He sounds like he was born sipping Earl Grey, the quintessential erudite British gentleman whose voice narrates Harry Potter. Yet that same polished national treasure was repeatedly expelled from school, stole a credit card, and spent three months locked in a youth detention center for fraud.

This episode traces the staggering contradictions of Sir Stephen Fry, a polymath whose towering intellect ran like a high-performance car with a broken steering wheel. We follow him from a lineage scarred by the Holocaust, through Cambridge and comedy stardom, into the inner demons of cyclothymia, addiction, and survival, all the way to a knighthood for his mental health advocacy.

• The harrowing family history behind his Jewish mother's lineage, and his 2024 reclamation of Austrian citizenship
• How hyperfocus turned a remand center inm ...