Beside Myself
Antony Sher
368pp, Hutchinson, £17.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL

This is the most unsparingly honest actor's autobiography I have ever read. A master of disguise on stage, Antony Sher comes clean about his own life: about his sexuality, his insecurity, his wracking search for his father's love and his long period of cocaine-dependency to nullify his self-loathing. By the end of a beautifully written book, you feel you know Sher inside out.

Sher begins and ends with the story of his return to his native Cape Town in 2000 to give his father Mannie, who had died six years earlier, a proper family funeral. The book is haunted by Sher's prickly, unresolved relationship with his father: an Afrikaans-speaking Jewish businessman whose own father had fled the Lithuanian pogroms to come to the tiny South African settlement of Middlepost. As Sher describes him, his father was cold, distant, hard-drinking, incapable of expressing physical affection; yet he receives the news of his son's homosexuality with equanimity and shows hospitable warmth over the years to his partners.

Sher's voyage round his father is both touchingly described and artistically productive: while playing Cyrano de Bergerac, he emotionally recalls his unrequited love for his dad and you feel his triple career as actor, writer and artist has been spurred by an aching desire for paternal attention. But his candour knows no bounds. He describes his political innocence: it's shocking to realise that, coming from a privileged white background, he only really got to meet black South Africans when doing a London charity show in 1988. He also describes his slow awakening to his sexuality: after a brief, early marriage he has enjoyed long-term, overlapping relationships with actor Jim Hooper and director Greg Doran. And he writes, with honesty, about his drug-dependence: astonishing to think that, while he was grappling with Marlowe's mighty line in Tamburlaine, he was also doing some mighty lines of coke.

Sher emerges as a multiple outsider - a gay, white, Jewish South African, who, by the end of the book, has achieved a tentative peace with himself: he's kicked the drug-habit, buried his father, achieved recognition as a classical actor and even been made a knight of the realm. But while I admire the book's reckless honesty, it raises an implicit question: is it good, or even necessary, to know everything about the private lives of public performers?

There's a fascinating moment in the book when Ian McKellen says to Sher of Olivier: "We can't match him - none of us can - ever." McKellen's point is that no one can ever compete with Olivier's protean range or animal danger. But part of Olivier's enduring public magnetism was to do with his private mystery: even those closest knew little of his innermost beliefs. He exemplified Hazlitt's argument that actors are the only honest hypocrites. "Their life," wrote Hazlitt, "is a voluntary dream, a studied madness. The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves."

The age of reticence - to which Olivier, Gielgud, Ashcroft, Redgrave and Richardson all subscribed - has now been followed by the age of self-revelation. It has had many beneficial effects: McKellen's political championship of gay rights, for instance. But it also has undiscussed consequences: actors have sacrificed their mystery on the altar of self-disclosure and invite us to make moral judgments on them as people as well as performers. If they endorse causes we approve, well and good; but I'd find it difficult to be critically objective about an actor - not that there are many - with known right-wing views. In short, actors' honesty has killed audience innocence.