Emma Brockes

It is two weeks since Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s polemic on the war in Iraq, was released in America, and in that time Lipscomb’s voice has emerged as the film’s most powerful. As with any project generated by Moore, the film will be loved and loathed in equal measure, but whatever one thinks of him, it is hard to resist the testimony of 50-year-old Lipscomb, a mother from Flint, Michigan, who still flies a flag in her garden, but is down to three children and a handful of ruptured assumptions where other certainties used to be.

The scenes in which she recounts the story of her son Michael’s death have had cinema-goers sniffing into their sleeves. “For many years,” says Lipscomb, “I thought I had to control everything. I had a real controlling spirit. But, boy, when the army stands in your house and tells you that your oldest son is killed, all that flies out the window. Over this last year and a half, I’ve been known to cry a bit.”

The power of Lipscomb’s story lies in the sharpness of the U-turn she made and her eloquence in speaking about it. Initially, she supported the war, on the assumption that the government knew best. But just two weeks into the conflict her 26-year-old son, a sergeant in the US army, was shot down while serving as a door gunner in a Black Hawk helicopter. Five other soldiers died with him. A week or so later she received his last letter, in which he told her he thought Bush had lost the plot and that they shouldn’t be in Iraq, that the whole thing was folly. Moore got wind of it when Lipscomb and her family were featured in Newsweek magazine and he flew to Flint, his hometown, for a meeting.

“Michael Moore said he’d already been around America interviewing all different types of people [for the film]. It was the most incredible experience; he was sitting in our living room and all of a sudden, during the talking and sharing, a tear fell from his eye. His producer said afterwards, ‘Michael found it, he found it, he found what the movie was going to be about!’”

Lipscomb should by rights have been suspicious of Moore. She is a Democrat, but a conservative one. She is, or at least was, deeply conformist and even now if the draft was enforced, wouldn’t urge desertion, because that would be breaking the law. “I instilled in my children, as it was instilled in me that, regardless of who is elected the president of the United States of America, it is the position that you honour. It doesn’t matter if they are Republican or Democrat. Boy, what an awakening.”

She had seen Moore’s first film, Roger and Me, a documentary about the devastating closure of Flint’s General Motors plant, and been impressed. When he asked her to participate in Fahrenheit 9/11 she went away and watched his last film, Bowling for Columbine. This also, she thought, had merit. But she had other reasons for taking part; chiefly guilt, for not having spoken up sooner, for having, she says, been complacent and gullible enough to believe Bush’s arguments for war.

“The reason I didn’t hesitate was because I was carrying my son’s words with me. And as a mother I have to carry each and every day the fact, could I have done a little bit more? Could I have been more vocal so that the president would not have been given that much authority within himself? And nobody can make that go away. My son got sent into harm’s way by a decision made by the president of the United States that was based on a lie. Would my son still be here today if I had had my uprising then?”

The day Michael decided to join the army, she says, “I was so proud of him, so proud of him. It was the first grown-up, manly decision that he’d ever made in his life.” She knew the risks  her daughter Jennifer served in the first Gulf war  but she also thought it a smart career move for people in their position, a low-income family. Then, over Christmas 2002, on his last home visit, Michael said something surprising. “I so vividly remember. I walked out of my bedroom and we have a long hallway upstairs and he was standing there and he said he would have to go to Kuwait and then to Baghdad. And he said he didn’t support the war, that he didn’t know why he had to go over there. We talked about fear. I was petrified, because in my mind I was thinking that’s where Bin Laden is, because that’s what we’d been told.”

She knows better now, she says, about the failure to find a connection between Bin Laden and Iraq, about the failure to prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Moore’s film follows her to the White House, where she tries to have it out with someone, but is refused entry. Instead, she is berated by a passer-by who accuses her, as an antiwar campaigner, of “staging” many of the conflict’s tragedies.

“My son is dead,” she says. “That is not staged.” And her legs buckle under her.

In its first three days, Fahrenheit 9/11 grossed $21.8 million  Harry Potter took $11.4 million over the same period  across 868 cinemas in America; that number will rise this week. Lipscomb is rapidly becoming a celebrity. She was spotted twice at airports on the way to Britain. “Yeah. Isn’t that awesome? And I’m just a mother from Flint.”

The downside is that she will probably experience more hostility from people who find her stance unpatriotic. “Yes, oh yes. There’s a few I’m sure who hate me. But that’s OK. Because that’s what America is all about, you are free to hate who you want to hate and like who you want to like.”

But so far, she has had only positive responses. The letters and emails are pouring in, many, she says, from the parents of soldiers serving in Iraq who have echoed the sentiments of her son. She is a member of Military Families Speak Out, an American organisation for people “with relatives or loved ones in the military” who oppose the war in Iraq. “Through us, their voices will be heard.”

She has heard from people all over the country, “just incredible, incredible, men calling and leaving messages, sobbing and thanking me for my courage. Women just going ‘Yeahhhh! Michael has a hell of a mother.’ And then the night of the Flint showing [of Fahrenheit 9/11], there was a message from a young lady named Tracy.” Tracy had been friends with Michael when they were children and hadn’t known he was dead until she saw the film; she had to be carried out. Tracy is in the navy and on her way to Iraq.

The most surprising letter came from a man Lipscomb knew only slightly, who had sold her her house. “It was a full-page, handwritten letter from a man  that in itself is unique . He said he’d seen the film and when he got home he had to write. He had always been a very strong Republican, but his views are now changed.”

