Michael Crawford is not an obvious sex symbol. But there’s something about him that attracts 140 fan letters a day – and a year ago caused an obsessive female fan in LA to follow him fanatically for three months. ‘Each night I drove home from the theatre and a car pulled out from behind the hedge and started to follow me. I was on my own and the audience had gone,’ he says, wringing his hands and looking down as he does throughout most of the interview. ‘I used to come off the freeway by a different exit each night to try to lose her.

‘Being British, you don’t want to call the police or make a fuss. And I didn’t feel I was in danger. But one night I just got tired of it, so I stopped the car. The woman drove into a cul de sac. As I got out, she came streaking past me, nearly hit me and drove off. The next day I got a letter from her apologising for upsetting me. ‘I just wanted to know where you lived,’ she wrote. ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ ‘

She then sent him a large cheque for the Sick Children’s Trust, the charity supported by his fan club. How does Crawford feel about inspiring such passion? ‘I don’t want to think about that . . . but I don’t think it’s healthy for her to behave like that. It’s too fanatical.’

Michael Crawford is returning to the British stage for the first time since 1986, performing in his already sold-out tour of The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. His tours in America have been triumphant, outselling Whitney Houston and Diana Ross. His recordings are gold and platinum sellers in the States and in Britain his record sales have pipped those of Michael Jackson. His is a show business career that spans almost 25 years, from Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em to the lead in Phantom.

Crawford has a reputation for being a ladies’ man. Is he a Don Juan? ‘Not at all.’ His eyebrows shoot up. ‘I have lady friends and like having them. But I live alone. And in the last five years I’ve been travelling and living out of two suitcases. I can’t imagine any woman who would want to tolerate that. Life isn’t really conducive to having a long-term partner right now. But if I met someone I felt I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, I would stop travelling.

‘I just haven’t found that person yet. It’s very hard to meet people. It’s difficult enough for normal people who go to the pub every night. But my feet just haven’t touched the ground, I’m always in a different town,’ he says, genuinely. ‘I just meet receptionists in hotels – and we’re not all keen on women in uniform!’ He appears genuinely to dislike talking about himself and often deflects with his humour.

He has made his work a higher priority than meeting someone and one detects a certain sadness. But he disagrees. ‘No. There is no sadness about it. If I wanted to meet someone, I would go for it. I would take adverts and join a club. I would do whatever is necessary to meet a partner. I don’t think, ‘Gosh, I’ve got to get married’. I don’t have a girlfriend at the moment. But I have close friends.’ Publicly, his daughters, now 26 and 24, are Crawford’s ‘dates’. When did he last have a girlfriend? ‘I’m not going to discuss that,’ he says, somewhat petulantly.

In 1965, when he was 21 years old (‘Too young,’ he says) he married actress turned photographer Gabrielle Lewis. Almost 10 years later, they divorced. ‘If things go wrong, you either rush headlong into another relationship, or you sit back and think, ‘What went wrong? What have I done? What’s wrong with me?’. You have to resolve it . . .

‘I want to be careful about marrying for the second time. There are no guarantees, but you just wouldn’t want it to go wrong again because it’s too hurtful.’ People aren’t generally still licking their wounds 20 years later. ‘I’m not,’ he replies. ‘I’m just wary.’

Crawford looks wholesome, like some country golfer. He is neat in leaf-green jumper with sea-green shirt, gold chain round his neck and a dazzling smile of capped teeth. He also appears in robust health and wears a curious silver ring set with crystals. ‘A crystal is meant to be good for the throat,’ he says, adding that he also crosses his fingers and walks round ladders.

During his five-year run in Barnum, he was hospitalised for exhaustion; another time he went on stage just 24 hours after a hiatus hernia operation; and he pushed himself through a gruelling tour in the States with a kidney stone, checking in at the hospital in each new town.

‘I don’t know why you make it sound so dramatic. I’ve been ill twice in my life,’ he says, gently. ‘Not bad for a man of 50.’ Does he push himself to the limit? ‘No.’ Certainly he comes over as terribly normal and soft, a loving sort of person. (He admits to being shy and a perfectionist.) He has moved financial mountains in his life. ‘We never had much when I was a child,’ he says. ‘It was the kind of household where my parents couldn’t smoke and send me to school. So they gave up smoking! I wish they’d carried on smoking!’ (He left aged 15.) In the 1960s, he was also impecunious. ‘I had a flat in Clapham and my daughter Emma slept in the drawer of the chest of drawers because we didn’t have much money and she’d outgrown her crib. When she grew a little more, we put her in the bath – with the water turned off!’ He laughs. ‘No, I’ve never been ashamed of where I’ve come from or what I’ve done.’

Nowadays, he turns down lucrative job offers and earned a rumoured £20,000 a week (‘An exaggeration,’ he says) in Phantom.

‘For the first time in my life I have a feeling of security. I go where my instinct tells me, where I feel I would be happiest. The financial thing doesn’t enter into it. I made one film for money, Hello Goodbye, and it was the unhappiest time I ever had. I lost my integrity for the three months we made that movie.’

We talk then about his childhood. Born in Salisbury, he was called Michael Dumbell-Smith. (He changed his name, inspired by Crawford biscuits.) He has always said that his RAF pilot father died in battle before he was born. But author Anthony Hayward, in a recent biography, alleges that Crawford was born illegitimately and that his ‘father’ was killed 16 months before he was born.

‘I’m not going to talk about that,’ he says now, in a manner that suggests he could be quite temperamental. ‘I’m writing my book where I’m telling all about my life. That’ll be about a year and a half and then we can talk about all that . . .’

His mother married his stepfather when he was four. ‘I don’t know what I missed not growing up with a real father. That’s like asking a blind man whether he misses seeing trees. But it’s not true that I hated my stepfather. I didn’t feel he was like a blood relation, but he sacrificed a lot for me and I appreciated that.

‘I was an only child, so you spend a lot of time making your own amusement. I was always playing wall tennis. So maybe it was inevitable that I should take up a profession where I am only competing against myself. ‘But I’ve no idea what makes me tick. I agree I’m a very instinctive sort of person. I grew up mainly surrounded by aunts and female company. I also grew up with a lot of love around me, which I think helps me in my sensitivity. I don’t feel in any way tortured or scarred inside, I feel very content.’

The strongest influence in his life was his maternal grandmother. ‘She was my spiritual teacher. She taught me to live life simply and be aware of other people’s emotions and situations.’

His mother died when he was 21. ‘That was hard because I was very young and it turned me into somebody I didn’t want to be. It made me very independent and alone. That encouraged me to go looking for a relationship very quickly. I got married soon after she died.’ Today, he senses the presence of his dead grandmother and mother around him: ‘I still feel they’re with me. I feel they’re helping me.’ He says he believes in God ‘in a child-like way’.

His belief is understandable. His child, Emma, nearly died of meningitis when she was seven. ‘It was one of the worst experiences of my life.’ He becomes pensive and quiet. And, in 1990, he was caught in gang gun warfare in LA. ‘I was driving back after dinner with friends. A car came roaring up the street on the wrong side.’ The gunman shot at his target. ‘You just heard crack-crack, it didn’t sound like a bang. The bullet missed me by about a foot. I thought, ‘My God, that was close’. My head was pounding with fear.’ You can understand why Crawford doesn’t mind cars with fans.