greatly relieved if he were able to acknowledge in his mind that his father was to blame for many of his problems.

Perhaps with a little help as well from modern antidepressant drugs to raise the levels of certain brain chemicals, his life may now be less self hating.

When I spoke to him in 1988, he said that although he had been 90% gay, he was now sure he was heterosexual. He said he ‘feared depending on others or them depending on me’, but he also said he would like in theory to get married.

Would that not be a wonderful plot development in the script of the life of one of our most intelligent, decent and British of artists?