Waxing miracle

Ritzy end of the hotel. The all-star suite is airy and large, and a comely piano glints darkly in the corner. Low on the table lies a mighty portion of reddish fruit salad and the Wax one, Ruby, sits on the sofa. She calls it her throne.

The queen of talk is pert and spruce, but is not pleased. "I'm wondering if I should be worried about this," she says soon after I arrive.

"Oh, don't be worried," is my calm reply. I hope, somehow, to sound as casual as a fashionable young shrink doing good business with the chat-opera community. But Ms Wax is not for backing down. It is not yet 9 a.m. and my Saturday is not going well.

"Do you think I should be worried that two journalists have now said they know nothing about my series? If the third one comes in I'm going to go on serious drugs." L'horreur! I thought we were to talk about R.W.'s new one-woman show for the stage. No one mentioned television. And Wax wants to talk about both. "I wouldn't be worried if I were you," I purr. "Honest."

Next, an obvious soft-focus teaser to retrieve the situation: so how is the life of fame? "How could I be high-profile if you haven't heard of my show." Ouch. And then a micro-silence from the brash dame, now looking more than slightly intimidating with one arm akimbo and another picking at her fruit salad. "You sure you don't want a cookie or a coffee?" she asks. I decline.

What's the show about then? "They're short stories about Americana, scenes of America." Now we're talking. "This is the last American series because we are really at the end of how far we can go, including the Ku Klux Klan and how people are doing death magic and female wrestling."

Ruby describes the one-woman show to be staged at the Olympia this month as a "theatrical event". "It's a philosophy of life vocalised by somebody who's not completely on the rails herself."

Pure Wax, that's the style. Vim and whim all the way and leave no thought unuttered. Though loved by many, who fancy what one reviewer described as her Miss Piggy competitiveness, Ruby is but a vulgarian to others. Some appear to be genuinely fearful of Wax, although she comes across as sincere in person. No one denies she's a workaholic, and her image-crushing prowess is as legendary as her resources are deep.

It was she who once visited Imelda Marcos, the shoe woman, and coaxed her into displaying extravagant jewellery receipts before singing a poor rendition of Feelings to a piano accompaniment.

Wax is famous also for rifling through Sarah Ferguson's fridge. Then she popped upstairs to go through the duchess's extensive collection of regal underwear. Even Fergie, never one to shun a stunt, looked perturbed.

Resisting temptation is just not one of Ruby's strong points. She called her son Max after all. She does before she thinks of stopping. A high-octane, oddball motormouth from Chicago, with plenty of oh-my-god-it's-just-so-crazy angst simmering underneath, Wax was never one to be bound by convention.

O.J. Simpson got the treatment too. After a day-long shoot boasting about his carnal conquests, the acquitted Simpson pretended to stab Ruby in the back with a banana. Eerie, yes, but Wax laughs it off.

"He was trying to be funny. If he wishes to do that that's what he did. I mean I didn't think it was surprising at the time. He clearly has something in his head that re-interprets reality in a genius-type way." Was O.J. troubled, under pressure? "Oh I think he's haunted but in a much more subtle way than you or I could understand."

R.W.'s other encounters on Wax Meets included a crazed beach session with Pamela Anderson Lee and a chat about facelifts with the indomitable Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Wax now prefers to explore the lives of non-celebrities. Does she miss working with people in high places with reputations to burn? "If I did I'd still be doing it. I haven't done it for two years so I'm done with that. I asked all the questions I was going to ask and it was only so interesting."

While this may be so, Wax's penchant for boisterous low-jinks is not lost in the latest series. Last week's programme on BBC1's on the butch business of female wrestling in North Carolina. One woman who featured apparently wrestles with hogs in her spare time. Heady stuff.

Irony is a key feature of the work, which is why her two attempts to break into the US market have failed, she claims. "I couldn't go there," says Wax. "My shows don't sell. They wanted me to be adorable and sit behind a desk and talk to celebrities. And I started off making documentaries, rushing around and whatever, and that's really what I like. So they don't get that show because it's got irony."

Of course Wax has no Americanness to exploit in the US. In Britain, where she has lived for almost 30 years, she is now a national figure, known to adroitly manipulate local taboos with the marmish here-Iam-it's-me intimacy of an in-your-face Yank on the loose.

The stiff upper lip she has not. Like an imaginary American aunt from the slightly neurotic Jewish wing of the family, she is strong on the art of the canny observation. Sagging body parts, her own usually, are a favourite topic of conversation, and R.W. frequently refers with glee to such tricky phenomena as the free-for-all procreative habits of baboons.

Now aged 47, Wax has plenty of confidence and verve, but she indicates that this was not always so. Beneath the loud exterior lies a history of rejection and that lengthy struggle for acceptance into the mainstream.

"I was depressed," she said of her arrival in Britain in the early 1970s. "I was eating and I was locked in a bedsit eating chocolate day and night because I wanted to hear myself crunch. I couldn't get where I wanted to go because I had no talent. That was a big drawback. And then I was a fat American so nobody would touch me. So it took like 20 years to crawl through the system to get out of the gutter."

Wax's first significant stage performances were at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she played spirited "wench parts" badly. There were no triumphs. "It was death my performance, death. I was awful," she says.

But fellow actors such as Alan Rickman encouraged Ruby to do her own material. "Alan said you know you talk funny why don't you write it down. So I did. He directed my first show and then he directed everything all the way up until the last one-woman show, but not this."

Stints as a writer on Not the Nine O'Clock News and French and Saunders's Girls on Top followed, before Ruby started her own television career. Along the way, she married twice before settling with TV producer Ed Bye. They now have three children.

The current stage show is called Stressed. Three years in the writing, it is a return to old-style Waxwork. Expect addled thought structures, frenetic reflection, very long sentences and odd juxtapositions. Don't expect to understand it all.

Wax was the only child of an obsessively house-proud mother and a Jewish father from Austria who escaped the Nazis. A maker of sausage skins, her father made a fortune in the hot dog business. Mother covered all her furniture in clear plastic to protect it from Ruby, whom she sent to dance lessons. Compulsory.

How important was the Jewish element in Wax's home life? "I wasn't raised a Jew. They didn't really mention it," she said of her parents.

What, then, of God? "I have an idea that he is controlled and doing things to laugh at us. He does things to spitefully confuse us and the world. I think there's a game of chess going on, but I'm not the first to say this." And where are we in the game of chess? "Oh we're definitely in the dark ages. No. I'm the one that's in the darkness and the next person may not be."

All this from a woman who came to Britain "to marry the Beatles". Does she miss the US? I film all the time in America so I'm a spy for the English."

What of Britain now, in the happy days of Tony and Leo? "I think it's pretty impressive, except for the Dome fiasco. I do think there should be a revolution and we should get a pitchfork and hunt down the people responsible and then burn them."

Waxtastic. Someone buy that woman a drink. Please.

Ruby's American Pie, runs on Sundays, at 10 p.m. on BBC 1. Wax's one-woman show, Stressed, runs from Tuesday, June 20th, to Saturday, June 24th, at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. Tickets cost £18.50