Lipscomb’s employers have been supportive. Her friends in Flint have been stunned. She wonders if her phone has been bugged and how her unlisted number seems to have become so quickly and widely known. “Interesting, isn’t it?” And she wonders if she will ever get to the White House. It is on her to-do list. “When I go to Washington DC as an American citizen I have a right, I have a right to go to the White House and I’ll not stop until that right is given back to us. My son’s blood paid for that White House, and I can’t go in? That’s my White House. I’m furious.” What would she say to Bush if she met him? “God have mercy.” She shakes her head. “God have mercy.”

Now, instead of telling them to trust authority, Lipscomb is raising her seven grandchildren to question it. “I tell them: if you don’t understand something, ask. And if you still don’t understand it, go to the next level. And the next. And the next.”

With this in mind, she intends to hold off deciding who to vote for (she knows who she isn’t voting for) until she has sussed out John Edwards, the running mate announced this week by Democrat candidate John Kerry. “I really don’t know anything about this man. I’m not going to listen to what the TV says; I’m not going to listen to what the radio says. I have to find a way for him to answer my questions, either by sitting down with him, or by being at one of his rallies. That’s how serious this is to me. I’m not playing.”

What to make of Jane Fonda? A woman who, for the last four decades of the 20th century, was as surely indexed with the times as hemlines and house prices; who provided an iconic image for every decade; and who meant whatever she did, and screw the consequences. For many women, the memory of her all-in-one leotard and belt combo will never be erased. Today she is in a green terrycloth gym top, hair thatched mercilessly under a tight baseball cap, which fans of “Barbarella” will see as the unwelcome stylistic intrusion of all those crusty old activists. At 67 she is luminous without makeup. She sips herbal tea. “When I start down a path that I know is the right path, I go with all of me,” she says in that Fonda drawl that sounds, these days, more ironic than it is. “I have a lot of energy. I give off sparks. If it’s antiwar, it’s going to be very visible, and if it’s an exercise video it’s going to be …”

“$17 million.”

“Exactly, the biggest seller of all time. I just do it big. I don’t think about doing it big; it just becomes … visible.” After six decades of unhappiness, eating disorders, bad marriages and low confidence, her true identity has finally become apparent to her. She is, she says, now “whole,” “authentic” and “good in my skin.” She has become a Christian. It is a beautiful apartment, I say. “It is a good venue for fundraising,” says Fonda stiffly. “You can fit 80 people in it.”

Her memoir, “My Life So Far,” has been seized on in pre-publicity for its chapter about her marriage to Roger Vadim, the French film director, who, she reveals, coerced her into having threesomes with prostitutes when they lived in Paris in the 1960s. It was not her intention to be salacious. The book is honest and humorous, but the memories are couched in a language you don’t hear much these days. The reason she went along with Vadim’s demands, she says, is that “when I met him, I was on a search for womanhood. I was terrified of being a woman because it meant being a victim and being destroyed like my mother was.”

Fonda’s discursive style was forged in the late ’60s and early ’70s, during those huge waves of activism when “paradigms of hierarchical patriarchy” were all the rage. Although she wryly observes in the book that she might have toned it down a bit — that she made herself unlikable by banging her drum so loudly — there is nevertheless something affecting about her refusal to soften, to flirt with neofeminism’s more digestible language. When I suggest that the word “patriarchy” is an anachronism — that while no one would deny inequality exists, lots of women would bridle at the suggestion they are victims of a patriarchal system — she fires back: “Part of what my book delineates is how misogyny is internalized: the need to be perfect, to please, to be malleable. And that this is true for otherwise strong, successful women like me. No, Emma, patriarchy is very much alive and well, and we have to do something about that.”

Fonda’s career outside of Hollywood can be measured in the acronyms of the movements she is and was involved in: from the Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice (EIPJ) to Mobe (Mobilization to End War) to Glad, the deaf charity she supported in 1979 when she accepted her Oscar for “Coming Home” in sign language, to those hastily convened and disbanded organizations hostile to her, such as the American Coalition Against Hanoi Jane. In 1995, she formed the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, to which she devotes most of her time these days. Above all else, she says, she is an activist. The acting was something she got into by default, and until she started making films with a political or feminist agenda, such as “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and “Klute,” she “would’ve given it up in a minute. Because I didn’t like how it set me apart from other people.”

The feeling of isolation grew out of a childhood with cold and unresponsive parents. Fonda’s mother committed suicide in a mental institution by slitting her throat with a razor. Fonda was told she died of a heart attack and only learned the truth from a celebrity magazine she got hold of at boarding school. Her father, Henry, was remote by virtue of being a legend and was, besides, what she calls a typical man of his generation — incapable of sharing his emotions. “Bringing feelings to my dad was like bringing a dead animal and laying it at his feet — like my cat would do to me with mice and gophers. It would elicit a look like, What do you want me to do about it? He just didn’t do it.”

This made the scenes they played together in “On Golden Pond” poignant and peculiar. It was the biggest-grossing film of 1981, in which Fonda and Fonda played out a weird proxy of their own relationship on-screen, with Katharine Hepburn as the mother. Didn’t her dad find it bizarre that there they were speaking lines about the failure of a father-daughter relationship when they couldn’t do it in real life? “I don’t know!” says Fonda, throwing up her arms. “Because he would never talk to me about it. I could never get him to tell me! I mean, he was a smart and sensitive man, so he must have known. But I think if he had really allowed himself to talk about it, he would have become emotional and cried, and he couldn’t stand emotions. This is what patriarchy has done to our men. They think the only thing their sons and daughters want are their balls; but what we really want are their hearts.”

