There are few, if any, inhabitants of the world of showbusiness whose net has been cast wider in the quest for creative fulfilment than Stephen Fry. Over the decades this iconic Cambridge colossus has brought his effortless charm, intellect and classical, aristocratic Englishness to just about every arena possible: writer, actor, comedian and presenter, TV, film, stage and books, fiction and non-fiction, comedy, drama, documentaries, panel shows, memoirs and novels.
The story demonstrates a few things about Stephen Fry. Firstly, that he is a natural storyteller, aided by that famous voice and a manner that simultaneously exudes oratorial confidence and friendly warmth, seemingly taking immense joy in the art of conversation. Secondly, that for all his achievements, his approach to his career has never been one of precise planning or long-term thinking.
There are a lot of really smart people out there who ... are not members of anything that anyone can sneeringly call ‘an elite’.“The pompous or life coach answer might be that I’ve always been fortunate enough to think of myself as, if I can put it this way, as a verb, not a noun. I haven’t thought of myself as an actor or a writer, a documentarian or whatever, but just this fellow who does things. I just love doing things.” There are some things, of course, he doesn’t do.
The idea of Stephen Fry as verb, not noun, leads this interviewer to musing that his surname is already a verb, and that perhaps future dictionaries will include a second definition alongside the standard one: “Fry, verb: to enjoy a career of wide and fulfilling diversity”.Fry being Fry, this leads in turn to another story, of a long and boozy dinner in the ’80s with John Hurt. The day after, a hungover Hurt declared, “I got fried last night”, to which Fry returned, “I got Hurt”.
“It has a special sauce. It’s been going since 1968, thousands of shows, and it proves something that’s really important at the moment, and that is that there are a lot of really smart people out there who are not celebrities and not members of anything that that anyone can sneeringly call ‘an elite’. And the people who come onand make fortunes come from all kinds of backgrounds.