Back in the 1980s, real Hollywood stars appeared on the London stage, not just one-hit evacuees from over-hyped American TV series.

Anyway, reading a recent interview with celebrity biographer Michael Munn, whose accounts of his friendships with various legends have raised some skeptical eyebrows, reminded me of my own more modest encounters with the stars.

Jack Lemmon was my favourite actor of all time, by all accounts a thoroughly nice person – even when he was in his cups. I saw him on stage twice, first in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into night in 1986 and then in Veterans Day, in 1989. I waited outside the stage door of the Haymarket Theatre Royal – London's most beautiful theatre, by the way – on both occasions. The first time was a Saturday night. Lemmon tottered out. He had an awkward, slightly stooped gait and quite prominent rings under his eyes. Perhaps this is what led him to have botched plastic surgery later on.

He signed the programmes and photos we'd all brought along, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.  

"I thought you'd stopped smoking," I said to him when my time came, having read in a previous interview that he'd quit.

"So did I," he replied, which struck me as quite funny.

He was really tired, having just done two performances of one of the most taxing plays and parts (James Tyrone) imaginable but he obliged a long queue of fans. Only once did he express irritation, when some idiot produced a photo and asked him to write "with love and best wishes from your very dear friend, Jack".

"Oh, come on!" he said.

The definition of happiness
Veterans Day, with Michael Gambon in 1989, seemed like a sure-fire winner but was a big disappointment. I can’t remember anything of the play but I can remember being deliberately over-charged by an over-zealous programme vendor who obviously thought I was a gullible foreign tourist. Nevertheless, I again waited outside to see my idol in the flesh. After the autograph-signing he started walking back to the Savoy Hotel just round the corner, an army of fans still stalking him to the bitter end (including me!) although the poor fellow was probably hoping to enjoy a few minutes of solitude. No such luck, I'm afraid.

Lemmon did not exactly stand out in a crowd; he was your endearingly flawed everyman, your diffident average Joe, the kind of guy who would apologise for coffee and cigarette stains on his trousers. He usually played people perplexed and sometimes overwhelmed by life's challenges. By the end of the movie your typical Lemmon character was usually chastened and humbled but somehow still capable of fighting another day.  

The same summer, I saw Lemmon in a live question and answer session in London. I sat in the front row and Jack, then 64, took the audience's questions on everything from politics to golf. He never had a bad word to say about anyone. And if you think of some of the performances he gave – in comedies like Some Like It Hot, The Prisoner of Second Avenue and The Odd Couple, through to sensitive dramas like Missing, The China Syndrome and Save The Tiger, you can understand why directors never had a bad word to say about him either. "Happiness," said Billy Wilder once, "is working with Jack Lemmon".

I cried when he died in June 2001, the only time I have ever shed tears over an actor's death.

Giants of the stage
Over the years I was privileged to see some of the greats of British and American theatre in London stage – Charlton Heston in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial with a young fellow named Ben Cross, John Mills in Little Lies (he was then 75 but leapt about with the gusto of a man half his age) Lauren Bacall in Sweet Bird of Youth and Anthony Hopkins in Pravda – an acclaimed performance as newspaper tycoon Lambert Leroux several years before Silence of the Lambs made him an international megastar.

Then there were the British acting greats – Paul Scofield in I’m Not Rappaport and Sir John Gielgud in his last ever stage performance, in 1988, in The Best Of Friends, opposite Ray McAnally. Gielgud had to be prompted on a couple of occasions but otherwise was still in great form. One of Britain's great triumvirate – the others, of course, being Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson – he died in 2000, aged 96, acting to the end.

Other highlights were Derek Jacobi in Breaking The Code and Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave in a Touch of the Poet. Richard Harris scored a hit in the twilight of his career in 1990 (he'd also been nominated for best actor for The Field) in Pirandello's Henry 4. Harris, for all his alleged belligerence, was always nice to his fans. He signed all our programmes and asked us if we liked the show before walking away with a lady whom I later identified as his ex-wife, now married to Jonathan Aitken.

Charismatic
The most compelling stage actor I ever saw was Peter O'Toole. Electricity filled the theatre when he appeared. I first saw O'Toole on stage in Shaw's The Apple Cart in 1986. Even then he looked rather dissipated, perhaps testament to his hard-living lifestyle. Fortunately, however, O'Toole is still with us, perhaps the last survivor of that generation's hellraisers. O'Toole was good in the Apple Cart – I must confess that this was not long after the debacle of Macbeth, panned by the critics – and so I didn't know what to expect.  

The pinnacle of O'Toole's stage career, however, came in 1989 when he took on the part of Jeffrey Bernard, the alcoholic journalist, in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. For the uninitiated, Bernard was a drunken hack who penned a weekly column in the Spectator magazine. As Bernard's health deteriorated, the column sometimes failed to show and the tag-line "Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell" would appear, hence the play's title. If ever an actor was born to play a role, this was it. O'Toole was hilarious and uncannily good as Bernard.

Not only did they look similar – tall, gaunt and leonine with a mischievous glint in their eyes – but O'Toole (perhaps after a lifetime's experience?) proved particularly adept at playing a drunk, much better than Tom Conti or James Bolam could muster in the same role. O'Toole later reprised the part for another successful run at the Old Vic after Bernard's death in 1997.   

A fit of giggles
Of course, for all the memorable plays there are always those that somehow don’t make it. It's not always the actor's fault. Sometimes the audience is restless or the script is just totally unconvincing. I've already mentioned Veterans Day. Now, we all know that Albert Finney is one of Britain's best actors – his performance in Lyle Kesler's Orphans was another great stage experience. His veteran actor in the movie The Dresser by Ronald Harwood was brilliant. Hence my high expectations when I went to see JJ Farr – the next "collaboration" (for want of a better word) between Harwood and Finney on stage in 1988.