Although a good Cold War liberal, Henry Fonda disapproved of his daughter’s activism; it was too brash, too disrespectful. But it was seeing him play noble, anti-establishment roles such as Tom Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath” and the young Abe Lincoln that, his daughter says, sowed the seeds of her activism. “He didn’t talk much; he never spoke about values or anything. But he played these characters that I knew were what he wanted to be like. And those values entered my DNA. But we had a lot of conflict about [my own activism], because I was going beyond his comfort zone and inviting him to come with me. And he couldn’t do it.”

She was so far outside the comfort zone after her trip to Hanoi during the Vietnam War that effigies of Fonda were hung from trees, and a 20,000-page dossier was compiled on her by U.S. intelligence agencies. Her house was ransacked, and on one occasion, she says, “I looked up out of the window and saw this guy with a gun in his hand; he turned and ran back up the hill. We were followed. There was a feeling of danger, yeah.”

During the hate campaign, did she ever think of throwing it in? “No! No! God! They would’ve won! No! You can’t do that. No, no, no, no, I wasn’t going to allow that to happen.”

Fonda was married at the time to fellow activist Tom Hayden, with whom she had a son (she also has a daughter by Vadim) and who, when asked in an interview in 1973 what brought them together, said, “The degree to which Jane had changed and the mutual strategic outlook was exactly right.” The po-facedness of the movement is something Fonda can’t quite shake, although she has occasional flashes of irritation with it. When Hayden sneered that the empire she built on the exercise business — which she views in the light of bringing empowerment to women in their own living rooms — she waspishly pointed out that the $17 million it had raised for his political activities was not exactly trivial.

“There’s nothing like committing yourself heart, soul, body and mind to something beyond yourself, that you’re willing to die for, alongside the man you love and with a host of friends. There was something very beautiful about that. And when it ended, we had our son, but we never quite had the same connection after that.”

I ask if she has any affection for the term Hanoi Jane. She looks horrified. “No, I hate it. I hate it. It has become way bigger than me. I’m just like this little pawn in this huge myth that has been created by people who need the myth to flog their right-wing, narrow worldview. And they will do everything they can to keep it alive. When my book comes out, they’ll probably use it to flog the myth again. But I feel sorry for them. I really do.”

She continues to campaign against George W. Bush and the Iraq war, and to urge other celebrities not to be cowed by the lie that speaking out against the government a) is unpatriotic and b) will ruin their careers. “It didn’t ruin mine,” she says. She has just made her first film in years, a light comedy with Jennifer Lopez called “Monster-in-Law.” It is the sort of fluff she would, in the depths of the ’70s, have looked down on for being trivial. “But I had a good time on it,” she says. She still sees her third ex-husband, Ted Turner, who lives in Atlanta and whom she characterizes as a lovable nutter, as someone who “should be like Rupert Murdoch. But he’s one of the good guys.” “He knows he’s screwed up,” she says fondly. They split in large part because while good at talking about himself, he’s not so great at listening to others — “and he wants to do better, he really does, bless his heart, but it’s just very hard.”

She allows herself a wry smile. I tell her I winced at the bit in the book where she calls herself an inadequate mother. “Well,” she says, “my daughter wouldn’t have allowed me not to say it. You just have to own your mistakes and fess up. I’ve been close to too many people who think the world is full of assholes except for them. You know what I mean?”

After all of this, one has forgotten about the other Jane Fonda, the one on the wall in huge glamorous prints. I point at them and ask if her friends make fun of her for devoting a whole wall to her own image. She looks blank. “They’re by Andy Warhol,” she says. “He was a friend of mine.” Of course.

I get up to leave. “I’ll show you out a different way,” she says. We walk through an atrium painted in pale pink, with huge silver doors leading out of her flat. “I designed it myself,” she says. “It represents the womb. The doors are the labia, and this” — she points to the corridor — “is the birth canal.”

I stare at her. Are you serious?

“Yes,” she says. “I’m serious.”

“Do you think so?” said his companion.

“Yes,” he said, and it was as easy as that. The journey up, to be followed by a stomach-sliding descent some 12 hours later, had begun.

When people awoke Wednesday morning, those for whom Bush’s overnight gains were unwelcome weathered two sensations: a slug of shock, followed by a surge of recognition. We had been here before. This was 1992, the morning after the general election when, despite hatred for the Tories having peaked over the poll tax, they still managed to bring home a 21-seat majority. And so, not even callers to 5 Live could summon any outrage; despondency was instant and lethal. On the way to work, the faces of people on the tube looked like chalk pavement pictures after a downpour. (OK, so they look like this every morning; but they had particular resonance Wednesday, suspended as they were above front-page pictures of Bush smugly meditating.)

By 10 a.m., as people got to their desks and began a day of low productivity and high personal e-mail exchange, it became clear that the most pressing post-election question was not “Where were you when you heard Bush was winning?” but, rather, “Where were you when you allowed yourself to think it could ever have been otherwise?” Dismally, people asked each other how long they had stayed up the night before. “Until 4:30 a.m.,” said my friend Jim. “Long enough to start crying like a girl.”

If Jim’s experience had been more widespread, perhaps news of Bush’s irreversible lead Wednesday would have been cushioned. But most people did not stay up until 4:30 a.m. Most people seem to have bailed out, still feeling reasonably optimistic about the result, sometime between midnight and 1:30 a.m. That spark of hope, so cruelly lit in the early evening, had spread so rapidly that by the time David Dimbleby came on television at 11:50 p.m. it was blazing uncontrollably. Dimbleby’s chuckly demeanor looks, in retrospect, more like a form of “we’re all going to die” hysteria. It only fanned the surreal, celebratory atmosphere that took hold in the early hours. Look! John Simpson pouting like a pantomime dame! Kerry’s sister looking like Norman Bates in his mother’s wig! Peter Snow! When, sometime after midnight, news came that the exit polls for Virginia were too close to call — a sure sign, we’d been warned, that Bush was in trouble — there was exhilaration of an intensity not felt since Stephen Twigg unseated Portillo. We were going to win!

