Apart from anything else I couldn't have done it

Apart from anything else, I couldn't have done it."You believe Stephens because a face so guileless would seem incapable of anything short of total emotional honesty What you get is what there is, off-stage and on. Again it is Wardle who puts his finger on this quality in his description of Stephens's best performances in The Recruiting Officer, in Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen and as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing - in which he demonstrated "a genius for confession, for playing without a mask. There are actors, among whom Stephens is supreme, who express their power by giving everything away. Every action takes you by surprise; every action lets you see to the roots of the character."In other compartments of his life, however, honesty has often been the worst policy. It was his confession - albeit forced - of his many affairs that finally destroyed his marriage to Maggie Smith (she ran out of the room and vomitted). Doubtless she will be less than thrilled to find the revelation in his book of her diet of uppers and alcohol, how she chewed the Caprice's finest food and spat it out rather than swallow it, how she snapped at him constantly and became, in his opinion, intolerable to live with.

Lady Antonia Fraser ("the bubble in the squelch and squeak of daily life,') must have hoped that most people had forgotten the less than devout period of her life pre-Pinter. His one-night stand with Vanessa Redgrave made it to the gossip columns at the time, but that was more than 20 years ago and she probably didn't need reminding of it. But it's the ordinary people who might suffer most - his secretary, the dentist's receptionist, the make-up girl... "Oh, she went back to Bristol to be head of make-up there, but her marriage was on the rocks She wasn't doing anything she'd regret," says Stephens "Regret's never worth it If you're going to regret it, don't do it, it's foolish. The only point of doing my autobiography is to tell the truth I don't think anyone will be upset by it. Maggie says she never reads anything about herself so she won't know."His iconoclasm, irreverence and total absence of sentimentality are, on the other hand, wonderfully refreshing. In his memoirs he cheerfully dismisses plays (Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea is "the most awful claptrap"), and characters (Pastor Manders in Ibsen's Ghosts is "the most boring part in the world").

He merrily slags off other actors: Hugh Grant and Anthony Hopkins are accused of giving "a one-flick trick, always the same. It's not acting." Every time he mentions the director Tony Richardson a tide of venom seethes out. "He was a monster, so devious you could see it coming out of him," he adds, his lips curling in remembered disgust and his eyes glinting with loathing "He was always up to something, always after something He couldn't give a shit about anybody in the world. He couldn't direct either." Most surprisingly, he rails against almost everything about the RSC in Stratford, the poor pay, the parochialism, being "stuck with 'actaws', who are for the greater part frustrated by somebody or something.