The play proved to be incomprehensible, not helped by the fact that someone at my side kept rustling sweet wrappers throughout. In the end I nearly walked out. But I still gave Finney a second chance in another Harwood play, Another Time, in 1992. It turned out to be just as bad as JJ Farr, a thoroughly cliched flashback story of a rags-to-riches Jewish immigrant family. A sucker for punishment, and convinced that I must be missing something, I gave Finney and Harwood a third chance in 1992 with Reflected Glory but this turned out to be very mediocre too. To the best of my knowledge Finney has not acted on stage since.

Unlike film, which instantly transports you into a different world, if a play is not particularly engrossing, your mind stars to wander. You inspect the actors more closely, wondering if they're tired or having a bad night. You no longer see, for example, an adaption of Shakespeare but instead a group of ridiculous thespians prancing around a stage near Waterloo station.

Such was the case with the late Corin Redgrave in Coriolanus in 1989. His performance might have been good - but the whole production was an exercise in deafening Dolby sound, massive "battles" fought against special sound effects. Redgrave, clutching a spear, would charge across the stage in full battle armour, foaming at the mouth and screaming at an imaginary enemy. Cue eardrum-busting battle music. Redgrave exits the stage. Ten seconds later Redgrave re-emerges, still clutching the now ketchup-splattered spear, running to the other side, still screaming. I burst out laughing and had the giggles until the end.

'Psycho' needs change
In 1987 I saw Malcolm McDowell in The Holiday at the Old Vic. I'd seen him in If and was aware of his psychotic incarnation in A Clockwork Orange, a film that few have seen because it was banned. He had a kind of maniacal intensity about him.

Simon McBurney – in particular I'm thinking of his Atticus Noyle in The Manchurian Candidate – has a similar sinister quality. Anyway, I went to see McDowell at a mid-week matinee performance. I saw him arrive. He parked his car some distance from the stage door and came towards us, looking rather grumpy. He seemed to be staring at me. I thought back to a scene in a war movie called The Passage in which his Nazi fanatic, dressed as a chef, tortures poor Michael Lonsdale.

McDowell didn't seem very pleased to be appearing at the Old Vic on a wet, miserable Wednesday afternoon. He looked like he'd rather be somewhere else, California perhaps? And I've often wondered how many stage actors who profess to abhor Hollywood – usually the ones who haven't made it – secretly feel the same way.

Anyway, McDowell put his hands in his pocket and pulled out his wallet.

"Does anyone have any change for the parking meter?" he asked, waving a bank note.

It just so happened that I did.  

"Thank you," he said.

So much for my encounter with 'psycho' McDowell who, incidentally, is indeed now firmly located in...California.

The incorrigible Ronnie
Sometimes chance encounters with the stars off-screen or stage can be an unexpected pleasure. One of the great personalities in British show business – "d'un certain age" – was the late character actor Ronald Fraser. Never heard of him? He was one of those stalwarts who played villains and truculent soldiers in tonnes of TV. He was in Paper Tiger, The Wild Geese and Too Late The Hero, among other movies.

He also appeared in two of director Robert Aldrich's movies, The Flight of the Phoenix, opposite James Stewart, and The Killing of Sister George in which his phlegmatic pomposity was put to good effect opposite Beryl Reid. Fraser was also erstwhile friend to Richard Burton, Harris and particularly O'Toole, a junior member – as 'twere' of the hell-raising team.

Ronnie, as he was always known, was a ubiquitous figure in watering holes around the Hampstead area of north London, in particular the Haverstock Arms which today boasts a plaque commemorating "incorrigible" Ronnie. We had a long chat one night in the pub in early 1997. Ronnie was always topped up, glass of whisky and pint of beer at his side, smoking Mayfair cigarettes.

"I spoke to Bob Mitchum on the phone the other night," Ronnie told me, suddenly during our conversation.

For a moment it sounded like that famous Peter Cook sketch where he is pestered by "bloody Greta Garbo". A phone conversation with Mitchum seemed far removed from a rather grubby London pub. Nevertheless I knew that Ronnie had managed to make friends with some big names.

"How is he?" I asked.

"He's dying, poor bloke," said Ronnie, gazing forlornly into his beer. "I asked Bob how he was because I'd heard he'd been ill and he said, 'Well, Ronnie, I've got emphysema and lung cancer but apart from that I'm fine.'"

Sure enough Mitchum died later the same year.

Strangely, Ronnie, something of a lush himself, wasn't averse to chastising other actors over THEIR drinking habits. We spoke about Oliver Reed – "a nice man when sober, but when he's had too much of that," said Ronnie, pointing to his Scotch, "his personality changes completely". We also talked about the late Ian Hendry, star of The Hill and Get Carter, another member of the North London hell-raising set. "Drank himself into the grave in the end," said Ronnie.  

At no time did it seem to occur to Ronnie that he too was drinking himself into the grave, but he was, of course. I was sad to read of Ronnie's death later the same year, aged 66. His funeral was attended by O'Toole as well as Sean Connery and a young actor named Ewan McGregor. Everyone came back to the Haverstock Arms after Ronnie's funeral to toast his memory.

I treasure the memories of growing up in London and being able to see some big stars on stage as well as those casual encounters with semi-famous people that made London life in those days worthwhile. I still have many autographed programmes, 20 years or more down the line, gathering a little layer of dust in what I call my nostalgia drawer. And no, I'm not selling!!