The first e-mail I received the following morning read: “Fucked off, dejected, our hopes have been blown to shit.” The next one read: “As REM once sang: ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it.’ Only, unlike REM, I don’t feel fine.”

At around 11 a.m., shock gave way to group therapy through shared experience: “The time difference was particularly cruel on Brits, who yet again went to bed thinking the Democrats had won.” This was from a friend of a friend. “Did anyone else hear supposed-polling guru Bob Worcester say something on ITV along the lines of ‘I’m Bob Worcester, it’s 2 a.m., and I am calling it — it’s President Kerry!’? A real bloody Michael Fish moment.”

At lunchtime, friends from America woke up and joined the chorus. With a defeated sneer, the Brits among them threatened to move home in protest. It isn’t hard to imagine a Republican reply to this: “There’s going to be a brain drain from this country which will leave the red-state [Republican] morons to fend for themselves,” wrote an American on the Guardian talk boards. “I wonder what the immigration requirements are like in the U.K.?”

A friend in New York wrote: “The one consolation that people are clinging to is that he will fuck things up so badly in the next four years that the Democrats will move back into favor. That’s if we still have a world.” People in the city, he said, were wondering, “How we are going to survive the next four years? Unbelievable.” I rang my cousin in Chicago. “I’m good,” she said. “Well, no, actually, not great.” The hope thing had prospered there, too. “We thought we were going to win. Bruce Springsteen … the youth vote …” She had to get off the line then; there were commiseration calls waiting.

At 1:17 p.m. my friend Dave called and, unconsciously arranging his speech into one last election slogan, said pitifully, “I’m clinging on for Kerry.” But we both knew it was over.

If there is such a thing as collective depression, then the circumstances of the election are just right to encourage it. At least the scandal in Florida four years ago gave people something to focus on; there was a battle to be raged. This time, despite some lingering uncertainty over the final result in Ohio, there isn’t the consolation of injustice, of having someone to blame. Depression is not a very focused thing and Wednesday’s mood was universal only in that it allowed people to group their individual reasons for cheerlessness around the huge disappointment of the election result.

Some of these reasons are seasonal: The clocks have been turned back, the leaves are coming down, the bloody Christmas stock has appeared in the shops. Everywhere you look is raw material for misery, and it’s tempting to hang one’s reluctance to get out of bed on a more profound psychological state than laziness. To this extent, “collective depression” is a misleading term; it has connotations of Carl Jung and a mystical union between people. But even given all of this, there was a unified sense Wednesday morning that the prospect of having Bush back in business made all the small, crappy things in one’s life worse.

“Ach,” says Oliver James, the clinical psychologist. “I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, ‘Why doesn’t anyone see where this is leading?’”

He thinks people in Britain have every right to be upset by the election outcome. “People invest in political ideas as a way of creating a sense of the future. A big factor in depression is a sense of hopelessness — the feeling that you can have no influence on outcomes.” If people seemed disproportionately miserable Wednesday, then it is because, he believes, the election result is not abstract political background to the daily business of living; there are many who will feel that George W. Bush in the White House compromises their personal safety. “There might be a feeling that a dirty bomb exploding in London is more likely to happen with the policies pursued by a Bush government. People may be taken back to the generalized sense of dread that was widespread before 1988 and the end of the Cold War. This complete nutter in the White House and Blair with the wild look in his eyes.”

This sense of powerlessness was also raised by American psychologists, who, anticipating high levels of disgruntlement among voters, were on standby Wednesday to analyze the fallout. Dr. Robert Butterworth advised those individuals who felt depressed and despondent to take refuge in the long view, and warned of likely displays of “anger towards the electoral process [that could] could result in alienation, cynicism and even antisocial activities.”

The only antisocial behavior noticeable in Britain, meanwhile, was the punctuation in chat rooms. “I expect to see bombs falling on Tehran before the end of the year! WOOHOO!!!” posted one contributor to the Guardian’s talk boards.

“I am deeply ashamed to call myself American,” wrote another, while “I’m ashamed to be English,” countered a third, in a competitive orgy of shame. Lots of people talked about powerlessness. “And that,” said one, ominously, “won’t lift until we get our own general election.”

At some point in the afternoon, fatalism set in. No one had anything more to say. I phoned Suzy, a graduate student at LSE. Sky News could be heard in the foreground and BBC News 24 in the background. She talked about the “glimmer of hope,” and how surprised she’d been by the scale of her own disappointment. Halfway through the conversation she broke off and called to her flatmates: “Has Ohio been declared yet?” A little voice came back, “It doesn’t matter. Kerry has conceded.”

Affection for Andrews has grown in the 40-odd years since “The Sound of Music” was made, to the extent that she is one of the few Brits to rival the status of America’s biggest stars. With impeccable manners, she always attributes this to luck and to the fact that, because she is lodged in people’s childhood memories, she is almost impossible to eradicate. It has also to do with a kind of sincerity: Some stars survive by changing with the times; Andrews has thrived by resisting them.

Her new film, “The Princess Diaries 2,” attempts to bring Andrews into line with more modern entertainment values. It is the sequel to the 2001 hit based on Meg Cabot’s fairy tale about a grungy American teen who inherits the crown to Genovia, a European state of which Andrews is head. The first film had a rough, joyful energy about it that is missing from the second, a thoroughly market-tested product. Six-year-old girls will love it.

