Sher talent

He has been the subject of an Omnibus profile and Dr Anthony Clare has interviewed him for In The Psychiatrist's Chair, yet try to put a face to the name and you're hard pushed. Sir Antony Sher, as he is now - the first stage knight of his generation - has always been a talent rather than a star. It has not helped that, unlike his contemporaries, Simon Callow, Kenneth Branagh and Bill Nighy, Sher's career has been largely theatre-bound. Another factor is that the stage roles he has inhabited with such acclaim - Richard III on crutches, a Biblical Shylock, a bullet-headed Balkan Macbeth - are so visually powerful they have overshadowed the man beneath.

The search for who he is ultimately extends to Sher himself. Following his impressive writing debut with The Year of the King - one of the best books ever written about the theatrical process - Sher has now stripped away the actor's disguise in an extraordinary work of self-exploration appropriately titled Beside Myself. Celebrity autobiographies are usually ghosted, driven by anecdote and devoid of insight or analysis. This, however, is the real thing. Sher's account of growing up in an affluent family in 1950s South Africa, his Jewish parentage (central European extraction), conscription into the still-apartheid South African army, confused homosexuality (he was married for a year), drug addiction (cocaine) would be fascinating in itself. Add to that stories that anyone interested in the theatre will devour, from the idiosyncratic rehearsal processes of Mike Leigh, Max Stafford Clark and Steven Berkoff to the self-deprecating humour of Tom Stoppard, and you have a book that deserves to be bracketed with the greatest of the genre.

At the heart of Beside Myself is Antony Sher's relationship with his parents. It was a case of mixed messages: hero-worship from his mother, total disinterest from his father. He was born with the amniotic membrane (the caul) intact, which indicated, his mother informed the world, that her son was destined for greatness.

"On the one hand, I'm very grateful that I have her resolve about me, because I never had that about myself," Sher says. "On the other hand, it has always been in terms of accolades, a kind of bringing the prizes home - and I regret sometimes that we didn't have a relationship based on who I was rather than what I could do."

In a way, Sher's misfortune was that he could do so much. His most obvious talent as a child was as an artist. Indeed, the paintings and caricatures reproduced in the book show an exceptional talent. Drama classes began simply as a way of making him less introverted, but he soon became fascinated by the element of disguise and discovered the pleasures of "hiding away in public instead of in a solitary room or in a studio".

It has taken 30 years for the process to reach full circle, for Sher to throw away the make-up and false noses that dominated his early career and to learn instead "that the work is really only interesting when it's internalised. The disguise is fun if you can do it, and I prefer to do it with myself - I put on weight, or lose weight, or cut my hair or grow a beard - but I hate sticking on things now, or any of that thing that I was so fascinated by. The only way I could overcome my shyness was by becoming other people, but I had literally to become another person - but that's not what acting's about really".

The work which helped this process was that in which Sher discovered he had a personal stake. "It always happened with the plays that were more personally important, whether they were on Jewish themes (Merchant of Venice, Singer) or gay themes (like Torch Song Trilogy) or South African themes," he says. "They were always the ones where you suddenly realised there was a whole different personal investment." The best advice he ever received, he says, was by Alan Dossor, director of the Liverpool Everyman Theatre who gave him his first job in the late 1960s: only be an actor if you have something to say. For many years he was haunted by what his art teacher had said on hearing the news that his prodigy was ditching any idea of a career as an artist - that being an actor was solely interpretative. But surely all art is ultimately interpretative? "I suppose the difference is that you do it on your own," he says. "There is a profound difference when you face a canvas or a computer screen or a piece of paper - whatever you're using - that thing of having to go it alone. As opposed to walking into a rehearsal room and thinking: `Well, I don't know how to play this part, but there's going to be the writer to talk to and the director to talk to and the other actors and we'll kind of find a way.' It is a different process."

Beside Myself pivots around a visit to South Africa made in 1999 by Sher and his partner, the director Greg Doran, for the 80th birthday of the actor's mother, a visit that would also involve scattering his father's ashes.

"We were in this funny situation of being in a hotel that overlooked the house - and suddenly everything fell into place," he says. "I wanted to write a book, but I didn't want to write fiction. And I suddenly had a subject that I could write about. The great thing about this subject is that I know everything that needs to be known."

The "not wanting to write fiction" is important. After the intoxication of writing The Year of the King, Sher went on to publish four novels. The first, Middlepost, was long-listed for the Booker Prize; the next three, he says, sank without trace. His most recent novel, meanwhile, has not even found a publisher, although his agent submitted it to readers anonymously and elicited the best reviews of anything he has ever written.

"I'm not saying it's the best book in the world, but I do think there's a strange prejudice in the English - though I don't think it's true of the Irish - which is that they don't want you to be good at more than one thing," he says. "If, as an actor, I'd made a successful debut in a performance, my next performance would be watched with interest and discussed. But the next book was simply ignored. It was like they decided he can write one novel and however good it is or not - and indeed they did think it was good - that's it. He's an actor. He's either got to be an actor or a writer. And he's an actor."

Sher has not re-read any of his novels since writing them. He admits that he is scared to look back at them. "Probably because I would see very clearly whether they were any good or not, and I would stop being able to rage at the world at being kind of misunderstood or unappreciated," he explains.

After the Omnibus profile, Sher was approached by a couple of commercial galleries with a view to putting on an exhibition. He said no. He accepts that it was the same fear at work - that a "Renaissance men need to be cut down a peg or two attitude" would prevail.

"I'll sometimes do the covers of my books, and sometimes I might use my work, but I am absolutely not going into the arena, because this is just something I can do for myself. This is mine. This is private," he says.

He feels strongly that he lacks "proper training" in both writing and painting; the "artisan" aspect. "The thing I'm most experienced at is acting. The best acting in the end is one that has no rules, but it's based on rules, or on breaking rules, particularly with Shakespeare, particularly when it isn't just about being naturalistic," he says. "But there is a whole technical side that you can fall back on when you're in trouble, a set of basic guidelines. And I simply don't have them either as an artist or as a novelist."

As a child, Sher identified himself with the family dog - a dark, unattractive runt. Yet this picture is not borne out by the man in front of me - shy, certainly, but smiling and open.

"I think it's completely irrelevant how you're structured physically. It's what signals you get about how to relate to yourself and as a child," he says. "I was getting very odd signals. My mother was interested in what I could produce, my father wasn't interested at all. So I think, early on, I simply didn't get that sense of myself where you are content to be who you are."

Is he content now? More relaxed, he says. Attractiveness, he believes, quoting Anthony Burgess's translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, is not to about "the casual dress of flesh". Instead, he says: "It's about your inner peace."

Beside Myself - An Autobiography is published by Hutchinson (£17.99 in the UK).