Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry is an English comedian, actor, writer, presenter and activist. After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from two schools and spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, Fry secured a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English literature. While at university, he became involved with the Cambridge Footlights, where he met his long-time collaborator Hugh Laurie. As half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth24 August 1957
CityHampstead, England
Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
Money and fame are trashy and don't guarantee happiness, but we all refuse really to know it.
I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you're never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It's in the spirit of it.
I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.
It was extremely important to show that Wilde's sexuality was not just some intellectual idea. It was real, and it was about the human body. To just have mentioned it and not shown it would have been, I think, peculiar and wrong.
My secret is that I have never thought there is a secret to anything in life. Passion. Love. Drive. Work. Work. Work. Dull but true.
I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there's just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.
It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there's an email, most of the time there's a letter, someone wants something of you.
One of the nice things about looking at a bear is that you know it spends 100 per cent of every minute of every day being a bear. It doesn't strive to become a better bear. It doesn't go to sleep thinking, "I wasn't really a very good bear today". They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we're not 100 per cent human, that we're always letting ourselves down. We're constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment
Humanism is an approach to life which encourages ethical and fulfilling living on the basis of reason and humanity, and rejects superstition and religion. The most immediate impact of living as a Humanist is that we believe this life is all there is - so what we do and the choices we make really count.
I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God.
If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it.
As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.
Humanism inspires a lot of enthusiasm for everyday life and urges people to be better to one another, to work towards a better future and a common good. If I believed there was an afterlife I would have so much less motive for filling this life with every experience that is offered up to me.