“You know what, it’s got some nice subtle messages,” says Andrews crisply. “A lot of films seem to go to the lowest common denominator. And this one is talking about responsibility and growing up and assuming your destiny and your life and all of that. It’s not a bad message. And being decent; being decent to people.” She is very emphatic about decency.

The power of Andrews’ early roles makes watching her in anything else unsettling, particularly now, given her failure to age in line with the rest of the population. She is 69, but could be 20 years younger. The director, Garry Marshall, tries to address this by making veiled references to Andrews’ career history (“I’ve done a bit of flying in my time,” says her character at one stage, nodding to “Mary Poppins.”) It is Disney’s little joke and one, I sense, that Andrews does not entirely approve of. “It was just a nudge,” she says, smiling gamely but with underlying waspishness. Her image is often mistakenly identified as “sweet,” but there is a steeliness to her that goes beyond the usual fortifications of the famous.

It is Andrews’ voice that has defined her. It never came easily. She always had to warm it up and was envious of those who could burst effortlessly into song. “As my mother said, I never sprang out of bed with a glad shout! My voice needed oiling and then it took off.” Since a disastrous throat operation eight years ago, Andrews has been unable to sing. But she speaks with the same precise delivery she brought to her songs. Her words are like beads of mercury: They don’t run together. When she refers to Tony Walton, for example, her first husband and father of her grown-up daughter Emma, she pronounces “ex-spouse” with a pause in the middle to distinguish the two “s” sounds. It has taken her 40 years of living in the States to cave in and pronounce “laugh” — as in “to laugh like a brook as it trips and falls / over stones on its way (on its way)” — with the short, American “a.” Since she comes from Walton-on-Thames, it is always assumed that she has had elocution. But Andrews’ diction is the result of her singing lessons, on the foundations of which her whole manner is built.

“I had a teacher who stressed for me the importance of diction in terms of … I want to be very careful about how I say this … in terms of supporting one’s voice when one is singing. In other words, if you hold on to your words, your voice will pull through for you when you’re singing. So be true to your vowels.” Be true to your vowels! Andrews gives an example: “Supposing you have to sing [from the "Messiah"] “Behold thy king cometh unto thee.” If you do a strong “thee,” it will help you with the “-hold,” which is a much higher note. And it’s the note before the note that matters; then you unpeel a song backwards.” She puts equal emphasis on a song’s lyrics as on the melody, and it limits what numbers she can sing.

“I tried singing a lovely song called ‘Feelings’ — do you remember an old song called ‘Feelings’?” She croaks a few bars. “It has a lot of oh-oh-ohs in it, and it just completely escaped me. I couldn’t get my head around the message of the song. It didn’t work at all.”

It was her stepfather, Ted Andrews, who got her into singing, one of the few things she has to be grateful to him for. When her mother remarried, she was forced for reasons of respectability to change her name. Her real name is Julia Wells. She used to imagine as a child that, if she grew up to be a novelist, she would combine her middle name with her real surname to sign herself Elizabeth Wells. Was her real dad annoyed about the name change?

“I suspect he was. He was such a honeybun. He was a really decent, honest … a … a nature-loving man. He gave me the grounding. My mother gave me all the sort of chari—.” She stops short of saying “charisma,” as if curbing an unseemly spurt of ego. “Flair, or whatever,” she mutters. “And I don’t hold a candle to her; she was wonderful. But my dad was the sane one, really. He treated the kids as beloved equals. He was a teacher, and a good one.”

Ted Andrews, by contrast, was a song-and-dance man and an alcoholic. The family was dysfunctional, she says, to the extent that in her 20s she had a lot of therapy to remedy the fallout from it. “They gave me as normal a childhood as possible but it certainly wasn’t … I didn’t know what normal was in those days. I was working from a very early age. So I probably missed out on some of those things … God knows every family has its problems.”

I ask if her stepdad was violent. “Yeah,” she says, “there were times when he was.” There is a long pause. She sighs. “He was kind of a very sad man. I have to say I have great compassion for him, because he had a tough life himself, although at the time it didn’t make much difference to me. You can imagine: I had this lovely dad, I didn’t like my stepdad, and I wasn’t going to accept him. And I mean, he tried. But his demons got in the way. So.” Another pause. “Yeah. He wanted life to be better.”

What were his drinking patterns like? “He’d go sometimes for two years if we were lucky, and be completely sober, and then fall right off the wagon again. In those days there wasn’t as much help. With absolutely no self-pity, I think I sort of was the glue that held the family together.”

It was an upbringing that made her, if not intolerant of alcohol, then at least very aware of it, something that helped her withstand the pressures of early stardom. It also, I suspect, made her tough. When Andrews was 19, she won the lead role of Polly in a Broadway production of “The Boyfriend” and flew unchaperoned to New York. Emotionally, she says, she was much younger than her years. The contrast of Manhattan with Walton-on-Thames might easily have derailed her. But Andrews simply knuckled down and, true to the image that would later define her, got on with it. “The work was hard, I was learning my craft and floundering to stay … Let’s see if I can put it correctly and succinctly,” she says, sounding suddenly very Poppins-ish. “A lot of my life happened in great, wonderful bursts of good fortune, and then I would race to be worthy of it.”

There must, surely, have been temptations along the way. “Well,” she says, “I can’t drink too much without getting absolutely silly. And drugs have, mercifully, never worked, so I think I’m far more frightened of being out of control.” What drugs did she try? “I didn’t! Really, I didn’t! I don’t know why.” She giggles.

After “The Boyfriend,” Andrews had another successful run in the stage production of “My Fair Lady,” but it was “Mary Poppins,” for which she won an Oscar, that made her name. A year later in 1965, she starred in “The Sound of Music,” and her fortune was sealed. Since then, of course, the film has had a life of its own.

