Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry, like Oscar Wilde, is fated to carry the tag “prodigy” until the day he dies. With the same combination of talents as his great predecessor, he is even harder to categorize. Wilde, for example, never tried to deliver his own lines on stage. Fry would be a valuable actor even if he never wrote a word. There is no point in trying to list his achievements in this paragraph, but I can personally vouch for one aspect of his wide range of knowledge that sometimes gets underemphasised in the press coverage: he is profoundly acquainted with poetry, as his book The Ode Less Travelled proves. The English language is in love with him and he generously attempts to reciprocate. When he arrived at my apartment for this conversation, he had already given half an hour’s riotous entertainment to the crew before we even sat him down. Then the cameras rolled and he really got going.