Antonia Quirke - Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

On stage, I felt I had mainlined into acting. The aperture opened wide and I saw the abyss. ‘Listen, you bastard,’ I had to say, fetching a photo of the Don out of a drawer. ‘Our child is gone. That's right. Gone. Vanished. And I can never have another. Who was it I reminded you of, hmmmmmmm? Go on. Tell me. Who was the bitch?’ I took a needle, poked holes through the photograph's eyes, lashed out furiously at a table, and thinking what the hell, I can do anything picked up a chair and broke its back off by smashing it against the floor, and then leaned up against the wall, panting.

I got a glimpse of what I would be like as an actress: a nightmare. Acting was shocking. It was more than just the power of having other people look at me, or the power of being another person. It was the utter freedom and violence and irresponsibility available. Don't think I'm saying that the performance was any good whatsoever – I just thought: I could easily spend my life in the service of this feeling. I'd come off stage weeping uncontrollably and sink into a kind of post-coital woolliness that lasted until we got to the pub where none of the rest of the stage-school cast would speak to me because, presumably, they all found me completely terrifying.

My family came and were stunned by my noise and rage as I clomped around on the stage balling up my fists like someone who'd been well and truly screwed over. In the car on the way home, my father turned round and said, ‘I'll never believe you again.’ And for a moment I had an instinctive feeling – something more than just the inculcated social instinct that being an actor is a bit silly – that if I kept this up I would be permanently releasing a sort of person that I might not like. When the next play was cast, my mother pointed out the ad in the local paper, but I said I didn't want to do it. I would have liked to have called this book ‘I've Been Marvellous: Seventy Magical Years at the Top’, or simply ‘QUIRKE: The Autobiography’, but I'm not allowed to. I forgot about being an actress and never thought of it again.

Let's start with a whole man. Let's lay down a brief marker, an ideal to measure the rest by. Who should it be, this person who, if the movies were asked what a man was, they could reply with? Someone with a bigger heart than Brando. More longevity than De Niro. Less neurosis than Cary Grant. Let's not use Steve McQueen or Gregory Peck or Al Pacino or Denzel Washington or Valentino. Let's use Robert Mitchum as our marker. Why? Because of all actors he explains himself the most, needs analysis the least. He tells you, more than anyone else, that a body is what a soul looks like, that the way you speak and move is all there is and nothing more need be said. You don't explain it, you just love it. In Mitchum's case, the eyebrows like droplets sliding off a windshield and the genius for standing still, as if he is both moving and staying put at the same time. The way his gaze comes at you through the second set of transparent eyelids he seems to have, like a crocodile. The upswing in his voice as if he's continually stopping himself from drifting off. The mysterious depth of experience implied by so many of his gestures as if he is laughing at the smallness of movies compared to life, which goes back forever. All great movie stars know that they will bore you in the end. Avoiding being boring drove Brando nuts. But the anxiety of being boring never crossed Mitchum's mind. The virus of boring-anxiety – which all actors carry – never made it past his antibodies. He is the undiseased. And, having read more pages on Mitchum than I have on anyone in this book, I've learned two things: 1) I have nothing whatsoever to say about him, and 2) nobody else does. So let Robert Mitchum, like a post driven into the ground to stake a claim over a landscape, be our marker. I like being silenced by him. He shuts me up like the right answer. He simplifies everything for me until I can think ah, Bob Mitchum, so that's what a ‘man’ is, is it? Got it. And what an amazing thing! Just look at that. Aren't they amazing, these ‘men’? And so many of them! It's raining bloody men! Let me tell you about a few others …

After my A levels I got a job selling insurance at Scottish Amicable in Manchester where every day I was convulsed by psychosomatic illness. But the job was useful because it enabled me to pay for all the drugs which my boyfriend and his friends liked to take.

‘What are you talking about? What are you on ?’ my mother asked one day across the kitchen table.

‘Ecstasy!’ I beamed, happy to inform.

It was 1989 in Manchester and, had I but known it, my boyfriend was very cool. I had seduced him by the length of my jumper. I hadn't seen my own hands in eighteen months. He was a musician called Mark who looked a bit like Peter Firth in Letter to Brezhnev, I thought, and I adored him. I loved him. There was nothing else. But when he suggested that we should go to bed together, I was baffled. It was as if he had suggested that we move to South America, or that we weren't English at all, but French. Or aliens. A bizarre and totally irrelevant suggestion. Sex was abstract and ever present but it never actually happened. Like maths. I was horrified by the voice-over on Betty Blue which insisted that the principals had been ‘screwing for a week’.

‘Screwing for a week! Screwing! Screwing? Screwing! Skerr eww -ing! For a week?. Can you imagine?’

‘Yes,’ said Mark.

I would roll around the floor of the Hacienda in a three-hundred-person embrace while Mark talked record deals with an old man who used to hang around called Tony Wilson. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Shaun. You too, Manni,’ I would say at five o'clock in the morning out of my tree on ecstasy and speed before removing Mark's hand from my thigh. Just what kind of girl did he think I was? What was he on?

Eventually, I acceded to Mark's request. ‘Tonight, on the 12th December 1989, I, Antonia Quirke, became a woman,’ I thought tremulously to myself. Or had I? A couple of days later I thought: ‘Tonight, on the 14th December 1989, I, Antonia Quirke, almost certainly became a woman.’ The day after that I thought: ‘Bloody hell. Bloody hell!’ and proudly munched my way through half a packet of Anadin. I was immensely lucky to have Mark as my first boyfriend. My first love. He had great talent as a musician and the dedication to back it up. He was as sincere and grave as any prince in an Oscar Wilde fairy story and bought me a ring whose inscription, love you baby blue , obliquely thanked Beatrice Dalle for her help in binding us together. In his blue and serious gaze I was wide open. I was invisible, I had no secrets to conceal. That's young love. Not because it's the first time but simply because you are young, before Life thins into that pointed little thing, A Life. Before time turns your life into a one-woman show.

On the strength of my convalescence-assisted A levels, I got a place at UCL to read English, which gave Scottish Amicable the excuse to sack me they had long been looking for. As I descended in the lift from the fourteenth floor for the last time, the nausea and palsy which had gripped me for a year unclenched themselves floor by floor until I arrived at reception and walked out into Piccadilly a new person. The only truly strange thing that has ever happened to me. It was like I'd been sacked into reality. Everything around me suddenly came into its full life. The traffic sounded out, the shadows of sandstone buildings on dusty concrete became delicately blue, sunlit Georgian granite sprang into heat, the Pennines showed up, windy and bright and in focus thirty miles away, and I felt for the first time, in the nicest way, like I was on my own. I have never felt more well than I did at that moment. In this lofty mood I was reluctant to take money off my parents for university and told them that I had won a ‘special grant’ to cover my costs in London, which I hadn't. I wanted to do it on my own, like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. The afternoon I arrived I managed to get a job at Habitat on Tottenham Court Road for six days a week, and at a pub in the evenings, leaving me absolutely no time for lectures or tutorials, but I reckoned I could work around this if I chose only those courses where you don't have to do any thinking (like Phonetics) and stole all the books I needed from the Waterstone's on Gower Street.