I ask why she thinks she is a gay icon. “I don’t know. I’m sort of aware that I am. But I’m that odd mixture of, on the one hand, being a gay icon and, on the other hand, having grandmas and parents being grateful I’m around to be a babysitter for their kids. And I’ve never been able to figure out what makes a gay icon, because there are many different kinds. I don’t think I have the image that say, Judy Garland has, or Bette Davis.”

I suggest that these women encouraged their camp status by taking sidelong looks at the world. “I bet they weren’t,” says Andrews, as if the very suggestion of irony is insulting. “But I don’t know whether longevity has something to do with it. I honest to God don’t know. It’s very flattering, in a way.”

As well as Emma, Andrews has two daughters with her second husband, Blake Edwards, director of the Pink Panther films. The couple adopted Amy and Joanna from Vietnam; they are now 29 and 30.”We didn’t even think about what we were laying on them at the time,” she says. “We only knew what we hoped to do for them. Anyway, they survived. But they are [ready to visit the Far East] now and they want to do it and I’ve said that we’ll go.”

Andrews’ singing career is over, but the success of “The Princess Diaries” has revived her acting career, and she has other projects on the boil. With her daughter Emma, she has written several books for children, which are published as the Julie Andrews Collection, an imprint of HarperCollins. The collection will be available in Britain for the first time next year. And she is busy with her seven grandchildren, who are scattered, for the most part, near her home in Los Angeles.

There are two questions that remain unanswered. One: Was Christopher Plummer, as is widely assumed, playing Captain von Trapp for laughs? “I don’t think so. We see quite a bit of each other, and” — she whispers — “I think he’s quite pleased that he did the film.” (He made a terrible fuss about it at the time.)

And Dick van Dyke: Did she notice during filming how terrible his accent was? “Um. Yeah. And he did too. He’s darling about it. Absolutely sweet. And he says, ‘Ugh, I’m so terrible, but I tried.’ It is what it is and one wouldn’t change it for anything. Fond memories.”

Does she think Mary Poppins and Bert ever got it together? Andrews gives a filthy laugh. “I hope so. She wouldn’t admit it, but I do hope so.”

At 44, Cartwright has provided the voice of 10-year-old Bart Simpson for the past 17 years. Her house outside Los Angeles is full of references to him; dolls, a Bart pinball machine, her Emmy awards for the show and, in the garden, a big plastic tribute to Bart’s entreaty, “Don’t have a cow”. It is a source of both relief and frustration to her that, were her face on screen, she would currently be one of the richest and most famous women in the world; The Simpsons is watched by 14 million viewers in America alone and has made Fox TV more than $1bn. It has featured some 350 celebrity guests, including Meryl Streep, Kirk Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Winona Ryder and, most recently, the rapper 50 Cent.

“Oh my God, that guy was just like, so sweet,” says Cartwright. She talks with her whole face and a lot of exclamation – “Oh cool! No way! Ha ha ha!” – but there are no obvious traces of Bart in her voice. “He had his homies with him, but I’ll tell you, he came in and was very endearing.”

That Cartwright has made her name playing a cynical and satirical character like Bart is surprising, given her wholesome Ohio background and her acceptance some 14 years ago into the church of Scientology; her bookshelves are filled with the works of L Ron Hubbard, including Learning How to Learn and Death Quest; it isn’t hard to imagine what Bart would make of those. She is also the chairman of her own production company, Cartwright Entertainment, the management structure of which is outlined on a wall chart in her office and includes the job titles “director of success” and “goal maker”. Bart, she says, beaming, is essentially a nice kid.

Cartwright lives in relative modesty in a suburb of LA, with her husband Murph and their two kids. We are sitting in her garden under a tree. “It’s such a different kind of celebrity,” she says, “that … I don’t know – I really, really like it, but it’s kind of a double-edged sword. The anonymity is obviously fabulous, because I have my privacy with my family, but at the same time when there are public events like award shows and ceremonies and whatever, the purpose is to acknowledge those who do certain things and” – she laughs – “there’s no recognition of who we are. That’s a little odd. But weighing the good with the bad, I think it’s pretty enviable.”

Before The Simpsons, Cartwright’s most famous role had been the voice of the Dipped Shoe in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a tough job requiring her to empathise with a cartoon loafer in the moments before it was dropped into a vat of acid. The Simpsons was initially a five-minute vignette on The Tracey Ullman Show, and Cartwright says Bart’s voice came to her immediately; she had already used versions of it for Gusty the My Little Pony, Daffney the Snork and Brighteyes the Pound Puppy.

“Some characters take a little bit more effort, upper respiratory control, whatever it is technically. But Bart is easy to do.” Using Bart’s voice, she says, “I can just slip into that without difficulty.” It is weirdly horrifying. On the odd occasions when parents recognise Cartwright in the street and ask her to “do Bart” for their children, she has taken to refusing, because it freaks the children out. “It’s a big concept for them to understand. The kid’s are like, ‘Aaaarrrgh, what’s that?’ They don’t get it.”

This month, Cartwright will be doing Bart before audiences at the Edinburgh festival, in a one-woman show based on her memoir of working on The Simpsons, My Life As a 10-year-old Boy. She says it’ll be “a little audience participation, hand raising, standing up. We’ll do a little fun and games.”

She is looking forward to getting some public recognition of her work. In the early days, the Simpsons cast were “totally and completely” treated as the poor relations on The Tracey Ullman Show, recording in a makeshift sound booth with carpets tacked to the walls. Even when the show took off, says Cartwright, they had to struggle. At the last round of pay negotiations, she and her fellow cast members threatened strike action unless they were given a bigger share of the profits. (This in contrast to the advice offered by Homer to Lisa in one episode of The Simpsons: “If you don’t like your job, you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.”)

