Their troupe, the Cambridge Footlights, wins honors at the Edinburgh theater festival, and, upon graduating, they team up for lightly watched TV sketch comedies. (Dave Hogan/GETTY IMAGES)įry joins fates with two other undergrads: a semi-radical feminist named Emma Thompson (“She seemed, like Athene, to have arrived in the world fully armed”) and a rower named Hugh Laurie, who becomes Fry’s best friend and writing partner. Stephen Fry attends the European premiere of Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows at The Empire Leicester Square on Decemin London, United Kingdom. “I loved the tingle of nerves as I waited in the wings,” he remembers, “I loved the almost mystical hyperaesthetic way in which one was aware of each microsecond on stage, of how one could detect precisely where an audience’s focus was at any one moment, I loved the thrill of knowing that I was carrying hundreds of people with me, that they were surfing on the ebb and flow of my voice.” Tall and gangling, covertly gay, he expects nothing more adventurous from his life than a teaching career, but after due consideration, he auditions for three drama club productions and gets into all of them. When we pick him up again, he has somehow gotten himself into Cambridge University.

Readers of Fry’s first memoir, “Moab Is My Washpot” (1997), will recall the author’s deeply troubled youth, checkered by expulsions and suicide attempts and a brief spell of incarceration for stealing credit cards. He only means that this leopard won’t be changing his spots.Īnd yet a fairly deep change does play out across this funny, poignant, exhausting book. “The Fry Chronicles” drops name after showbiz name, and unless you’re acutely Anglophiliac, seeing Ian Botham, Rik Mayall, Vic Reeves and Lenny Henry strut and fret their minutes upon the page won’t produce many answering chords.Ī second consideration: How close are you to a dictionary? Such words as “nubiferously” and “colaphize” lie strewn across your path, not to mention such phrases as “Parisian post-structuralists and their caravanserai of prolix and impenetrable evangels and dogmatically zealous acolytes.” That hunk of text repeats itself at least twice by my count, but as Fry shrugs: “The felid remains incapable of permuting his nevi.” No, don’t get up.

Will these admirers line up for his second volume of memoirs? The answer may depend, first of all, on whether they’re English. Stephen Fry, the waggish, wonkish actor-writer-director-quiz-show-host-I-forget-what-else has attracted more than 3.5 million Twitter followers, which means that, at any minute of the day, a population larger than Berlin’s is waiting for the next words to fall from his electronic lips.

The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry