After a long time off the small screen, you'll be seeing a lot of Stephen Fry in the next few weeks. He pops up in this weeks 'Sunday Theatre' and in the epic 'Gormenghast' next weekend. But it's been a strange few years, the actor-comedian tells Jan Moir.

Stephen Fry is a busy man today, conducting his business from the Groucho Club for comedians in Soho. He details his chores for the day: he must have his photograph taken, play in a snooker tournament and then do a voiceover at 5 pm. "All good, good, good," he says, settling down in a chair.

Stealing shy glances from under that floppy fringe, he takes great pains to be helpful - to me, to the waiters, to the messengers who deliver his documents - and is lavishly polite to all. Much of this, he admits, stems from a craving for approval that he has spent many years trying to shake off. Fry's early life was plagued by low self-esteem and a crippling self-consciousness that were not entirely vanquished by his success. It was customary for him to capsize emotionally if he overheard someone making a disparaging remark about him.

It would be vastly over-simplifying matters to say that when he walked out of the West End play 'Cell Mates' in 1995 and disappeared for several days, it was down to hostile reviews. But they were certainly a factor - perhaps the last straw? - in the mental collapse that followed.

Recuperation and therapy in California appears to have put him back together again, although he sounds alarmingly like his great friend Prince Charles when he tries to explain what happened to him. "Well, I suppose you could call it a nervous breakdown, whatever that might be," he says. Does he still have a horror of scorn? "Well, I am never going to like it, but I am much less upset than before. It is still a characteristic of mine - this need to try to please, this desire to be liked - which I know is extremely irritating."

Much of his composure stems from the fact that he is in love, after 15 years of proclaiming he was celibate because he hated sex and loather the idea of relationships. "I was in such a state odd denial about it. It was much easier to say, 'I can live without love' and I really thought I could. It was only when I looked at myself, I realised that one of the reasons I was so unhappy was because I was genuinely lonely."

He met his boyfriend some years ago. Of course, he still wasn't quite brave enough to make the first move, so a third party got them together. Fry is brick and chipper and could happily burble on all day about the delights of being a "we rather than an I" and having a "home rather than a house." He chooses not to name his partner publicly - all we know is that he is not in show business and is 10 years younger - but is happy to talk about the peace and contentment the relatioship has brought him, and even of his belated emergence as a sexual being.

In his autobiography, 'Moab is my washpot' Fry went some way towards explaining the agonies of the first 21 years of his life. Although he was precocious and clever, he yearned to be able to swim or sing or play sports without humiliating himself, but seemed destined for a life of awkwardness. He grew into a tall, pale mushroom of a boy who developed a passion for a classmate that appeared to unhinge him totally.

He became a kleptomaniac and went on the run with stolen credit cards, ending up in a Somerset remand centre. What saved him, he says, was the fact that, despite all the exploding teenage hormones, he recognised that, deep inside, he was a clever boy. "So, even if I missed the bus academically, I knew that if I got a job in a bookshop, I would rise pretty quickly because I vould, um, deal with things. I always had the resource of knowing that I had a mind that was not useless." He pulled himself together enough to sit his university exams and go to Cambridge, where he met friends such as Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie.

Fry and Laurie. Jeeves and Wooster. Blackadder. Cold Comfort Farm. Peters friends.....They all enjoyed brilliant success shortly after leaving - and indeed, seemed to dominate televisions comedy output for about a decade - but Fry says now that he was always troubled by this. "I had so much guilt about being successful because I didn't feel that I deserved it. I felt that I had lucked into it all, that somehow it wasn't quite fair."

So here we have Stephen Fry in February, 1995; consumed by doubts, working like a maniac to appease his guilt, unhappy at being kittenish, lonely and - perhaps most important - without someone at home to say: "Calm down, you silly fool."

When he fled to Brussels, after planning and abandoning suicide, he simply could not bear being in his life. "I realised with complete clarity that I was utterly miserable. I was in hell. I am not my own best analysis, but I realised that I was truly miserable and had been for some time." Eventually, after a public outcry and newspaper appeals to find him, Fry contacted his family and his father fetched him home. After treatment in London - where he was diagnosed as a manic depressive and prescribed lithium - Fry headed west for California.

Today, he divides his life into two distinct parts, which he refers to as "Before Cell Mates" and "After Cell Mates." Fry made a pact with himself that he would never work so hard again, nor feel so beholden to strangers. He does appear still to be working at a furious pace - four upcoming movies drawing inspiration from George Best, Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward; the TV 'Gormenghast' - but not, he insists, with the do-or-die desperation of before.

He is also the narrator - a perfect choice - for a series of audio tapes of the Harry Potter books. Fry is a big Potter fan and snorts derisively at recent reactionary protestations from America that the Hogwarts hero is a bad influence on children. "It is as stupid as you can get. They are very moral books and unless you show evil, you cannot show goodness. Not counting 'Littel House On The Prairie,' of course," he jokes, gathering up his papers and heading off for his snooker match. It is a relief to see him looking so cheerful and without that blurry, sad look that haunted him for so long.