Interview: Michael Winner Film director, restaurant critic, bon viveur and former self-confessed fat pig

Michael Winner is many things to many people. To middle England, he's the gallivanting gourmand whose to-the-point restaurant reviews are a talking point at Sunday lunch. To the telly-viewing public at large, he's the "Calm down, dear" star of a series of insurance comercials. To tabloid readers, he's the ageing playboy who has had more younger girlfriends than favourably critiqued hot dinners.

Above all things, Michael Winner is a natural impresario. This is a man who knows how to put on a show, whether he's trying to organise an unforgettable movie premiere – such as the one he attempted to pull off for his 1983 film The Wicked Lady, involving the temperamental ageing star of the original (Margaret Lockwood) and the reputedly temperamental star of his remake (Faye Dunaway) – or staging the school play, when he inadvertently directed a chum out of the window. An old-fashioned showman, Winner knows how to set the scene and get his guests or audience talking. And this applies to interviews too.

Having read of his appreciation of punctuality, I arrive on the leafy Holland Park street where he lives early, and am directed to the gate of his magnificent Victorian mansion by a Monty Pythonesque pointing finger. After I've pressed the buzzer, a glamorous assistant appears, takes my name and leaves me on the street before reappearing a minute later to lead me into the house and down to the private cinema where I'm to await Mr Winner (as I'm to address him).

It's like one of those screening rooms movie moguls sat in to view the daily rushes back in the old days of Hollywood. A full-size screen covers one wall, while opposite it, at the other end of the room, is a well-appointed bar. A comfy settee faces the screen, and a row of old-style director's chairs line the mezzanine level behind. On every surface – bar, coffee tables, arms of chairs – there are pairs of spectacles. In domed glass cases, prominently displayed, are two Spitting Image puppets – Winner's and that of one of his Wicked Lady stars, Sir John Gielgud.

However, it is the gallery of framed photos on every inch of the walls which grabs the attention and offers an infinite number of potential conversation starters. It's like a visual Who's Who of Hollywood history. They're all there: James Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Faye Dunaway, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, Charles Bronson. Every photo, apart from the signed cheesecake shot of Marilyn Monroe, is from his movies or has him (often looking like the young Gene Wilder) in it.

Films, you see, have been the constant throughout his life. The jovial and extremely entertaining 73-year-old settles into one of his director's chairs, switches on his own tape recorder (he is known to be very distrustful of journalists, despite having started his own career as one) and recalls how the cinema was a means of escape from an unhappy household.

"When I was a child during the war – and I was an only child, very lonely – I couldn't relate to the people at school, I couldn't relate to the Jewish group in London. I would just go and see films over and over. I saw Olivier's Henry V about 23 times. When I was about to see it for the 23rd time, my parents said: 'You've seen it 22 times – why are you going again?' And I said: 'Well, I love the battle scene'. And my mum said: 'Well that only lasts three minutes!' "

Throughout our chat, Winner delivers his punchlines very matter-of-factly, only to let rip with a very loud, proclamatory guffaw that almost blasts us out of our seats. He became a movie aficionado as early as primary school. Long before he had seen what became his favourite film, The Third Man, the infant Winner was demonstrating his directorial skills. One of his most vivid memories is of staging a show with shadow play and by "shining a light behind cut-outs with sweet paper to make different colours through the window".

Winner recalls: "I was only five or six and I was on the toilet at my mixed school and this girl is on the potty next to me. I'd just given my "film" show with my hand play and my coloured sweet papers and drawings, and I said: 'Did you like my film?' And she said: 'I hated it. Films frighten me.' My first critic!" But he was undeterred. "I remember sitting in these smelly cinemas and there were these glamorous people on the screen and I would just think: 'My God, I just want to be part of that. Not as an actor, but as a director. I want to be there.' That was my only motivational force."

So driven was he that he blagged his way into film studios on the pretext that he was writing a book on "filmmaking from the children's angle". What makes all this astonishing is the fact that he has always said he's naturally a very shy person. How on earth did he have the nerve to fib his way into the film world?

"Well, I've always been two people," he explains. "One is genuinely shy and reclusive, and the other, which I put on for you right now and for television or whatever I have to do, is this kind of jovial, cynical, humorous idiot. This second Michael Winner came into play when I said I was writing the book."

Back in the late 1940s, there were so many studios all competing for publicity that the adolescent Winner was welcomed with open arms, especially since he said that his book was for the well-known publisher, Paul Hamlyn, a friend of the family.

"I went round the studios eating and drinking and finally there was a boy called John Howard Davies who had played Oliver in David Lean's Oliver Twist. He lived about four blocks away from me, and he was doing a film called Tom Brown's Schooldays. We became friendly because we were about the same age.

