The Mischievous World of Quentin Crisp : Movies: The gay icon has made the whole journey from the outer suburbs of ostracism and, at 83, shows the wisdom of a survivor.

Quentin Crisp may have described himself as “England’s stateliest homo,” but over brunch in a West Hollywood hotel suite he proves mischievous as well as witty and wise.

“I try never to let the mention of money to besmirch my coral lips,” he quipped, describing his first meeting with director Sally Potter, who cast him as Queen Elizabeth I in her surrealist film of Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”

“Miss Potter called to invite me to come over to an apartment on East 4th where she was staying, and I live on East 3rd--they call it the East Village but it’s really the Lower Eastside. I told her that I wanted to do whatever she wanted, which is what I always say.”

At 83, Crisp is a puckish, slight man who wears his longish hair somewhat in the piled-up style of Katharine Hepburn. For his interview he was simply but stylishly dressed in shades of blue--blue jacket, tie, trousers and shirt. On his left hand he wore a turquoise ring and around his neck a monocle.

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For pictures he put on a floppy but rakish Garbo-style black hat; the total effect was to make him seem an older, contemporary version of the New Yorker’s signature image, the dandy Eustace Tilley, who graces the magazine’s cover every February. He had indeed painted his lips coral and wore light makeup; Crisp, after all, is one of the most famous androgynous figures in the world.

A resident of New York City for 12 years, Crisp returned to England to film “Orlando.” He had visited there only a year before.

“For ‘Orlando’ I did two weeks in Hatfield, about 25 miles outside London,” Crisp continued, “I must say everybody was kind to me; I never had to take a step. The costumes, of course, were an agony.” Mrs. Swinton--the mother of Tilda Swinton, who plays Orlando, a royal protege--remarked, “No wonder Queen Elizabeth was always chopping people’s heads off; she was in a permanent rage at having to wear those clothes.”

In the years since the 1976 TV film of his autobiography “The Naked Civil Servant,” for which John Hurt won a British Academy Award for his portrayal of Crisp, he has become an international celebrity, appearing on talk shows, occasionally acting in plays and films and touring in his one-man show in which he expounds on the importance of learning how to become yourself. “English audiences are not so easy to please as American audiences,” he said. “In America they just want you to give them help--to teach them how to be happy, rich or thin--almost anything will do.”

Crisp was the subject of a delightful documentary “Resident Alien,” which was in theatrical release last fall. He has been a film reviewer and currently is a free-lance book reviewer. Most recently, he has been approached to do voice-overs for British commercials for Boy George’s newest album.

“I received this call asking me if I would do this,” he said. “I said as always that I want to do what you want me to do but said I didn’t want to have to go to England to do it. I haven’t done it yet. My agent said, ‘Did you get their name and phone number?’ But I never remember to do such things.”

In his own estimation, Crisp’s voice is “flat as a pancake and not at all appetizing,” yet it may well be his most distinctive feature. It has a somewhat gravelly, nasal quality with a decidedly masculine pitch, yet, when mimicking people, something Crisp does well and frequently--and with affection rather than cruelty--he can startle you with a ringing basso profundo as well as a falsetto. His British accent is very grand and his speech very precise, yet he seems always to be ever-so-gently mocking both.

Since completing “Orlando,” Crisp has appeared in Jonathan Demme’s “Philadelphia,” in which Tom Hanks, playing an attorney diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, hires a former adversary (Denzel Washington) to represent him in a suit against his law firm, which has fired him.

“I went to Philadelphia by train,” said Crisp, who revels in any and all opportunities and amenities that come his way. “I was met by someone holding up a placard and taken to the Omni Hotel, where I lived in unaccustomed splendor. I appear in this costume-party scene. Lypsinka entertained, so did the Flirtations, who sang ‘Oh, Mr. Sandperson, Send Me a Dream.’ They assigned me to come as Oscar Wilde--no one ever looked less like Oscar Wilde than I! We were all to dance the Madison, which has not been done since Doris Day and Gordon MacRae did it in some Warners’ musical. I never learned the steps, so I stayed in the background, shuffling backward and forward.

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“When I was young, all the boys in the West End thought of Oscar Wilde as this rich aristocrat who had thrown his life away for Lord Alfred Douglas. It is impossible to like either of them; Lord Alfred was always procuring for Wilde. I once appeared in a play called ‘Lord Alfred’s Lover.’ I played the elderly Lord Alfred, and I was also the narrator--the alienation factor, very Brechtian. People came, to my amazement. It was staged in one of the many dim cellars in the lower half of Manhattan.”

Crisp is a gay icon yet worries that radical activist tactics can divide straights and gays rather than bring them together. Once he appeared on a panel with Michelangelo Signorile, the gay journalist who is the key proponent for outing; controversial gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs and an attorney for Act Up--”and I never managed to say anything anyone agreed with. I said, ‘Men are not homosexual or heterosexual, they are just sexual.’

“I want to join the real world, and I have made the whole journey from the outer suburbs of ostracism across open country under fire almost to the heart of the world. I live in the most sophisticated city in the world, and I do as I damn well please. What more can you ask?

“People ask me, ‘When did you come out?’ I never was in! I was a hopeless case. Long before I plucked my eyebrows or painted my nails and all that rubbish, people said, ‘Do you really have to stand that way?’ ‘Can’t you keep your hands down?’ I would try but invariably went back to being my horrible self. You have to know who you are and then become it.” In England, Crisp’s cross-dressing flamboyance became an act of defiant courage, and he feels that only when he came to America did he come into his own.

It was the late Michael Bennett, director of “Chorus Line,” who brought Crisp to the United States for his first visit in 1977. “He wanted to make a musical of ‘The Naked Civil Servant,’ which I would have loved !,” exclaimed Crisp. “But it was not to be. However, when I saw New York, I wanted it! I never liked England but didn’t know there was any happiness anywhere. Absolutely everybody here is your friend. In England you have to make friends--very tiring--and when you do, you’re stuck with them, which is also tiring. People are always saying ‘but are they all really your friends?’ I don’t sit in my room wondering if the shopkeeper on 2nd Avenue really wants me to have a happy day! I’ve always tried to avoid having a best friend, which means if you meet on the street they say, ‘Oh, you’re still alive? You didn’t telephone last week.’ I do have two friends I do see more of than others.”

Having lived his entire life on modest incomes, to put it mildly, Crisp relies on a “nuts-and-champagne” diet afforded by the many invitations that come his way. He does go to clubs--”dim cellars with that terrible music”--that even sometimes throw in real food--but draws the line at fashion shows “and shows for monogrammed luggage.”

“But I try to spend one or two days a week never leaving my room. When do you recharge your batteries otherwise? The moment you step out you’re in the smiling and nodding racket--I like it but can’t do it all the time. Wrapped in your filthy dressing gown you can be your horrible self.

“Money is for saving, not for spending. With luck you only have to pay your rent and your telephone bill. Unlike Mr. Williams’ Miss Dubois, I have found that I really can rely on the kindness of strangers.”