Biography

For a journalist who grew up as a Stones fan, Mick Jagger was the Everest of interview subjects. By the time I met him, the idolatry phase was long gone. We sat in an empty classroom of a Toronto school where the band was rehearsing its 'Voodoo Lounge' tour in the gym. He seemed strangely diminished in the flesh. Pale, impossibly slight, a concave chest peeking through an untucked pink shirt, an indolent youth in old skin.

[on interviewing Jack Nicholson] At one point, when I tried to redirect a line of questioning, his eyes narrowed into crocodile mode. 'I don't necessarily want to give you the interview you want', he said in that familiar desert-dry drawl. 'I want to give you the interview I want'.

Harrison Ford's eyes are exceptionally busy - the stare of a paranoid stoner locked in a perpetual conspiracy theory, trying to make up his mind if he's a predator or prey.

To sit down with an aged, elegant Gregory Peck, and hear the cadence of that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' baritone, was like having coffee with God.

When I interviewed Robert Downey Jr. For his breakout hit 'Chaplin' I couldn't understand why he was so nervous. The guy was sweating bullets. That was before the world knew that this young genius was a drug addict.