"I said: 'John, how do you get down to the studio each day?' He said: 'They send a limousine for me.' I said: 'Oh, I'll come with you tomorrow.' So I get in this f***ing Daimler. It drives down to Denham village. I get out. The publicity man comes over. He's apoplectic. 'Excuse me,' he says. 'I took two and half hours to get here. I'd to take an underground to King's Cross, a train and then a bus.' 'Oh, I say. 'We did it in 40 minutes!' "

When word of Winner's activities inevitably reached Paul Hamlyn it looked as if that was the end of his days on film sets. "I was desolate," he recalls. However, his father suggested that he offer his interview with Davies to a local paper. The paper ran it, and before he was even 15 years old, Winner was a regular contributor of a column entitled Showtalk, which was syndicated in 17 west London papers.

Michael Winner's Showtalk opened the doors to the best dressing rooms in London, and the teenager found he had access to entertainment royalty, including many of the stars who had made the film world so appealing – among them James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. Throughout this period, Winner cultivated his alternative personality. "I really had to, out of necessity. I thought: 'The only way I'm going to get to meet Bob Hope or Nat King Cole is not to stand there shaking – I'd better do something.' So this other persona switched in, and it's been switching on and off ever since."

Winner, understandably, remembers this as a "magical" time. But he could rely on his mother to bring him crashing back to the depressing reality of his home life. "Once, I said to my mother at lunch: 'Yesterday, I had dinner with Louis Armstrong.' Well, she was an inveterate gambler, my mother, she lost £8million in the Cannes casino, and her response was: 'Yes, darling. Well, you know last night I had an ace of spades and Mrs Bijou was playing clubs and she went and put down ...' She wasn't in the least bit interested, you know. I loved my mother but she could be a real cow. Ha Ha!

"She had great, great charm, a great sparkle, but could turn in a second to a f***ing monster. But it doesn't matter, because I can do the same to a degree. And when that happens, I think: 'Pull back, Michael. You're getting like your mother. Pull back. You've seen it. You don't like it. Don't do it.' "

Although he jokes about his mother now, and tells the story of how his Bar Mitzvah celebration doubled as a poker party, it's not difficult to see that her addiction to gambling was all-consuming and that Winner and his long-suffering father paid the price.

Winner escaped into movies and the world of showbiz, when he wasn't away at boarding school. "I would go to the cinema, or I'd go out all day collecting autographs. In those days, famous artists had their addresses in the phone book so I'd go and knock on the door! Then I was writing my little articles from the age of 14. So I created a life for myself outside of the family unit."

His father, however, had no such escape. "I remember they were going to get divorced at one point, but I said to my father: 'You can't get divorced, George, you're 60 years old. It's ridiculous.' I should have let them get divorced but I stopped them, and he died at 65. Quite honestly, I'm amazed he lasted that long with her. He never spoke ill of her but she was always knocking him. She'd argue and he just looked forlorn."

After George died, Winner's mother gambled away the money and, to her son's chagrin, many of the family valuables. "She'd literally take a painting off a wall in the apartment in Cannes, get in a taxi and sell it."

Although Winner describes his mother as often monstrous and has obviously been deeply affected by his relationship with her (there's a strange irony in the fact that another of his favourite films is Bambi, in which the devoted mother dies), he doesn't sound nearly as bitter as one might expect of a son whose mother spent a decade trying to sue him in order to fund her gambling. And Winner has clearly turned the experience into a positive: dealing with a character like that stood him in good stead for handling some of the personalities with whom he's worked during his movie career.

A couple of times in our conversation, Winner refers to his fondness for what he calls "damaged people" – and he's certainly come across plenty of them, from the reclusive former star Margaret Lockwood who became "very bitter" in her old age, to some of the, literally, larger-than-life characters who shared their own weight issues with him, years before he devised his Fat Pig Diet.

Orson Welles, who went from being the star of the teenage Winner's favourite film, The Third Man, to a close friend and the star of Winner's own film I'll Never Forget What's'isname, taught him that the most flattering way to be photographed is at eye level. On set one day, Welles scolded Winner for shooting him from below (ironically, the technique he himself had pioneered on Citizen Kane). "He said: 'It makes me look fat.' You could shoot Orson from a helicopter and he'd look fat, bless him!

"He was already big then – it was because of overeating. His ankles were purple and swelling and he couldn't stand up for long – and that was in 1967. He claimed to be dieting: he had lemon and hot water in the morning … and then ate himself to death all day! And Marlon, well I couldn't see him the last two or three years because he couldn't travel but he'd say to me on the phone: 'You know Michael, I've lost 30 pounds.' Then I'd speak to a friend and say: 'That's wonderful, Marlon's lost 30 pounds.' And they'd say: 'No he hasn't, he's not lost anything at all. He's fatter than ever!' Fantasy time, but these are lovely people, damaged people."

Who's to say whether Winner himself is one of those damaged people, but he's certainly considerably lovelier than his reputation – which, like his pre-diet tummy once did, precedes him. sm

- The Fat Pig Diet (JR Books, £7.99) is out now.