“where’s the bottle?”
Where does that fear come from? From the nightmare that you will forget your words, move to open the door on stage and have the door handle break off in your hand, and from the never-ending dread that “they” may not like you. You see, before you even get a job as an actor, you have to prime yourself for an audition. That is a public event where you step forward out of the darkness when your name is called, when you plunge cold into some speech you’ve worked on, when you offer up your face, your body, your mind, your soul, and a bored voice cuts you off: “Thank you. But adrenalin is a juice, a liquid, a liquor and it exhausts the body. How can a professional actor have stage fright? Yet most of them do, at some point in their careers, and nearly all of them know what it is to feel fear, or adrenalin, building before a performance.

“That’d make me nice and happy,” he sighs, “and you can’t ask for more than that, eh?” ERonnie Wood’s Art Show is at Scream, 34 Bruton St, London W1, from Tuesday to 25 August (020-7493 7388 or see www.ronniewood ) The Rolling Stones play across the UK, 20-29 August. For more details: www.rollingstones . In the past couple of weeks, two Hollywood stars have had to admit that alcohol has got them again. I’m thinking of Mel Gibson and Robin Williams, 50 and 54, supermen in their times and enormously popular, men who have commanded audiences and felt that moment of power when our hushed response hangs on their next word.

Isn’t this always what they wanted to do? So why are they drinking?

Let’s count the ways. Have you ever spoken in public, in front of 50 or 500 people? Were you nervous? Were you desperate about it for days in advance? Did you think of getting in a car and just driving away for ever? Can you imagine that nervous tension facing you every day? We call it stage fright, and sometimes the public regards it as rather comic. Painting is when Ronnie Wood is his own boss and, just perhaps, when he is at his most content.”This is what I’m looking forward to: brush in hand, whatever I’m painting in my sights, maybe a cigarette on the go, and sunshine, lots of sunshine.” His 60-year-old eyes gloss over until they become positively teenage. One doesn’t hang out with the Rolling Stones the way one can, so readily, with its second guitarist at one of his own shindigs. But then that’s Ronnie Wood for you: no airs, no graces, full of zest and youth and the open, eager friendliness of a Labrador puppy.A day earlier, he was telling me that he was keenly anticipating the end of the tour, which grinds towards its ultimate full stop some time in 2007. Not because he will be tired of music – “I always want to rock,” he grinned – but because he wants to set himself and the missus up in a house by the sea: “France maybe, or the Algarve – possibly both.” He wants some unbroken painting time to stretch out tantalisingly before him. Fifty thousand roaring fans ultimately impede my progress, but then the backstage area would no doubt have resembled a military zone.