“I’m terribly keen to find things out if I don’t know about them,” Fry says. Lately, he has settled into the role of avuncular public intellectual. He has acted to great acclaim in television (the Wodehouse adaptation “Jeeves and Wooster” is a highlight) and film (earning praise in 1997 for his portrayal of his hero Oscar Wilde in “Wilde”).
In his native England, he has hosted popular quiz shows, documentaries and podcasts. A rare polymath, Fry, who is 63, has written, among other works, satirical novels, a trio of unsparing memoirs, a charming how-to-write-poetry book and reimaginings of the Greek myths (the latest of which, “Troy,” will be published on June 22). And as to the specific question of who he was - that the ensuing years have provided no easy answers has been a source of only pleasure. Operation Ascot went downhill, George, since the lamplighters and the scalphunters went on their own.” Why that oddly specific word, “potty”? Who were John le Carré and George? What’s Control? Who was this Stephen Fry? Door-opening questions all.
“George,” he began, referring, I would understand later, to le Carré’s spymaster George Smiley and doing so in what I dimly inferred was a tone of upper-class officiousness. He was improvising a story in the style of John le Carré novels.
I was a teenage Anglophile, sitting at home on a slow afternoon - this would have been the late ’90s - and watching a rerun of the British sketch-comedy show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” (Judge me not.) Fry appeared on the screen, a tall, urbane man with a zigzag nose. I remember when Stephen Fry started to become such a figure for me. We all have them: cultural figures whom, beyond any single thing they’ve done, we’re just kind of glad to have around, and whose sensibility seems to jibe in some fundamental way with our own.
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