“This was the most intense negotiation of all. And it’s not fun. But you have to go through it in order to get to the other end and we’re more or less back to normal now.” (Fox stumped up with a better pay deal.) Did they really threaten her with replacement? “Uh, well, yeah. Sure, that’s gonna be their viewpoint. Absolutely. It’s a game. It’s what negotiation is all about.”

That said, Cartwright admits that she has “the best acting job in the world”, given that she and the rest of the Simpsons cast have their characters so down pat that it takes them less than half a day a week to record a single episode. While she’s in Edinburgh, she will continue to record for the show, by reading her part down a phone line every Thursday.

Cartwright started doing voices when she was a child. Her classmates assumed she would be an actress, and so did she, until a perceptive judge at a speech contest told her she should think about going into cartoons.

“And I was like, ‘People make a living from that?’ So that planted a seed.” She won a scholarship to be on the speech team at Ohio University, and while she was there got in touch with the man she calls her mentor, Daws Butler, the voice of, among others, Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound. He told her to go for it, so she moved to LA and set about hawking a tape of her voice work around. “And it’s real interesting, because usually when somebody comes to Hollywood, they’re coming from Iowa, or Kansas, or Ohio in my case, and they’re wanting to be an actor and be on camera and that’s their goal. But I didn’t.”

I ask her about Scientology. “Yeah,” she says, “it’s totally helpful. I mean, I use the administrative technology to achieve my goals and what I’m doing in terms of ‘for me’, and I’ve found it totally totally helpful and successful.” She looks bemused when I ask whether she gets annoyed at its characterisation as a celebrity fad. “Uh-uh,” she says, flicking hair out of her face.

The success of The Simpsons has changed the status of Cartwright’s profession; she and her co-stars were the first voice artists to receive Emmys, to be on the cover of Vanity Fair and to feature on Inside the Actor’s Studio. I ask when she first got an inkling of how huge it was going to be. “It was the middle of the first season, I think. The vignettes were still airing on The Tracey Ullman Show and there was a buzz going around about the controversy, and I had a feeling this thing was going to kick off and it felt like, ‘Uh, what’s the plan?’ ” She guffaws. “You know – ‘What are you guys thinking is going to be happening here?’ There was a mystery and a curiosity and an intrigue. Yuh.”

Johns does not particularly like talking about his art. He’s aware that by explaining what he means, he risks limiting the meanings that can be derived from it by others. His claim to the title of World’s Greatest Living Artist is buttressed by his amazing wealth — one piece alone went for #12m — and the iconic status of Flag, one of his earliest works, an equivalent in American college bedrooms to the place occupied in British ones by Matisse’s Blue Nude. When he emerged on the art scene in the late 1950s, Johns’ tightly controlled studies of everyday objects, his sculptures of coffee tins and ale cans, were read as a rebuke to Jackson Pollock and the abstract impressionists and he has since been called the father of pop art. He haughtily rejects both notions.

“I don’t think it matters what it evokes as long as it keeps your eyes and mind busy,” says Johns of art in general. “You’ll come up with your own use for it. And at different times you’ll come up with different uses.” We have settled on the first floor of the barn, in a big airy room which I observe would be great for parties. “I haven’t had any parties here,” he says drily.

Johns is not reclusive, but neither is he forthcoming. He asks me not to use a tape recorder because it makes him tongue-tied. He talks in short, enigmatic sentences, which teasingly deflate all the wind-baggery that has been written about him. Lots of deep things have been said about Johns’ use of irony and ambiguity, his talent for suggesting multiple meanings that was evident from the time of his first exhibition in 1958, in Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York. But he has also inspired a lot of nonsense. Not untypically, an American critic writes: “By connecting looking to eating and the cycle of consumption and waste, Johns not only further de-aestheticised looking and art-making but also underscored art’s connection to the body’s passage of dissolution.”

An exhibition of Johns’ recently opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and I ask whether he has much time for modern British artists. “I’m aware of them,” he says. “Of course.” I’m thinking in particular of Tracey Emin; you can’t get much further from Johns’ position on autobiography (horror) than Emin’s work, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. Johns lived for seven years with the artist Robert Rauschenberg but is loathe to talk about it publicly. I tell him I can’t imagine him ever using a title like Emin’s. He smiles. “I’ll consider it,” he says.

His circumspection might derive in part from his background; like Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, two artists with whom Johns has much in common, he grew up in the south at a time when those with artistic aspirations were advised to suppress them. His father was a farmer and divorced from his mother, and Johns grew up being passed between various relatives. It was not a happy time and he says he was always “dying” to get away from it. “There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn’t aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.”

After studying art at the University of South Carolina, he did a compulsory stint in the army and decamped to New York, where he fell in with Rauschenberg and two other big influences, the choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. “In a sense,” he says, “you don’t ‘start out’. There are points when you alter your course, but most of what one learns, if that’s the word, occurs gradually. Sometime during the mid-50s I said, ‘I am an artist.’ Before that, for many years, I had said, ‘I’m going to be an artist.’ Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made ‘going to be an artist’ into ‘being an artist’, was, in part, a spiritual change.”

