RICHARD Briers has plenty to be sad about. The star of The Good Life and Ever Decreasing Circles watched his mother die slowly over 12 years, diabetic, blind and with her leg amputated. And he stood by helplessly for a decade as his father perished painfully from lung cancer. Unsurprisingly, Richard, 60, who was brought up in genteel poverty and fears financial insecurity, dreads old age and dying.

He’s driven ‘through a monsoon’ to meet me and now we repair to his Bath Spa hotel bedroom. He jokes with the staff, signing his ‘autograph’ in the guest register, being infectiously funny, habitually saying ‘becosh’ and ‘sho’ in that Tony Bennish voice of his, twiddling his eyebrows when he’s rattled, rolling his own with Virginia tobacco and exuding bonhomie and charm. He looks like a country golfer in his tartan tie and casual trousers, but he has impossibly sad eyes.

He’s touring with Paul Eddington in Home, David Storey’s play about disillusionment, first produced at The Royal Court with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. ‘We play two old boys who can’t cope and live in a mental hospital,’ says Richard. ‘We’ve had terrible marital breakdowns and live in a fantasy world to protect ourselves from reality.’

There was an early production difficulty when Richard refused to work opposite actress Liz Smith because he thought her too old. So she was sacked six weeks after she was contracted (No More Mr Nice Guy, screamed a tabloid).

‘We had casting approval but the director went to Tokyo and forgot that,’ Richard replies, commenting for the first time. ‘She’s a super actress but wrong for the part. I wrote to her and said how very sorry I was that she wasn’t right and had been badly treated by me and I regretted the hurt caused.’ She didn’t write back.

Sadly, the health of Paul, his great friend and co-star, might now be a problem. He suffers from diabetes and a rare skin cancer. ‘It spreads, poor thing. I remember when we were doing a play 40 years ago he had this red thing on his stomach. Now it’s on his face. He has ultra-violet therapy, like going on a sun bed, so he looks as if he’s been in Malta on holiday for 10 years.’ Might Paul collapse as he did on stage last year? ‘He fell over once in a Pinter play because of his diabetes. He hadn’t eaten properly. He got up again immediately, so naturally everyone thought he was going to die.’ He speaks sardonically.

Richard knows much about diabetes. His only sibling, Jane, suffers. As did his late mother, Morna, who died in 1992. ‘It was terrible when my mother had her leg amputated and went blind. Bloody awful watching her deterioration, particularly dreadful the last two years. It was obscene the way her luck ran out.’ He’s a firm believer in luck and refers often to his own fortune.

Jane, an unlucky actress, moved home when she divorced to live with and tend her mother for 12 years. Richard visited weekly. ‘Poor old thing mother, couldn’t die, clung on and had a cruel, rotten life. She had that extraordinary bravery which only females have. I was lucky and didn’t sink because I was busy working and have a strong private life. I wasn’t broken up when she died because she was released from her suffering.’ Does he support euthanasia? He looks nonplussed. Would he have liked to have given her a pill to end her misery? ‘I couldn’t have, no. I’m too much of a coward.’ Dismissing any legal implications, could he have coped with it emotionally? ‘I suppose so, yes.’ Before his mother’s demise, he watched his father die 12 years ago. ‘He had a horrendous time towards the end.’ Richard says the family had been close. ‘I grew up in Raynes Park during the Blitz. Your family unites very tightly when you’re being bombed.’ Were they genuinely fond of one another or was it a closeness born of circumtances? ‘I think it was real. But we had our spats because we’re all highly strung.’ His father – ‘He had about 75 jobs, one as progress chaser for GEC’ – was feckless. Consequently, money was always tight. ‘When I was a child, things were run on the basis that if the rich uncle sent a fiver at Christmas, my father could go to the off-licence. He was a good-time guy.’ Richard’s education was erratic and he left school at 16 without taking any exams. An indication of emotional disturbance? ‘I just wasn’t interested, didn’t listen and loathed school.’

He became hungry and ambitious. A workaholic who would rehearse a series by day, act a play at night and record a TV episode on Sundays for months on end. Now he says such driven feelings have dissipated and he denies a tabloid report that he suffered breakdowns. ‘If you don’t get frightened on first nights, you’re nuts.’ (‘I didn’t know you’d had nervous breakdowns, dear,’ said his mother, sweetly, after the article appeared.) He began acting four decades ago, playing Hamlet, ‘like a demented typewriter’, in the words of WA Darlington, The Daily Telegraph’s redoubtable critic. ‘I took 25 minutes off the running time. I was the only Hamlet in the world who gave the audience half an hour in the pub afterwards.’ Four years ago he returned to serious parts with Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, when Branagh cast him as King Lear. He’s only ever had two years out of work, never made it in films – ‘I’m hardly the film-star type. I did dreadful films and was dreadful in them’ – and doesn’t anticipate work drying up. ‘I can play great roles and grandfathers now. If I start losing my memory, I’ll do radio. If we really get past it, my wife (actress Ann Davies) and I are going to pool all our enormous resources and influence to get two small parts in The Archers.’ His next part is in Down to Earth, a sitcom by Esmonde and Larbey who wrote The Good Life. He plays a 60-year-old who falls from grace, losing a job in a banana republic and returning penniless to England. Richard fears nemesis. When we talk he says, often, what goes up must come down. ‘The worst thing for me is not not making money, but having it and losing it. The nightmare scenario would be Lloyd’s.’