In Lima: 'Gosford Park's' Fry leaves dark days behind

LIMA, Peru, March 8 (Reuters) - British actor, author and comedian Stephen Fry has been a truant, a thief and troubled to the point of suicide, but then he had the "stunning revelation" that the key to happiness was to let himself be miserable. 

Now, the star of the film "Wilde" and TV comedy "Jeeves and Wooster," who is one of an A-list cast in Robert Altman's Oscar-nominated movie "Gosford Park," says he's definitely the most content ever and considers himself very lucky. 

"I think the first 15 years of my life of an adult ... I was just terribly concerned with proving myself to myself," he told Reuters in a recent interview in Peru, where he was filming a documentary on efforts to save endangered bears. 

"I had such a stormy childhood and was such a disappointment as a schoolboy -- a spell in prison, finally getting myself together enough to go to university -- and I think after university there was this enormous need to show I was no longer the same 'wild child' of my teens," he said. 

With a velvety, patrician-sounding voice that makes him a natural for posh parts, plus a charming manner and friends like Britain's heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles, the last thing the tall, thickset 44-year-old Fry seems is a rebel. 

Yet he skipped school and was expelled, attempted suicide over unrequited love for a fellow schoolboy and ran away at the age of 17 and went on a spending spree with stolen credit cards -- an episode that landed hirm a spell behind bars. 

Fortune came with when he rewrote the script to the musical "Me and My Girl" in London's West End; fame came through television hits such as the "Blackadder" series starring "Mr Bean" creator Rowan Atkinson, and his role as the butler Jeeves in a televised version of the P.G. Wodehouse classic stories. 

"If I look back at the immense symbolic actions that I did when I was starting up in my early 20s -- the number of cars I would buy, the number of Rolexes -- it's as if I was shouting at myself, 'I am worth something'," Fry said, relaxing on a sofa in the lobby of a Lima hotel, his feet up on a nearby table, puffing on a cigarette. 

BEYOND 'THE WOBBLE' 

"It takes a long time in our culture if you're, in inverted commas, successful, to understand why you're not happy because we so associate happiness with acquisition and achievement." 

Fry's achievements abound -- an intellect, classified while a child as approaching genius, that took him to Cambridge on a scholarship; a sparkling and sometimes irreverent wit. 

Aside from starring in the movie biopic of Oscar Wilde, Fry has appeared in films including "A Fish Called Wanda," "Peter's Friends" and "IQ" and written novels including "The Liar," "The Hippopotamus" and the autobiographical "Moab Is My Washpot." 

But his career screeched to a halt in 1995 with poor reviews for his performance in the London play "Cell Mates." 

He literally vanished -- he turned up in Belgium three days later -- and contemplated suicide, an episode to which he now refers, with practiced self-deprecation, as his "wobble." 

Fry is not bashful about talking about his dark days, acknowledging that he had been serious about killing himself and "certainly came very close to it." He admits to melancholy, to being a mild manic depressive -- he loves going mad buying "computing stuff, gadgets, things like that." Yet he gives the impression of guarding his real feelings under deeper wraps. 

"It did take a bit of time for me to realize that it's alright to be unhappy. ... It was quite a stunning revelation, as the most obvious things are. So now I am happy because I realize I can be unhappy," he said, summing up his trajectory. 

Famously celibate for 16 years -- Fry is often quoted as loathing the "repulsive dippings and splutterings involved in sex" -- he bounced back from his wobble with "Wilde" in 1997 and a happy relationship. 

Fry, who works hard fund-raising for the Terence Higgins Trust AIDS charity and drops quotations from the Bible and T.S. Eliot into conversation, appears perplexed when asked if he would ever entertain suicidal thoughts again. 

"How can I know?" he said in a tone of incredulity. "I haven't the faintest idea. That's the beauty of life." 

"HELMING DEBUT" 

He does not plan ahead, he says. "I have these cravings sometimes -- I have this nice house in the country and I sometimes think I'd like to spend two years gardening and making jams and chutneys ... and not even having a telephone. But it's a silly fantasy." 

He says he always knew he would be a writer and enjoys doing film "but I can get enough of it. I can do a film, two films in a year sometimes, I feel I need a year off to get the taste out of my mouth." His solution is both to write and act. 

His latest movie, "Gosford Park," is a murder mystery set in an English country house which he called "extremely good fun." Fry plays a bumbling detective. It has been nominated for best picture and best director in the Academy Awards on March 24. 

Altman's first British film boasts a cast including Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren and Alan Bates, which Fry said was "of almost ludicrous proportions -- it's as if he just went through 'Who's Who' and said, 'I'll have all of them."' 

Fry said he was "not that much of an idiot" to mind being typecast. With his floppy hair, big jaw, lopsided nose and what he in the past has called a complexion like putty, he says bluntly: "I know what I look like. I know I'm not going to get offered the parts that Brad Pitt is going to turn down." 

He is planning a coffee-table book about the Peruvian project to save the endangered Spectacled Bear -- he has filmed a program for the BBC about it which will air at Easter. 

Next up is what he smilingly refers to as his "helming debut" in which he directs veteran British actress Judi Dench in a film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies." 

In short, he says, "this moment now" is the best bit. 

"The best things in one's life, I suppose, are the private things that have to do with friendship, love and always will be and always should be ... I'm just very lucky." 

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