The hot movement at the time was abstract expressionism, spearheaded by Pollock and Willem de Kooning. But instead of joining it, Johns and Rauschenberg set up in friendly opposition. This was not, says Johns, a cynical decision; it just so happened that his interests lay elsewhere. He thought of talent in terms of “what was helpless in my behaviour — how I could behave out of necessity.” At one point, to illustrate their differences, Rauschenberg took a drawing of Willem de Kooning’s and ostentatiously erased it, a statement made less aggressive by the fact that de Kooning had submitted the drawing for precisely that purpose. Then, in 1960, news reached Johns that de Kooning had criticised Leo Castelli, his art dealer, by saying, “That son-of-a-bitch, you could give him two beer cans and he could sell them.” Johns promptly did a sculpture of two beer cans, and Castelli sold them.

Painted Bronze, two cans of Ballantine Ale cast in bronze, was one in a series of sculptures that came to define Johns’ theories of reality; like the pop art that followed it, his experiments with context sought to reconstitute “ordinary” objects in such a way as to highlight the power of the perceptual over the physical world. In 1964 he explained, as fulsomely as he ever would, what it was he was trying to do: “I am concerned with a thing’s not being what it was, with its becoming something other than what it is, with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely and with the slipping away of that moment.”

“De Kooning,” he says to me now, “used to say: ‘I’m a house painter and you’re a sign painter.’”

Johns’ most important work with signs is Flag, one of his earliest exhibits, which he did in 1955. It is a collage of the Stars and Stripes made out of encaustic, a wax-type substance which Johns dropped scraps of newspaper into and allowed to set. Flag’s challenge to the notion that symbols of state are fixed and inviolable  that they are not, under any circumstance, open to interpretation — was received at the time as blasphemous. The bits of newspaper symbolised the conflicting fictions upon which nations are built and the encaustic, an unstable material, was perceived by critics to be a metaphor for the unstable nature of identity. These subtleties have largely been lost through the work’s mass reproduction and Flag is now displayed, more often than not, as a straightforward expression of patriotism. “But I wasn’t trying to make a patriotic statement,” says Johns. “Many people thought it was subversive and nasty. It’s funny how feeling has flipped.”

Johns has been reluctant to discuss how much of the work’s theoretical content was intentional. After a long exchange which yielded no insights, a journalist once asked him, in exasperation, whether he chose his materials because he liked them or because they came that way. Johns thought for a moment and said, “I liked them because they came that way.” Today he says, “encaustic was a solution to a problem. I was painting with oil paint and it didn’t dry rapidly enough for me, and I wanted to put another brush stroke on it and I’d read about encaustic so that’s what I used.”

Was he also aware of its potential use as a metaphor?

“The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious  and I do  there’s room for all kinds of possibilities that I don’t know how you prove one way or another.” How does he know when a piece of art has come out right? Does he think it has a moral force to it?

“I think it does. In that [long pause] if in work you’re able to be in touch with the forces that make you and direct you, then that’s a perfectly reasonable conception of what happens. I’m not sure what ‘coming out right’ means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn’t just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.”

I wonder to what extent Johns and Rauschenberg achieved this state of grace through the exchange of ideas?

“We talked a lot. Each was the audience for the other. He had gone into a period where his gallery closed and we lived in relative isolation in the financial district [of New York]. We discussed ideas for works and occasionally we suggested ideas to one another. You have to be close to someone to do that and understand what they are doing.”

Johns never thought he would be famous. In a way, he says, he was more gobsmacked when he sold his first painting, than when False Start was bought by the publisher Si Newhouse for #12m in 1988. “I didn’t have that kind of imagination. Bob did. I read him a passage from The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas [Gertrude Stein's novel, which plays with reality in similar ways to Johns' work, and which he admits to being influenced by] and Bob said, ‘One day they will be writing like that about us.’”

He doesn’t believe he has become better as an artist; just different. Some people think he has become worse. For example Montez Singing, painted in 1989, features two eyes, a nose, a mouth and, inexplicably, a dishcloth all jumbled up on the canvas; the mouth is shut, so would seem to be humming rather than singing and who Montez is, is anybody’s guess. In such cases, John’s belief that “there is no wrong” in art appreciation founders on the assumption that there is any appreciation at all without some kind of helpful explanation.

“Ideas either come or they don’t come,” he says. “One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space. In terms of painting, I think ideas come in a way — I don’t know how to describe it — they come differently than they did when I was young. When you are young the sense of life you feel is inexhaustible and at various times in your life you see the speed of things alter. Your attitude changes towards thought and what it means.”

Johns once did a sculpture called The Critic Sees, in which he fashioned a pair of glasses with two mouths in the spaces where the eyes should’ve been. He said it was a response to a critic who’d jabbered at him incessantly; it was interpreted as a critique of the impossibility of thought without language. I ask if he ever wishes the critics would lighten up around him.

He says, “I never wish for critics.”

We go out into the garden. Johns loves ferns, and has devoted a whole patch to them. He shows me around it. “The maidenhair fern,” he says. “And the ostrich fern. You can eat the ostrich. But you have to cook it.”

On the way back he looks out over the fields and says with sudden vehemence: “Deer: I hate them. They destroy everything.”

We walk past a pond, at the centre of which stands a sculpture made up of bronze cutlery: a knife, a fork, a spoon. I have read somewhere that it symbolises sex and death. “Oh yes?” says Johns, wryly. “I shall have to look into that.”

I ask if he’s ever thought of writing his memoirs. He says, “I don’t know how to organise thoughts. I don’t know how to have thoughts.” He has no plans to reconstitute Flag to confront post-9/11 patriotism. And although he recently auctioned a painting to raise money for the Democrats, he says his interest in politics is only limited to the election; attempts to have a more general discussion about American government are rebuffed, although he will concede “I went to see that Roger Moore film [sic], Fahrenheit 9/11. I enjoyed it very much.” We re-enter his studio, where the etching awaits completion. I wonder if it is for anything in particular.

“No,” says Johns. “It is for itself.”